Books by Delaware Regional Authors 7

In The House of Yearning, Nina Bennett calls on the Muse of Memory to help comprehend the deaths of her sister, granddaughter, and father. In a compact narrative arc, the chapbook offers poignant remembrances of sudden loss and tender reconstruction using an expert mix of concrete images and abstract lamentations. Yes, these poems will offer succor to those who have recently experienced bereavement, but they will also appeal to any reader who appreciates the brief, capricious nature of life. After reading these 26 poems, you will not only seize the moment, you will hug someone you love.

If Nina Bennett’s well observed world doesn’t make you take deep breaths you’re only 10% alive. Her contemporary life is tugged by the irresistible forces of loss; and special bonds found in paradoxical places. The undercurrents are memory—the motive is love—the writing is flawless. — Grace Cavalieri: Host/Producer “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress.”

Nina Bennett is a healthcare professional with a subspecialty in bereavement issues and secondary traumatic stress. One of her first published works was Forgotten Tears: A Grandmother's Journey Through Grief (Booklocker, 2005).
Soon after publishing Forgotten Tears, Nina was selected to attend the Delaware Division of the Arts Masters' Workshop in poetry, where she studied with then Delaware poet laureate Fleda Brown. Nina’s chapbook Sound Effects was published in 2013 by Broadkill Press as part of their Key Poetry Series. Her chapbook Mix Tape was published by Flutter Press in 2018, and The House of Yearning (2018) has just been published by Kelsay Books.

Awards include the 2014 Northern Liberties Review Poetry Prize and second-place in poetry book category from the Delaware Press Association (2014). Nina's poem "Deja Vu" took third place in the Out & About magazine poetry contest, and her poem "They Do" was nominated for 2012 Best of the Net. Nina is a contributing author to the Open to Hope Foundation.
Healthcare provider by day, classic rock band chick by night, Nina is proud to be the poet laureate of the Club Phred band. She is a founding member of the writing group TransCanal Writers.

Rock and roll serves as the muse for this collection. Music, especially classic rock, has been an integral part of Nina Bennett’s life. Music and poetry are so entwined that she can’t imagine one without the other. Nina lives by the motto: No music, No life. Know music, know life.

Justynn Tyme's extraordinary and varied Dada output can be accessed at The Artisticness Justynn Tyme. The Gist of Justynn Tyme is a companion zine to The Gist of...album which expands and expounds on the scripts use on the album. It features not only liners notes but also graphic presentations of tracks from the several scripts. The Gist Of... Companion also includes some new works, some variations of the scripts used on the album and additional material cut from the album. The Gist Companion is designed to be a stand-alone zine but is also a great companion to follow along with the album, available at Radioactive Mango.

Sakura (Cherry Blossoms) reflects on the cycle of love from its first buds to full blossom to autumnal afterglow. Though each of love’s moments may be as evanescent as a cherry blossom, lifelong love, like a cherry tree, blooms many times. Sakura is a pleasure to read and reflect upon. —Howard Gofreed.
Jamie Brown is the Founder, Publisher and Editor of The Broadkill Review, a PDF Literary Journal, the Founder/Director of The John Milton Memorial Poetry Festival, and Publisher of the Broadkill Press Key Poetry Series.

Why would a decorated WWI veteran desert just after being honored by the king? That’s the question posed by Agatha-winner Todd’s absorbing sixth Bess Crawford whodunit (after 2013’s A Question of Honor). In the autumn of 1918, Bess, an experienced battlefield nurse, accompanies wounded Sgt. Jason Wilkins to Buckingham Palace, where he receives a medal from George V. After the ceremony, Bess agrees to let Wilkins have some time to himself to entertain friends, a choice she regrets after finding that he has bolted the London hotel where they were both staying. Given two week’s official leave for her perceived negligence, Bess is determined to track Wilkins down and ascertain why he used her in his scheme. The murder of a man in the north of England, with Wilkins the prime suspect, complicates her efforts. As usual, Todd (the mother-son writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd) effectively depicts the psychological effects of war, though the resolution doesn’t do justice to the opening puzzle. Agent: Jane Chelius, Jane Chelius Literary Agency. --Publishers Weekly

