Golden Foothills Poetry Anthology from the Green Hills of Altadena

BookReview: Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024.
Peter J. Harris, Ed. Altadena, Ca: Golden Foothills Press, 2024. ISBN 978-1-7372481-2-5.
 
Michael Sedano
 
 
One of the nation's foremost poetry communities populates the northwesternmost corner of California's San Gabriel Valley, Altadena 91001. A pair of Co-Poets Laureate serve two-year terms organizing readings, workshops, events, culminating in a published anthology. This year's book, the thirteenth in the series, features 121 poets with 177 thoughts, covering nearly 300 pages of Golden Foothill Press' Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024 (link).
 

Editor Peter J. Harris welcomed hundreds of submissions in the process of selecting works in section I of the three-section collection. 

In a remarkable publication schedule necessitated by the term of service of Altadena Poets Laureate, Harris and Golden Foothills Press publisher, Thelma T. Reyna, had only seven months from open call to printed copies and produced a magnum opus of contemporary U.S. poetry.
 
The anthology has three divisions. Part One publishes poets from the open call. Part two shares poems from an ekphrastic project of the Laureates in 2023 (link). Part three collects work from a cross-generational workshop, and comes with an introduction by Co-Poet Laureate Carla R. Sameth. 
 
Harris knows most of the poets in the collection but he relates an editorial anomia regarding poet names, selecting poems that move him personally. In his preface, Harris says he selects poems "that call to me." He chooses poems "that stop time in their own ways". The anthology collects numerous Poets Laureate, and awardees of American Book Award and Pushcart Prize, as well as numerous debut authors.
 
Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024 represents a nationwide set of voices with southern California artists in the majority. The anthology's roster of poets reflects the region's diversity with work across ethnic, age, and gender lines. There's an extensive fourth section, not of poems but biographies of poets. After reading a particularly provocative thought, readers will find perspective by reading a poet's one-paragraph file.

 
Harris' "Foreword: Community Without Conformity," and Robin D.G. Kelley,'s "Introduction" will give readers keen insight into the process of selecting, and the critic's understanding of how the poems go together and fall into recognizable ways of looking at a world. Carla Rachel Sameth's "Places We Call Home: Cross-generational Ode to the Land Workshops", frames selections.
 
Poetry itself will deal in universals, a reader expects to read poems about love, sex, reverence, anguish, heartbreak, politics, anger, separation, death. Anthologies collect these from the submissions that reached the Editor, que no? Submission aside, readers expect unique takes on familiar themes and for the Editor to collect stuff that makes sense, together as a collection, stuff that makes sense individually.
 
In this, Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024 exceed all expectations, offering readers a definitive portrait of contemporary poetry right now. It's like a Norton Anthology of contemporary United States poetry in 2023 and 2024 as seen from Altadena, California where Poets Laureate have been doing this for almost twenty years, and publishing for thirteen.
 
Robin D.G. Kelley's "Introduction" views the collection as a stream of consciousness where memory flows through to link poems into themes reflecting the poet's sense of purpose and aesthetic. Dig into the collection and see for yourselves.
 
Poets appear in alphabetical order, which adds to a reader's enjoyment discovering one's own organization of style and theme. Consider the richness exemplified in the first ten titles by seven poets: "May You Rest in My Love", "Shared Magic"; "Super Duper Toxic Masculinity"; "Saltwater Woman"; "Oh Palestine", "The Many Faces of La Llorona"; "Tin Man"; "Streamlight", "Letter to My First String Quartet, Live and Up Close"; "Star Catcher."
 
Kelley's suggestion that memory links these work strikes me as right on. Many poets possess memories built over years. More than mere memory, their poems reflect maturity and long years' experience living those universalities. Mature poets--old people, not-young poets--write poems with strong understanding of completion, finality, absence. Dying and death offer no mystery. Here, poems express resignation instead of regret, acceptance instead of anguish.
 
Two dementia and dying poems especially move me for their ethos and implicit strength, "The Essence of Us. Thirteen Profiles from Memory Care," by Linda Kraai, and Beatriz De Necochea's "Endless Angst". Each voice accepts what is, and finds balance in desolate landscapes.
 
The quartet poem delighted my own memory. People who dig chamber music probably share the childlike delight the poet breathes into the words.
 
