Donna Prinzmetal and Judith H. Montgomery
About Each Unkept Secret:
Donna Prinzmetal may question how her poetry can possibly "measure the distance / between the living and the dead," but it does just that and more: many of her poems both measure and collapse that distance, creating a riveting lyric voice that can fashion "the right syntax for grieving." With markedly fresh and vivid imagery, she employs memory's non-linearity, giving us striking elegies, eulogies, and tributes-poems to both her dead and living loved-ones. Taking us into her confidence, telling us her secrets, Prinzmetal gives us a rare gift. Courageous and movingly intimate, her voice speaks the poignant music of mortality, "the cadence between pain's husky gasps."
––Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, author of My Kindred
Donna Prinzmetal is a poet, psychotherapist and teacher. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, The Journal and New Ohio Review. Her first book, Snow White, When No One Was Looking, was composed of a series of persona poems and was published with CW Books in 2014. In 2020, she was awarded the 2020 Lois Cranston Prize from Calyx Journal for her poem “Your Body, Still Your Body.” In June 2024, her new full-length collection, Each Unkept Secret,was published by MoonPath Press. The book, a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award, focuses on family, both family of origin and on her marriage and children, and explores relationships with both the living and the dead. Donna has taught poetry and creative writing for more than 30 years to adults and children.
About The Ferry Keeper:
In these lucent poems of love and witness, the narrator likens herself to a ferry keeper whose body becomes a boat tasked with bearing her "pale family"—an Alzheimer's-stricken mother, a son with incurable brain cancer, an aging father who fights the decline into infirmity—across "the slow lake of leaving." Beginning with a photograph of her parents dancing in their youth, we journey through the heartbreaking, all-too-familiar inevitability of their loss. This is a voyage we all must make—for ourselves and for others—captured with impeccable grace and artistry. —B. Fulton Jenne, author of Flown (Porkbelly Press 2024) and Blinded Birds (Finishing Line 2022)
Judith H. Montgomery's poems appear in Poet Lore, Gyroscope, and Tahoma Literary Review, among other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. She’s been awarded fellowships in poetry from Literary Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission; residencies from Playa, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Caldera; and prizes from the Bellingham Review, Persimmon Tree, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Passion, received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Red Jess, a finalist for several national first book prizes, appeared in 2006. Her second full-length book, Litany for Wound and Bloom, appeared from Uttered Chaos Press in 2018. Mercy, which traces her husband’s journey with cancer, received the Wolf Ridge Press Narrative/Poetic Medicine Chapbook award, appearing in 2019. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Syracuse University, and was the first Writer-in-Residence at Central Oregon Community College. She loves to talk about making and revising poems.
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