In a new, compelling poetry collection, What the Bird Tattoo Hides, Bohm arrives in rural India in 1968, "seeking truth's taste." His stories about many of its personalities, including outsiders and their hidden histories, reveal the daily lives of haughty Sundara, labor leader Dev Raj, Meeda Mama, and Dada who likes "a few rums / before supper," as they work, argue, celebrate, and raise their children, struggling to better their lives and sometimes taking up arms to fight for caste and class justice.
Bohm's work challenges the West's falsely exotic and colonial view of India. As he chronicles three generations in a single village, the author evokes a world that is both more haphazard and violent, and also more human and present, than one would otherwise have been able to imagine. Using sensuous, gritty, and stunning language, he confronts the nature of death and change, realizing that "Wherever the body is, and no matter / how unknown the locale, / it is home."

Closing the Hotel Kitchen is about war. It is also about falling apart when that is the only route left to sanity. It takes place during the 1960s and early 1970s, from New York's streets to Vietnam and India. Untouched by nostalgia or baby-boomer sentimentality, these poems offer a searing, visceral look at the narrator's attempts to find hints of coherence within a violent world unexplained by his inherited Christianity or his family's patriotism.
Scenes and imagery pertaining to place, class, and ethnicity fuel the book from beginning to end. Presenting an up-close portrait of the experience of a previous era, the book sheds an unsettling light on the present one in which our nation continues to stumble over issues evoked here. But Bohm's often dark lyricism also offers more than a journey into an abyss. His poetry, displaying a capacity to listen to others' voices and assimilate their experiences, provides glimpses of transformation.

"The quality and depth of his vision and work, its deeplived root in the world, his knowledge and study of dissident poetics through time--how refreshing, how saving, how fantastic . . ." --Sharon Doubiago, author of Hard Country, South America Mi Hija, Body and Sopul, and other books.

An incredible blend of collage and graffiti verse created in Photoshop, converted into stencils to disseminate wherever graffiti is desseminated, and available in an online slideshow, found by clicking on the image, where one may find other provocative delicacies. A radio show of Robert Bohm discussing and reading these works can be found on After Hours Radio, preserved for us by Archive.org.

For six years Jim Bourey has been working at improving his craft. His poems have been published in the Fourth Coast Arts Magazine. In 2012 one of his poems "Words Then Space" was a runner-up in the Faulkner - Wisdom poetry competition. Several other of his poems have been finalist or short list for finalist in that competition since 2010.
His influences are varied. His list of admired poets is lengthy and includes: Frost, Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Sherman Alexie, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Odin Roark, Margaret Atwood, Charles Bukowski, Thomas Merton and on and on. The poetic criticism of Harold Bloom has also helped him to shape his work.
He is a selectee in the 2014 Cape Henlopen Writer's Retreat sponsored by the Delaware Division of the Arts.

The title, Conventional Heresies, is meant ironically. Rather than earth-shattering heresies, I envision “conventional heresies” as those ideas currently out-of-favor. Not so much large-scale thinking as personal-scale thinking. John Updike was once described as writing about three secret things: Sex, Art, and Religion. The trio of thematic threads which run through this collection have to do with Body, Mind, and Soul. They may not be appreciated by all, but they are a sincere attempt by a mature male at midlife to tackle subjects from a particularly (and peculiarly?) masculine (but not macho) perspective. -Jamie Brown, in Small Press Reviews

(Broadkill River Press, 2015) Silence often marks the absence of life, or it's pause, but in Bourey's poems of family, rural life, and work the world, is anything but silent, or paused. Bourey searches the darkness lurking at the edge of small towns, and searches the natural world around him to discover wise teachers in the birds, a fishing trip, and the veterans drinking at the bar. Bourey is after the truth, which is never silent.
— Scott Whitaker, author of The Black Narrows