OK, you’re thinking, what do these pictures have to do with poetry, chapbooks or design? You’re right, nothing, but there’s plenty of that on the other pages. And then, there’s just something about water. Water is never wrong.
What We Do
Bent Paddle Press endeavors to not only publish great poetry, but to design beautiful books. You can check out Bent Paddle's offerings on the chapbooks page, and read more about us on the About page. Scroll down the page for readings and events related to Bent Paddle books. The navigation bar is over to your left (no, your other left) or above if you’re using one of those phone thingies.
Bent Paddle Editing & Design: Besides poetry chapbooks, we also offer services in editing, critique, layout and design of other books (not just poetry), articles, brochures, flyers and whatnot (a highly technical catchall term I learned from my car mechanic). Read more on the Editing and Design page.
New Books and Other Bent Paddle News
Available now, a chapbook of poetry by Lee Kathryn Hodge.
Inspired by the writing of author Linda Hogan and written contemplating the loss of three friends by suicide. This collection is composed of two heroic sonnet crown sequences, each formed by fourteen interlocking sonnets bound together through line repetition and concluding with a final master sonnet.
Poet and co-director of the Arts + Literature Lab Rita Mae Reese writes that…
Rita Mae Reese, Poet and co-director of the Arts + Literature Lab, writes that…
Lee Kathryn Hodge opens "We Make Shapes from Shapes" with the plaintive, imperative line: "Call back to us; relent." The starkness of the language draws the reader gently into the undertow of grief, in this case the grief over three friends lost to suicide. These losses are examined through not one but two double crowns of sonnets ("Horizon" and "Krater"), both ending with a final master sonnet (which uses all of the beginning and ending lines of the preceding sonnets). The structure conveys a sense of retracing steps, of trying to make things fit together, and ultimately to make sense of irrevocable absences. Through the lines borrowed from Linda Hogan and the joining and rejoining of phrases and images, "We Make Shapes from Shapes" mourns the dead while also recognizing and even celebrating that we are fragile beings all living as we must in rooms "made / of flammable matter."
—Rita Mae Reese (she/her) is the author of The Book of Hulga. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She designs Lesbian Poet Trading Cards for Headmistress Press, is in the bluegrass band Coulee Creek, and serves as the Co-Director at Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-8-4
Bent Paddle Press, 2023, 40 pp., $14.
Click the button to read some sample poems and listen to the author read her work.
Cutting the Dusk in Half, by Thomas Erickson won 2nd place in the 2023 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets annual chapbook price!
That now makes four Bent Paddle books that have won 1st or 2nd prizes in the contest! Not that we're bragging (well, I guess we are!).
The Ring Toss Lady Breaks a Five by Mark Kraushaar.
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-7-7
Bent Paddle Press, 2023, 40 pp., $15.
Mark Kraushaar’s work has been included in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and Yale Review as well as the web site Poetry Daily and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and has been a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Award. A full-length collection Falling Brick Kills Local Man was published by University of Wisconsin Press as the winner of the 2009 Felix Pollak Prize. His collection, The Uncertainty Principle (Waywiser Press), was chosen by James Fenton as winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize.
Poet Alan Shapiro has written of Mark Kraushaar’s poetry as “the best counterargument to the specious claim that narrative poetry is either old fashioned, ‘linear’ or predictably ‘conventional.’ These poems have all the excitement and complexity of life as we live it now, together with a depth of speculation that is positively stunning in the light it casts on the intimate nooks and crannies of social experience that all of us encounter but either fail to notice or find words for…”
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-5-3
Bent Paddle Press, 2022, 90 pp., $15.
A new book of poetry by Richard Swanson,
The Shoeshiner's Rag Pops and Sings: Poems New and Old and In Between.
Long a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, Swanson exemplifies the mission of that organization: dedicated to promoting awareness and appreciation of poets and poetic heritage in the state. This collection gathers poems from 5 of his previous books as well as a large section of previously unpublished poems about his time spent in Mexico with his longtime partner. These 21 poems detail the sunshine as well as the dark corners of Mexico, but always written with Swanson’s wit, charm and humanity.
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-4-6
Bent Paddle Press, 2022, 108 pp., $14.
Madison Poet Laureate Angie Trudell Vasquez interviewed Ron Czerwien about 100 Umbrellas for the Madison radio station WORT.
"100 Umbrellas" by Ron Czerwien
Tangentially inspired by the Dada artist Erik Satie, these poems are at once serious critiques of culture and absurdist and funny frolics through the English language.
Four Bent Paddle Press books win awards
in the annual WFOP chapbook contest
Cutting the Dusk in Half, by Thomas Erickson, won second place in the 2023 contest.
Everything About Breathing, by B.J. Best, won second place in the 2019 contest.
Canoeing a River with No Name, by Ronnie Hess, won first place in the 2018 contest.
Dove Tail, by Sharon Auberle and Jeanie Tomasko won first place in 2017.
Read more about these and other Bent Paddle books on the chapbooks page.
Find Jeanie and Steve Tomasko’s homepage here.