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.
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.
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 andThrough 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
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 Path2021, 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.
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.
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.
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If you’re curious about the emotional depth and artistry of this collection, we invite you to experience it for yourself.
Let these poems accompany you—whether you are navigating illness, remembering someone you’ve lost, or simply seeking language for the complexities of love.
As a teacher, I will always remain a student. In the classroom of life, l wish to work with and educate others. Whether you’re a teacher, student, or just your average person, here are a few of my "TEACHERble" moments.
Hi! my name is Sebastian (You can call me Seb!) ...welcome to my Blog. I'm a photographer from Worcester, Worcestershire, England. Thanks for dropping by! I hope you enjoy my work.
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