books – Prolific Pulse Blog

About the Author

Glennie Moore is a semi-retired substitute teacher who enjoys writing Christian fiction, weaving elements of the gospel in every story. She holds a B.A. in English from North Carolina State University and a Master of Divinity in Biblical Counseling from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She enjoys teaching Sunday School and Bible study as well as family gatherings, photography and observing nature.

About the Book

In Echoes of Destiny – Short Stories of the Unexpected, nothing is as it appears and everything changes once destiny arrives – unannounced. This collection of short stories and a novella explore what happens when life takes an irreversible turn and it’s the stranger we meet, the enemy we fear or the unseen spirits who guide us toward our destiny. Journey through time where the past collides with the present and the ordinary with the extraordinary.

In Inside the Flame, a woman escaping an abusive marriage seeks refuge in a cabin by the lake until an intruder on the property shatters her peace. But the stranger she holds at gunpoint rekindles a love she thought was lost forever.

In Unlikely Allies, two feuding coworkers are stranded on a desolate country road only to be “rescued” by a dangerous hate group. Can they put aside their grievances and trust one another in what becomes a literal fight for their lives.

In Picture Perfect, travel photographer, Kayla, on assignment in the beautiful Bahamas meets a grieving widower with his young daughter and finds unexpected love. But his heart is lost in the past until a benevolent spirit reveals the love they secretly share – in the perfect picture.

In The Unquiet Guest, Shoney Harris, owner of a bed and breakfast restored from an old plantation home, is visited by the ghost of an enslaved man seeking justice for a centuries old murder he never committed. Only Shoney can free him from the hidden lies of the past.

In Echoes of Destiny, the title novella, two infants who miraculously survive a tragic accident capture the townspeople in a cultic devotion and a prophecy declaring them bound by divine intervention. Decades later, their paths unexpectedly cross and they discover the destiny the townspeople spoke over them. Feeling the heavy mantle of expectation placed upon their heads, they must decide if their undeniable connection is one of true love or the lingering echoes of a past that won’t let go.

In this collection, stories of mystery, revelation, love, and the twist of fate, takes us on a journey that proves it is the unexpected that truly defines us.

What Others Have to Say

In Echoes of Destiny by Glennie Moore, strangers become lifelines, enemies become allies, and lives collide in unexpected ways when ordinary people face extraordinary moments. A woman frightened of an abusive marriage finds unexpected comfort beside a lonely lake. Two rivals trapped in a nightmare must depend on each other to survive. Mysterious prophecy binds two souls across decades. Filled with suspense, romance, heartbreak, and hope, this collection will leave readers questioning whether destiny is written or created by the choices we make.

Munmun Samanta author of Yellow Chrysanthemum

Echoes of Destiny by Glennie Moore is aptly named. As you read each story, you recognize a crossing of the future into the present. Each character has a specific purpose of revealing the secrets of the past and showing how they affect the present and the future. Each story shows the supernatural part of life that is out of our control. The collection of short stories and the novella will keep the lover of a love story tuned in.

G. Elaine Sneed – Customer Contact Specialist

These short stories are exceptionally well written, and the way suspense is built is breathtaking. Each story is phenomenal in its own right. Which one was my favorite? Honestly, I don’t know. Every time I finished one, I was convinced it was my favorite… until I read the next. Each story brought something fresh and compelling that made it hard to choose just one. Scripture was woven in perfectly.

What stood out most to me is how these stories highlight the value of relationships. They remind us not to minimize their importance. When relationships begin with strain, they can only get better. And when they begin well, they establish a standard for what greatness in relationships can look like. These stories beautifully echo what Glennie Moore says: “It is the unexpected that truly defines us.” That idea lingers long after the stories end. It causes me to reflect on my own relationships. I found myself asking: What will I do when the unexpected brings me joy? And how will I respond when my relationships bring unexpected sorrow?

Lori Jones Moss – Author of My Heavenly Father’s Eyes: A Relationship-Building Study, Mental Health and Professional Life Coach

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Announcements, art, Book Announcements, Celebrations, essays, photography, poetry

Unhoused – Yearning for Home is Now Available!

May 31, 2026May 31, 2026 Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Announcement about Unhoused – Yearning for Home Anthology of Poetry, Art, Photography, and Essays. Lighthouse background with book cover forefront with art featuring a bench, backpack, shoes under a beacon of light on a rainy night. Homes with lights on are in the background.

