Featured New Mexico small press this month:

3: A Taos Press

with Publisher Andrea Watson and poet Joan Ryan

Reading from Blood Secrets

Plus Leslie Ullman reading from Little Soul and the Selves

Followed by open mic

Free event on Zoom, hosted by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse (your hosts Jules Nyquist & John Roche)

6 pm Pacific, 7 pm Mountain, 8 pm Central, 9 pm Eastern

event will be recorded

Blood Secrets - reading with Andrea Watson and Joan Ryan

“What is it like to live in a house alcoved in mystery and keep your soul as hidden as the Hebrew scroll concealed in the tiny Madonna by your front door? Or to be drawn—ghost hands guiding you to light tallow candles—to rites you don’t understand?….

In poems laden with enigma and insight, three New Mexico writers explore the emotional and physical journeys of the secret Jews who, centuries ago, fled to this state to escape the Inquisition and those of their descendants who have recently discovered their long-hidden roots.” 3: A Taos Press Blood Secrets

Little Soul and the Selves - reading with Leslie Ullman

…”what at first appears to be a chronicle of a mid-century childhood through coming of age to maturity becomes an interrogation of the very nature of the soul—its origins, its purpose, its evolution in a given lifetime. To this end, the persona of Little Soul muses at the heart of the search. Introduced as a half-wild creature unbound by maleness or femaleness, tentative and weightless as “a lone firefly lacing the dusk,” Little Soul at first flounders alongside the untried Selves but eventually comes to instruct and fuse with them. Sometimes humorous and gently satirical in their depictions of a middle-class America whose values seemed unassailable for a time, these poems ultimately reconstruct a personal history as they mull over the universal burdens of self-doubt, ambition, desire, disappointment and inevitable relinquishments, and then begin to taste the pleasures of traveling light.” 3: A Taos Press: Little Soul and the Selves