Readers will enjoy what I call the "vocabulary poems," for example, "An Experiment in Poetic Physics" evokes "Baroclinic vorticity / (swirly plasma)", also, "WIMPS / (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles)". Turn to the biographies to learn the poet is an astrophysicist in her published poem debut. Elline Lipkin sends me to Webster's for "haint blue".
 
In a cornucopia of poetic delight such as Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024, it's fruitless to catalog all the themes and attempt some forced-selection list of the best poems in the book. According to Peter J. Harris, here are the best poems of 2023-2024, and I, for one, take his word for it. I was privileged to read a draft and contributed a blurb to the back cover, so I was fortunate to spend many hours inside these pages.
 
Critical thinkers like people who read poetry, or would like to, will want to make up their own mind. Independent booksellers will order your copy from the book's distributor. Wise buyers will order publisher-direct, whose pre-order discount has just expired. Lástima.
 
Altadena Poetry Review: Anthology 2024, at just $19.00 publisher-direct, is poetry's best bargain.
 
http://www.goldenfoothillspress.com
 

Golden Foothills Press Publisher, Dr. Thelma T. Reyna at the anthology debut reading

 
 

Poetry in the Wet Air: Three Anthologies

Melinda Palacio

Rainbow in Santa Barbara. Keep raining California. 

I have the pleasure of being included in three wonderful anthologies: Maple Leaf Rag VI, the Wandering Song, and Poetry in Flight. Maple Leaf Rag VI is the latest sampling of poems read at the Maple Leaf Bar. For those unfamiliar with the poetry scene in New Orleans, the Maple Leaf Bar holds the longest running poetry reading series in the South. The reading began in 1979 and was founded by Everett Maddox who passed away in 1989. Nancy Harris has been hosting the weekly readings for more than 25 years. The collection includes many New Orleans poets, past and present, as well as first-time visitors, such as La Bloga friend Maria M. Kelson of Pueblo and Santa Barbara poets Chryss Yost and George Yatchisin. My poem, "Bones for Feathers" is included in the anthology. The book launch for the Maple Leaf Rag VI is this Sunday, January 15, at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans, 8316 Oak Street.  For those unable to attend the reading, you can order a copy of the book through the Portals Press website.

Maple Leaf Rag VI: An Anthology of Poetic Writings New Orleans
Portals Press, 2017

Next month, at AWP, Tía Chucha Press will present The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, edited by Leticia Hernández Linares, Rubén Martínez, and Héctor Tobar. The Wandering Song is a much anticipated anthology of Central American writers living in the United States. This is the first time a comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a U.S. publisher will be available for readers and scholars, a collection appropriate for high school, college, or university courses in U.S. Literature, Latino Literature, Multicultural Studies, and Migration Studies. The multi-genre collection includes poems, short stories, essays, memoir, novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction. I'm looking forward to this collection and am honored to have two poems in the book, "This Is How the World Ends" and "All Things Precious." The anthology is available for pre-order through Tia Chucha Press and Northwestern University Press. The book launch and reading will be in DC, Wednesday, February 8 at the AWP, details TBA, stay tuned on La Bloga.

The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States,
Tía Chucha Press 2017.

The Anthology Poetry in Flight/Poesía en Vuelo celebrates contributors of San Francisco's, El Tecolote. In the words of Juan Felipe Herrera, "this is the El Tecolote Anthology, the pioneering, fiery, soulful eye of this community, keeping watch and ward on our realities, without borders-even if the border makers insist on doing their border work. This is a volume of dreams, battle, play and the magic of the people-new freedom of thought warriors, word-salseras-checking on that odd-angled thing called 'progress,' on that viral tsunami of corporate, social and economic encroachment." My poem, "Age-Old Poetry" is included in this long-awaited collection. This anthology has witnessed the deaths of two of its co-editors, Francisco X. Alarcon and Alfonso Texidor. The cover art is by Juan R. Fuentes and the design work by Adrian Arias. An endorsement by Juan Felipe Herrera graces the back cover. The new publication celebration and reading will be held on Sunday, March 19 from 1-4 at Acción Latina in San Francisco in their beautiful remodeled facility at 2958 24th Street.

Poetry in Flight/Poesía en Vuelo
Anthology in Celebration of El Tecolote 2017