About Unhoused – Yearning for Home

UNHOUSED – Yearning for Home is a powerful and deeply human anthology exploring the realities of homelessness, displacement, migration, statelessness, and the universal search for belonging. Through evocative poetry, poignant flash writing, true stories, and compelling artwork, this collection gives voice to those who have experienced the loss of home—whether through war, poverty, immigration struggles, discrimination, economic hardship, or social instability—and to those who bear compassionate witness to these experiences.

Far beyond politics and headlines, UNHOUSED – Yearning for Home focuses on the emotional truths behind displacement: the grief of losing safety, the ache of isolation, the resilience required to survive, and the enduring hope of finding connection, identity, and peace. The anthology shines a light on the invisible struggles faced by unhoused and marginalized individuals around the world while honoring their courage, humanity, and determination to endure.

Editors Jia-Li Yang and Candice Louisa Daquin are both immigrants with extensive experience working in homelessness and crisis support services. It was their inspiration that drew the interest of Prolific Pulse Press LLC. This collection continues the press’s tradition of publishing meaningful social justice anthologies that amplify underrepresented voices. All four editors offer a glimpse of their experiences in the foreword.

Raw, compassionate, heartbreaking, and hopeful, UNHOUSED – Yearning for Home invites readers to look beyond stereotypes and statistics to witness the deeply personal realities of what it means to search for safety, stability, and a place to call home.

A portion of the UNHOUSED – Yearning for Home proceeds will benefit The Women’s Center of Wake County, Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Announcements, Book Announcements, Book Reviews, poetry

Presenting “Peculiar Perspectives” by Ed Ahern

May 28, 2026May 29, 2026 Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Peculiar Perspectives Book Cover

Twenty-four glimpses into the absurd,

the tender, and the beautifully human.

These twenty-four short poems are personal rather than political, reflective rather than polemic – quiet observations shaped by a life that has been, at times, unruly, uneven, and richly human. They invite the reader not to debate or defend, but simply to recognize: to nod in wry agreement at the small absurdities, contradictions, and tender ironies that fill our everyday lives.

Drawn from a long and garishly checkered journey – one navigated more by instinct than intention – these poems distill experience into brief, free verse moments. They could have unfolded as sprawling autobiographical narratives, layered with embellishment and softened by false modesty. But that is not their nature. The voice here leans toward the epigrammatic rather than the epic, favoring canapés over feasts – small, carefully offered portions meant to be savored, not consumed all at once.

At the heart of this collection lies a lifelong devotion to language. Beyond family, the author’s enduring love affair has been with reading, writing, and speaking words – finding in them both refuge and revelation. These poems arise from that relationship: an urge not just to observe life, but to shape it into something shareable. Many of these pieces have found their way into print and into the air – read aloud to audiences, sometimes more than once – where their quiet truths and subtle humor continue to resonate.

The subjects are not grand events or sweeping declarations, but the small, often overlooked details that give life its texture: fleeting thoughts, peculiar habits, private contradictions, and the strange comforts we build for ourselves. Each poem captures a moment of recognition – sometimes amused, sometimes bittersweet, often both at once. Together, they form a mosaic of perspective: two dozen glimpses into a mind attuned to the eccentricities and quiet wonders that surround us.

This is a book that does not rush. It lingers. It invites pause. It allows space for reflection, for a half-smile, for the subtle realization that what seems uniquely strange is often universally shared. There are no epic climaxes here, no sweeping resolutions-only the gentle accumulation of insight, the steady uncovering of meaning in the seemingly mundane.

In these pages, we are reminded that life’s significance is rarely found in its grandest moments, but in its smallest ones: the passing thought, the odd realization, the quiet acceptance. These poems offer not answers, but companionship-a recognition that we are all navigating our own peculiar paths, doing the best we can with what we notice, remember, and feel.

This little book allows us to smile at the absurdities we put ourselves through, while also inviting us to slow down long enough to savor the moments that offer contentment. It is, at its core, a celebration of the imperfect, the peculiar, and the profoundly human.

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About the Author

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He has had over six hundred stories and poems published so far, and twelve books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he squats on the editorial board, and at Scribes Micro, where he is the idle figurehead.

