Tag: haiku

Announcements, art, Book Announcements, book launch, poetry, Poets & Events

Indelible Ink: Jennifer Gurney’s Postcard Poems and Paintings Arrive October 30

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld
Three colorful postcards featuring abstract artwork, alongside a book cover titled 'Indelible Ink' by Jennifer Gurney, which includes the subtitle 'Postcard Poems and Paintings from the 2025 Postcard Poetry Fest'.

Prologue to summer, epilogue to summer, and every sun-soaked day in between: Prolific Pulse Press is thrilled to announce the release of Indelible Ink: Postcard Poems and Paintings from the 2025 Postcard Poetry Fest by Colorado poet and painter Jennifer Gurney, available October 30, 2026.

Thirty Postcards, Thirty Poems, Two Days

Every August, writers around the world sign up for the Postcard Poetry Fest. Each receives a list of names and addresses, and through the month they write a poem on the back of a postcard and mail it to a stranger, while poems from fellow poets arrive in their own mailbox.

Jennifer didn’t just write her postcards. She painted them. In a single day at her kitchen table, with music playing, coffee within reach and her curious cat keeping watch, she painted all thirty cards. The next day she wrote all thirty poems. Every poem in Indelible Ink is a true first draft, sent out into the world unrevised, paired with the bold, layered abstract painting it traveled on.

The result is a book of summer: watermelon, fireflies, thunderstorms, and a teacher’s wish that August would slow down just a little.

A Gift Economy in Book Form

What makes the Postcard Poetry Fest special, Jennifer says, is that someone writes a poem just for you, and you write one just for them. She calls the festival the epitome of authenticity and generosity. Indelible Ink honors that community of poets and brings its spirit to readers everywhere.

The vibrant cover painting is Jennifer’s own favorite from the collection, and, like the covers of all 16 of her poetry books, it comes from her brush.

Read the Interview

Want the story behind the book? In our new interview, Jennifer talks about painting thirty postcards in a day, the German and Irish voices in her head that argue over revisions, her Art Heals project after the Marshall Fire, what her fourth graders thought of the poems, and her advice for anyone nervous about sharing a first draft.

👉 Read the full interview with Jennifer Gurney

About the Author & Artist

Jennifer Gurney is a Colorado-based poet and painter who also teaches and hikes. She has published 16 books and nearly 3,500 poems internationally, with work recognized in two international contests and featured in a choral performance, a D.C. yard sign, Australian theater screens, the Rx Poetry project, and a bus sign in Racine, Wisconsin. Her manuscript We Are Never Ready: A Collection of Grief Poems earned Honorable Mention for the 2025 Concrete Wolf Louis Award, and Curvature of Life was a semi-finalist for The Word Works’ 2025 Tenth Gate Prize. As a painter, she creates vibrant, experimental abstract acrylics that have appeared in magazines, anthologies, and local exhibitions, and she was GloMag’s 2024 Artist of the Month.

Find her on Instagram at @pelican6527 and on Etsy at Jennifer Gurney Art.

Get Your Copy

Indelible Ink: Postcard Poems and Paintings from the 2025 Postcard Poetry Fest by Jennifer Gurney Available October 30, 2026

Order now at ProlificPulse.com

Bring a little summer home, one postcard at a time.

Announcements, Book Announcements, poetry, Poetry Forms

Announcing! Red Threads and Silver Linings by Adele Evershed is Now Available

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld
Cover of a haiku collection titled 'Red Threads and Silver Linings' by Adele Evershed, featuring a sketched illustration of a woman.

Celebrate today as the new release of Red Threads and Silver Linings, A Woman’s Life in Haiku, One Bloody Drop at a Time!

Red Threads and Silver Linings is a haiku exploration of the female lifecycle, tracing womanhood through the intimate terrain of the body. Inspired partly by Jaques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It, Evershed moves through menarche, puberty, menstruation, fertility, conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum life, motherhood, menopause, and aging. Her short-form poetry illuminates the quiet power, vulnerability, and resilience held within the body’s cycles.

The collection catalogues the blood that marks each stage of women’s biological lives – periods, miscarriages, birthing blood – threading these experiences to seasonal change, the moon’s rhythm, and nature’s wider cycles. The “red threads” are crimson tides, blossoming flowers, the blood moon: metaphors for menarche’s first shock, miscarriage’s sadness, labor’s endurance, and postpartum’s complexity. The “silver linings” gather later pleasures – reblooming azaleas, HRT’s sticky petals, a bruised peach scented with second chances. Grief and loss coexist here with endurance, humor, desire, and deepening self-knowledge.

Organized into sections like It’s Just a Period She’s Going Through, Childbirth and Other Horrors, and An Old Wife’s Tale, the book blends the personal with the mythical, the natural world with the biological. Daughters and mothers share pages with ghosts of earlier selves and ancestral echoes. Through haiku’s precision, the result is a map of womanhood both grounded and lyrical.

