Category: poetry

poetry

“Relish The Good” by Joni Caggiano

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

“Relish The Good” by Joni Caggiano A setting suntugs at the seamsof my life like anangry seamstress. Time fades,as scars risefrom a cruel rapewhen I was eighteen. Hope peeks earnestas burnt red skiesflirt with memoriesof a lost childhood. Freedom as hair flieson a rusty bike downan unpaved road tocash in pennies for candy. Gasps from subtlelack of my heart’snormal […]

“Relish The Good” by Joni Caggiano
Announcements, awards, Book Announcements, Celebrations, poetry, writing

Congratulations to LindaAnn LoSchiavo for this Big Win!

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld
Cancer Courts My Mother by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

What Great News to wake up to this morning!

HUGE Congratulations to LindaAnn LoSchiavo for this well-deserved win!

Get your copy today: Cancer Courts My Mother https://www.prolificpulse.com/lindaannloschiavo

Announcements, Book Announcements, Celebrations, poetry

ANNOUNCEMENT! “Perihelion” by Roberta Batorsky is Published Today!!

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

We are pleased to announce that “Perihelion” by Roberta Batorsky is now ready for your bookshelf. Her debut poetry book, “Perihelion” is a poetry collection which has been carefully crafted, critiqued, and polished for the best of reading.

About “Perihelion”

This book uses powerful, colorful imagery and often humor, applied to everyday life situations, to delve deep into the realms of love, loss, childhood, memory, aging, relationships, partnership and friendship. The writer’s command of language, including colorful and strong vocabulary, will appeal to poetry readers of all stripes in its accuracy, insight and universality. Her critical insight and unsparing explorations of feelings will bring readers into her circle with recognition of the beauty of her words and the similarities with their own experiences. Her love for nature and ability to describe people’s lived experiences, mental problems, societal upheaval, relationship struggles, love for family, and deep love for, and familiarity with, literature will inspire all who pick up her book. Her style is a giving and loving one which will be meaningful to all readers.

Note the cover design by Kelli Jackson of KRynae Design Co. She really captured the meaning of the poem by the same name.

What others have to say:

It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to Perihelion, the debut collection of poetry by Roberta Batorsky. Roberta’s poetry has taken the literary community by storm, her words will make you want to sit up and think, stir emotions, as she pulls you into her world. Her poetry reflects her interest in people, through lived experiences and the world of science. Each one is full of humour, pathos, and empathy. She is incredibly articulate and precise, reflecting her intellectual ability as an educator.

This collection has over one hundred poems; each one is a masterpiece in its own right, beautifully crafted to perfection. Each poem gives you an insight into her life and the lives of others, incredibly observant and full of wit, as you are transported to her world.

This book will appeal to readers of all ages and genders because it is relatable, to enchant, move and delight. Stand out poems include “American Standard or The Loo’s Lament,” “Social Dancing on Neptoon,” “Lost Lives Matter,” “Unstrung, for Richard,” “I Remember It,” “If I die first,” “Picking Apples in Stilettos,” “Bismillah,” “Autumn Finds Me,” “My Dis Connect,” “Drinking with Mom,” “Man to Man,” “The Walkers in the Rain,” and “Gasp.” This poignant book of poetry is an entertaining read, will make you laugh out loud, smile in places and shed a tear, extremely relatable and utterly brilliant, it will be a welcome addition to your bookshelf, a classic in the making.

Sarfraz Ahmed, Poet and Writer (UK)

Roberta Batorsky’s “Perihelion” carries rich layers of meaning in the context of poetic creativity. Like planets drawing close to the sun, the poet’s voice circles the most intense experiences of human life: mental health struggles (“Unit 4,” “New Year to Be Born”), grief (“Irreplaceable, for Mariana”, “Tremolo”), and love (“You Are All I Need”). These are moments of most excellent exposure, where both illumination and pain work together. It suggests that poetry itself becomes a perihelion. In this space, the poet dares to move nearest to the burning core of experience, and in doing so, offers illumination to the readers. In “Perihelion”, readers encounter humour, grief, survival, and renewal in equal measure. It is a collection that burns close, like its namesake, leaving the reader illuminated.

Munmun Samanta, Author of “Yellow Chrysanthemum”

Get Your Copy Here

Roberta Batorsky is a Biology teacher and freelance science writer. Her poetry reflects her interest in people, their lived experiences and science. She writes with empathy, knowledge and humor and has been published in Heron Clan, Fine Lines, NJ Bards, Delaware Valley Poets and other collections. This is her first book. She lives in NJ with her husband and has 2 children and 2 grandchildren.