What Others Have to Say

“I became a straggler in the jostling crowd

elbowing forward toward an unseen cliff,”

If you are ready to ‘wander into the thick woods without trails or patterns’, grab a copy of Ed Ahern’s Peculiar Perspectives. This poetry chapbook, containing 24 poems, will lead you to a world shaped by experience, memory, aging, and epiphany observed from the quieter edges of life. Just imagine how fascinating it would be to traverse through these fascinating, often overlooked byways and alleys of everyday life, sharing the wit, candor and unflinching honesty of his poetry.

Munmun Samanta – Author of Yellow Chrysanthemum

Ed Ahern may call himself a “geriatric poseur with aching muscles” whose courting of intimacy with life is touched by shades of mortality. Believe him. And don’t. He may sense that he’s becoming fractional even as he picks up all around him “lingering aromas / of a burning world.” Believe him. And don’t. Why do I waver as I come into the presence of this mind, this imagination, this man? I can only guess that it may be because here we have a poet who walks through the loam of life even as he floats above the muck, leaving me, in the process, to hang in the air holding on to ambiguity by one hand and ambivalence by the other. Until, that is, I read him chanting “Over time there is only the gathering.” Then I settle into a sense that now we have arrived, he and you and I, to rest in our all-too-human world-fragile and unique, and precious in the haunting darkness of the universe.

Professor Ralph Nazareth, distinguished leader of Curley’s Poets

Ed Ahern’s wit glows in the dark as he walks through the woods losing and finding his way back through the trails he creates with his sharp-edged words. And his understanding and compassion for those who are lucky to know him glow in his original, heartfelt images.

Janet Krauss, adjunct professor emeritus from Fairfield University, author of Borrowed Scenery and Through the Trees of Autumn

Peculiar Perspectives leads readers into the untamed menagerie of Edward Ahern’s musings about nature, aging, family, loss, and everything in between. Filled with open self-reflection, as well as a humorous, sometimes jaded viewpoint, this collection is a sampling of some of Ahern’s best new poetry. He is excellent at illuminating those quiet moments and reflections that no one talks about, but everyone knows about and will never admit to. Reading these short verses, you’ll find yourself smiling at the absurdities – and the intrinsic rewards – of being human.

Alison McBain Award-winning poet & author of The New Empire

Purchase your copy today!

Announcements, Book Announcements, Book Reviews, poetry, Poets & Events

New Arrival! “Reflections of a Woman’s Life” by Gypsie-Ami Offenbacher-Ferris

March 30, 2026April 11, 2026 Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Meet the Author:

Gypsie-Ami Offenbacher-Ferris lives in Southport, NC, USA. Gypsie-Ami’s photographic artwork was chosen beside twenty-four other artist’s works by “Up Your Arts” and the City of Southport as winners in the fourth annual pole banner art project, “Raise Up Your Arts,” May through November 2026.

She is a twice published poet in Cameron Art Museum’s Writers Respond to Art Program and was awarded the Certificate of Completion for completing the 2021 – 24 Hour Poetry Marathon and the 2022 – 24 Hour Poetry Marathon. Her poem “Wheels” was published in the 2021, 24 Hour Poetry Marathon Anthology. Her poem, “The Date”has been chosen for publication in the 2022 – 24 Hour Poetry Marathon.

She is a published author in Whisper’s & Echoes, an on-line literary magazine and in 50 Give or Take for her 50-word stories, “Love,” “The Wedding” and “The Sleep Doctor.”In Visual Verse with her poem “Mother Earth” and several editions of The Virtual Poetorium. Ami is also published in Spillwords Press with her stories, “No Ghosts This Christmas!,” “Look!” and “I Am Not A Man!”

Gypsie-Ami has had the honor of being published by Carrot Ranch Literary Community in their Baby Ducks Ate My Lunch Collection for her 99 word story, Duckling Survival Guide.

Gypsie-Ami writes flash fiction, short stories, creative non-fiction, and fiction as well as poetry. Her short story, “Conversations With My Neighbor” is published in the anthology, Trouble, by Daniel Boone Publishing. Ami received Honorable Mention in Tales from the Moonlit Path 2021, a yearly Halloween Issue titled Abandoned Places Halloween Challenge, for her short story, “Abandoned Memories.” Her short story “Grandmother And The Strawberry Moon”was chosen as a semi-finalist in Stories That Need to Be Told: The Contest.

Gypsie-Ami’s first chapbook of poetry and photography is titled Flowers Flowers Everywhere! She has written two stage plays to date and is currently completing her second action/adventure/romance preternatural novel.