At once meditation and celebration, the collection offers poems that are tender, raw, and unflinchingly honest – honoring the shifting landscape of a woman’s life from girlhood’s first flush to menopause’s soft letting-go, and the humanity found in every bleed, every change, every reckoning of living in a woman’s body.

Catch this video of my interview with author Adele Evershed.

Prefer the Podcast?

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About Adele Evershed

Portrait of Adele Evershed, a poet with long hair, wearing a cozy jacket, and looking thoughtfully at the camera, accompanied by a text introduction highlighting her background and achievements.

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and Touchstone Award winner for an individual poem, she is co-editor of Thin Skin Journal. Her work has appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s est, Presence, Prune Juice, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press), the short story collection Suffer/Rage (Dark Myth Publications), three novellas-in-flash, and the haiku collections Pressed Between Palms (Nun Prophet Press) and They F#% You Up Your Mam and Dad (Cuttlefish Books). When she’s not writing, Adele can be found drinking PG Tips tea and trawling thrift shops for teacups to add to her collection.

Get Your Copy!

Announcements, Book Announcements, Book Funnel, caregiving, poetry

When Cancer Enters the Family

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

When someone you love is diagnosed with late-stage cancer, language shifts.

Ordinary words—appointment, waiting room, prognosis—take on new gravity. Time bends. Conversations sharpen. Silences grow louder.

In Cancer Courts My Mother, LindaAnn LoSchiavo transforms that altered landscape into poetry that is intimate, unsparing, and profoundly human.

When Cancer Enters the Family

This is not a clinical account of illness.

It is a daughter’s reckoning.

A caregiver’s vigil.

A complicated love story between mother and child—layered with devotion, resentment, memory, humor, and the quiet tenderness that surfaces when the end approaches.

Across 25 poems, LoSchiavo gives voice to:

  • The exhaustion of caregiving
  • The ache of unresolved history
  • The strange flashes of beauty inside sorrow
  • The love that refuses to leave

Her poems do not look away. But they also do not surrender to despair.

Instead, they ask:

What does it mean to accompany someone to the threshold?
How do we hold grief and grace in the same hand?
What remains when words fail?

Why Readers Are Saying Yes

Readers and reviewers have described the collection as:

  • “Candid and unflinching.”
  • “A testament to complicated love.”
  • “Tender without sentimentality.”
  • “A lyrical exploration of resilience.”

The poems resonate because they speak to universal themes—loss, reconciliation, anger, hope, and the stubborn persistence of love—even as they remain deeply personal.

If you have ever:

  • Managed medications and memories
  • Struggled with unfinished conversations
  • Loved someone through decline

You will recognize yourself here.

A Voice of Candor and Grace

LindaAnn LoSchiavo writes with clarity and restraint. Her lines are spare yet resonant. Her images—closets, gardens, corridors, dance-like metaphors of movement and stillness—carry emotional weight without excess.

There is sorrow here.

But also wit.

There is anger.

But also forgiveness.

And, perhaps most powerfully, there is presence.

Receive a Free Sample

If you’re curious about the emotional depth and artistry of this collection, we invite you to experience it for yourself.

Read a free sample of Cancer Courts My Mother and step into a poetic journey that honors both the fragility and the fierce beauty of love at the edge of loss.

✨ Inside the sample, you’ll discover:

  • Selected poems from the collection
  • A glimpse of LoSchiavo’s lyrical voice
  • An intimate portrait of caregiving and connection

Let these poems accompany you—whether you are navigating illness, remembering someone you’ve lost, or simply seeking language for the complexities of love.

Get your free sample now and begin reading today.

Because sometimes poetry says what prose cannot.

And sometimes, when everything feels uncertain, a poem is the one steady thing left to hold.

View more at https://www.prolificpulse.com/lindaannloschiavo

Announcements, poetry

National Poetry Month is Here! It’s no April Fool’s Day joke!

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Hey Everybody!

It’s not only April Fool’s Day, but it’s also the first day of National Poetry Month. How exciting is that?!

What are your plans for this month? Are you writing a poem a day? I am excited that there is a special competition starting today. It’s on Nolcha Fox’s blog. She explains the rules and provides the daily prompts. You can enter the contest on ProlificPulse.com via a special form which is also on Nolcha’s blog. We are doing this together as a way to celebrate this month and to offer to the top three poetry writers, one copy each of the upcoming book by Nolcha Fox and Ken Tomaro, namely Seesaw – Quirky Poems which is to be released on April 30. You can actually pre-order the book, now. Check it out on ProlificPulse.com/nolchafox

By the way, you may want to take a peek at Ken Tomaro’s page on Prolific Pulse. Here’s the LINK

Hope you will participate. It’s going to be fun!

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