Book Reviews, books, poetry

Peter Mladinic’s Book Review of “Cancer Courts My Mother” by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Home Remedies: a review of Cancer Courts My Mother by LindaAnn LoSchiavo. Prolific Pulse Press. Raleigh, NC. November 2025

It would be hard to find a person whose life, directly or indirectly, has not been touched by cancer. Just as cancer takes many forms, people’s mental, emotional, and physical responses vary. LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s response is this book. Out of ugliness, the frightful fact cancer kills, she has wrought beauty, this sequence of poems. A reader’s appreciation of them may be heightened by taking a look at their metaphorical resonance and their distinction between honesty and artifice; and, ultimately, by considering the voice of the poet, a daughter speaking about her parents.

The book’s title Cancer Courts My Mother suggests an extended metaphor. The tenor, cancer, is a suitor. A suitor is defined as a man who courts a woman.  Although the title suggests otherwise, the woman the suitor courts is the daughter, the poet. In “Arrival” she says, “I know he’s made himself at home, the dark prince …conveying her into his sunless realm.” Yes, death is conveying the mother but it’s daughter who knows. And she is the one being courted, the one who hears the dark prince’s seductive whispers, the one for whom “terminal illness / twirls out of the speech of men.” At the end of “Tick Tick” she says, “Cancer, biding his time, taunts me.” In “Early Visit from the Grim Reaper,” “His baritone commanded me to GO!” In the “Bartering with Cancer,” the octave begins with “When medicine has nothing more to give / There’s only daughters and morphine…” And in the turn, the second half, she says, “I’m stunned.” In “Jaundice,” she says, “my mother wound up with him —Cancer —,” but in the realm of life, cancer courts the daughter, the maker of these poems.

They are interesting for their distinction between fact and fiction, honesty and artifice. Interesting, compelling, haunting. “Diagnosis” begins the sequence. Its abrupt enjambments signal an urgency that inclines the speaker towards artifice.

Transformation’s required, starting with your voice,
Hemorrhaging with euphemisms, lies. You could
Be an actor fed fake dialogue, words almost
A well-rehearsed performance. You could be-
Come an acrobat, clutching the girders of hope. A
Safety net’s missing. The laughter is a ghost’s.

The abiding artifice is the poems.

Even imagination threatened to betray
me, failing to make good on the fancies I’d hope to invent.
But pen and paper became the dependable parents I’d
always longed for. With them, I sketched realities I could
eventually escape to.

That passage is the conclusion of “Mother Magnified,” which is an honest account of the friction between the speaker and her mother, one aspect of this mother and daughter relationship. Yet another realm of reality, that not only counters the artifice “an actor fed fake dialogue” but also the wooing of “the dark prince” is the life of plants.  In “Green Nursemaid” the daughter tends her mother’s plants, “suturing new healthiness into the exhausted potting mixture.” While other flourishes of artifice appear in the forms of mythic “mermaids” and the “prayer candles” of religious ritual, the plants symbolize continual life, and, in “Living through the Dying,” which begins with the imperative “Resuscitate the wilted,” their tenacity and the poet’s.

To consider the voice in the poems is to consider the speaker, a poet facing the grim reality that many of her reading audience have faced or will face: cancer kills. The poet’s mother’s suffering is terminal; then there’s her father’s suffering and her own. Her voice, what is said, and how, reflects the human heart in conflict with itself. Signs that say Fuck Cancer are brandished by people who hate the thing that is killing their love ones. I love, I hate —they suggest, conveying that conflict. The poet’s “realities” she “could escape to” suggests her speaking, and putting pen to paper is cathartic. She is also defiant. In “Early Visit …” the reaper says, “GO! She says “No!” 

Cancer Courts My Mother consists of poems in free verse and in tradition forms. While its rhymes resolve, there is no closure; the poet’s turmoil remains. Cancer took her mother. A mother’s suffering and eventual absence, left a daughter and a spouse/ father to grieve. The poet’s grief is poignantly conveyed throughout this sequence. Towards the end she says, “When my mother died, she took home along with her.”

Order “Cancer Courts My Mother”

Peter Mladinic was born and raised in New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1973 and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas in 1985. Professor emeritus at New Mexico Junior College, where he was a member of the English faculty for thirty years. During that time, he was a board member of the Lea County Museum and president of the Lea County Humane Society. He is the author of several poetry collections.