Ami is a member of NCWN (North Carolina Writer’s Network) and WWN (Women Writer’s Network). Ami’s core writing group and the women who literally saved her life during her COVID-19 illness, Coastal Women’s Writer’s Group of Wilmington, NC.

Ami is known to her closest friends and relatives as Gypsie.

Book Announcements, poetry

New Release! “Man Afield” by Jim Krosschell

March 20, 2026March 28, 2026 Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

We are pleased to announce the New Release of Man Afield by Jim Krosschell.

Jim Krosschell has published poems and essays in some 85 journals, plus two essay collections: One Man’s Maine, which won a Maine Literary Award, and Owls Head Revisited. He lives in Deer Isle, ME and Newton, MA, and volunteers on Boards for Coastal Mountains Land Trust and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

His poetry collection, Man Afield is a lyrical journey through the living world, guided by a backyard naturalist attuned to both wonder and warning. These poems chronicle spiritual and physical excursions into landscapes larger than any one mind or body — places where awe, joy, disorientation, and reckoning intertwine.

Organized in six evocative sections, the collection:

I. bears witness from a seaside deck;

II. wanders through yard and neighboring woods;

III. explores the shifting shoreline;

IV. imagines the vast and restless ocean;

V. surveys the scars of environmental damage;

VI. honors home in its many meanings.

Throughout, the poems dwell in the charged space where humans and the natural world meet. They examine our peculiar paradox: we are the only species that knowingly fouls its own nest — and the only one capable of choosing restraint. With clear-eyed honesty, Man Afield mourns the grinding erosion of precious places while celebrating the stubborn beauty that persists despite us — and sometimes because of us.

From deck to forest trail, from tidal pull to smoke-streaked sky, these poems trace one person’s evolving relationship with plants, animals, weather, memory, and spirit. Intimate yet expansive, they invite readers to travel outward into the wild and inward toward belonging.

Man Afield is at once a field journal, a meditation, and a love song — to earth, to home, and to the fragile bond between them./

What reviewers have to say:

A “backyard naturalist,” Jim Krosschell writes about human relationships with the natural world. His previous books include One Man’s Maine and Owls Head Revisited. He has been Board President for Coastal Mountains Land Trust and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and continues to volunteer in conservation and publishing communities. Before retirement, he worked in science publishing in Boston and now lives in Deer Isle, Maine and Newton, Massachusetts.

I read Man Afield in one sitting, delighted as the speaker in these poems trains his roving eyes and ears on his surroundings and the wonders of the natural world, searching for any “wildly beating heart.” There is no high or low in the cataloguing and noticing that happens here—gnats, ants, many kinds of birds and trees, rivers, oceans, the delicious names of plants all receive attention and care. These poems are clear-eyed, not romantic—they take in the “miles of Walmart, Ford, and Shell” and Land Cruisers “junked on the veldt” and know well how precarious our world is. Krosschell still chooses, again and again, to draw his careful attention to, say, three loons on “this stretch of shore / on the coast of Maine…” and to allow himself, and us, to be mesmerized.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Author of Deke Dangle Dive

What a satisfying and uplifting ride it is to join Krosschell’s journey from young man, “with his dreams of rivers” to old man with his “permanent perch on a hermit’s wild ledge,” overlooking the forest and coast of Maine, mindful of carbon’s engulfing demise, delighting in the “manna of joy administered only in crumbs.” From Man Afield’s opening flight of poems that expose what’s small and barely perceptible, to its closing epics and late-life gatherings, these are poems of a specific earned grace brought to beauty by Krosschell’s firm roots in the natural world. There is lament here for irreparable loss but also humor and social commentary (“Turkeys,” “White Man’s Footstep”), a retort to Frost (“Whose Woods These Are”), and a brilliant ode of reflection to Thoreau, “March Into April” and its haunting question, “will spring still come to the window and wake me?” Man Afield’s poems are grounded in the terra firma of New England, but their reach is universal, and they reward fully with the music of observation.

Bruce Willard, Author of In Light of Stars

In graceful, accessible language, Jim Krosschell’s poems create a glass pane through which to view and ponder the wonders of the natural world and the fraught relationship of humankind to it. Often clear and bright, sometimes dark, and always reflective, these poems reveal a man alive to the world he observes precisely and lovingly, and to which he longs to connect his self and the transcendent. Something we all, in our own way, seek in our lives. Man Afield is a collection that invites us in to learn from one man’s journey to our benefit.

Brian Schulz, Poet