365 Days: A Poetry Anthology Vol. 4 is a beautiful book and an even more beautiful tradition,
marking six years of these poets offering themselves to each other and then to the world. Each
poem here is “shaped like a life”—lives that inhabit jazz clubs and rivers, mountains and front
porches, all night diners and a small town’s last video store. Each poem here is stamped with its
birthdate, preserved like “a carnation in a yearbook,” chronicling hard years and hard themes.
Long after my first encounter with this book, these poems “haunt me still.”
—Melissa Fite Johnson, author of Green
This new volume of the excellent 365 Days anthology series traps freighted moments in an uncertain world. These poets know the steady, quiet heartbreak of living in the right-now; as Steve Brisendine laments, they “count stars // and wonder which one burned / out the night I learned its name.” Jason Baldinger speaks for many when, even in the warm hug of a shower, he only “find[s] hope lukewarm,” because ours is sometimes indeed a rough world. Hope can be hard-found in these pandemic years, where we cling to what we can; “it’s often hard to tell cloud from sky / or smog from smoke,” as Brandon Bender aptly puts it. But hope is there, maybe just around the corner, and we may find it yet. Yes, Lana Dealy confides herein that “making the choice / to love / is remarkably / simple.” When that choice arrives after so long away from things approaching normal, this collection tells us, stop and take a moment with it. As Lindsey Martin-Bowen implores us, take it in. Inhale that sweet, precious breath.
~Tyler Robert Sheldon, Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review and author of When to Ask for Rain (Spartan Press, 2021)
This Still LIfe
$13 USD
Ravenous and Salivating
$10 USD
Misfits in the Front Row
$13 USD
From the Back
$13 USD
Things Have Changed
$5 USD
Everyone's Alone Tonight
$15 USD
The Park
$14 USD
Against the Dark: Road Poems
$15 USD
Little Fires Hiding
$15 USD
As I Watch You Fade
$5 USD
365 Days: A Poetry Anthology, Vol. 4 (paperback)
$10 USD
365 Days: A Poetry Anthology Vol. 3
$10 USD
365 Days: A Poetry Anthology, Vol. 2
$10 USD
365 Days: A Poetry Anthology
$10 USD
James Benger Kansas City, Missouri
James Benger has written a bunch of stuff. So far there are two ebooks, three chapbooks, six splits, and two full-lengths. He is on the Board of Directors of the Writers Place, and the Riverfront Readings Committee. He is also the admin of an online poetry workshop called 365 Poems in 365 Days, which has produced four anthologies and counting. He lives and Kansas City with his wife and children. ... more
