Levellers Press—Hedgerow Books

Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible

Weaving the “Fourth World” of snails, ravens, and sloths with imagined worlds of our human fragility, our power to destroy and to love, D M Gordon’s poems bring us face to face with the divine. Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible is often allegorical, language-rich, and always illuminating. “In these sensuous, tough-minded and sophisticated poems, the possible extends its range to the clairvoyant. Like nature’s slow transformation of gleam to a rich patina of green brocade, the work of time and decay turns rich and strange in these poems of an original mind and an irrepressible spirit.” Eleanor Wilner

D M Gordon’s poems and stories have been published widely. Prizes include The Betsy Colquitt Award from descant, The Editor’s Choice Award from the Beacon Street Review, and First Prize from Glimmer Train. Phi Beta Kappa, Masters in Music from Boston University, she’s the recipient of a 2008 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in fiction, having been a finalist in poetry in 2004. She currently works as an editor and facilitates a weekly public discussion of contemporary poetry for Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts. She is the author of Fourth World (Adastra Press, 2010) and is at work on a novel set in the Gulf Islands.

First submission for open reading period now closed!
Winner(s) to be announced on January 30, 2012. Thanks to all poets who let us read their work. The next submission period will be announced.

Thanks to our readers for
our first submissions period.

Annie Boutelle (MA)
Carolyn Creedon (VA)
Cathy Essinger (OH)
Diana Gordon (MA)
Amy Greacen (CA)
Christine Kravetz (CA)

Patricia Lee Lewis (MA)
Leslie Ullman (MA)
Ellen Dore Watson (MA)
Julia Williams (MA)
Anne Harding Woodworth (DC)
Abe Louise Young (TX)

High Lonesome is a pasture on a West Texas ranch, a state of being, an affecting personal mythology. Poet Patricia Lee Lewis writes, “Think how brambles catch her petticoats, hold them ‘til they tear, feed on blood....Say the old woman can find her way, can feel the thorns of walls,” and “From her kneeling place between two great stones, she sends her voice.” These are poems of landscape and family, heart and perspective.“High Lonesome pulls you into the momentum of its sounds with urgency, shock, serenity and arrival. The language of Patricia Lee Lewis is devoted to noticing. Her poems digest the howling, look at what comforts, what invades to do harm, what remains.” —Anne Love Woodhull

Patricia Lee Lewis was born and raised in Texas where her three children were also born. For over 30 years she has lived and worked at Patchwork Farm Retreat in Western Massachusetts. She holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College, and a BA from Smith College, Phi Beta Kappa. Beloved mentor of many writers, leader of frequent writing retreats both nationally and internationally, she has also been the publisher of The Patchwork Journal. A grant in 2011, from the Massachusetts Cultural Council enabled her to help establish a writing program at her local library. Trained to teach English to speakers of other languages, Patricia and friends volunteer in Guatemala. Her first book of poems, A Kind of Yellow, was awarded first place by Writers Digest International.

About Hedgerow Books
Hedgerow Books is the literary and poetry imprint of Levellers Press, a publishing house founded in 2009 by the worker-owners of Collective Copies in Amherst and Florence, Massachusetts. With the publishing world in flux, the press comes from a new direction: thinking locally, in the rich political and cultural environment of Western Massachusetts; and acting nationally, utilizing recent innovations in imaging technology. The first Levellers Press title, History of Slavery in the Connecticut River Valley by Robert Romer, was published in October 2009 and has received national attention.