John Palen
John Palen pleads guilty to committing journalism and poetry in a career spanning more than 50 years. He worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, and also taught journalism. His first published poem in other than student journals appeared in Prairie Schooner in 1967. His books include Open Communion: New and Selected Poems, and Distant Music, both from Mayapple Press, and Riding With the Diaspora and Strange and Wonderful Creatures, both from Sheila-Na Gig Editions. With Li C. Tien, he co-authored a chapbook of adaptations of Chinese poets of the Song Dynasty, Drizzle and Plum Blossoms, published by March Street Press. He lives in retirement and tends his vegetable garden on the Illinois Grand Prairie.
COMING SOON!
A Little Lost Here
by John Palen
ISBN: 9781962405966
$14.00 ($3.00 US shipping)
Pre-Order discount through October 11
$11.20 (+3.00 US Shipping)
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In a variety of subject matter, voices and styles, this latest collection by John Palen explores a world of loss—deaths of loved ones, failures of democracy to live up to its aspirations, physical deterioration in old age—yet discovers in that world a surprising wealth of perseverance, courage, acceptance, and beauty. As a lifelong music lover now with hearing loss, he struggles to hear music, but can find meaning in watching the interplay among musicians, and “the way a good conductor/ sometimes just/ stops conducting for a while/ and lets them be.”
ADVANCE PRAISE:
In A Little Lost Here John Palen takes on aging, love, death, grief, and loss from the perspective of a long and richly lived and observed life. Whether it’s the heartache of parenting, losing relatives, or living in a country lost in war and violence, Palen – like the art and artists he celebrates – looks for beauty that can be salvaged. His opening poem declares, “I sensed / there’d be no bottom / to sorrow in the world” and yet, toward the end of the book, Palen considers the figure of a public sculpture who is “kept afloat by art,” and asks “what if he knows / this is the happiness available to him now?” Like that figure, the reader of A Little Lost Here, will find themselves kept afloat by the art of these finely crafted poems.
––Matt Murrey is the author of Bulletproof, winner of the 2018 Jacar Press Poetry Competition,
and Little Joy (Cornerstone Press.)
John Palen’s strength is his voice––one that articulates Midwestern sensibility rooted in patient observation and human connection. This book takes us on a journey through his world of tender griefs, a world capable of alienation and horrific violence, and a world of his body breaking down and its limitations. It’s the same world, though, that sublimates threats into beautiful connections with others and nature.
––Robert Manaster, co-winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation;
author of The Last Jew: Poems From an Interfaith Marriage (Fernwood Press)
Strange & Wonderful Creatures
by John Palen
ISBN: 987-1-962405-13-1
$14.00 ($4.00 US Shipping)
ABOUT THE BOOK
Art and life have a good long chat in this new book by John Palen. Starved of visual stimulation during the Covid shutdown, Palen turned to the work of Pablo Picasso, who pioneered a way of capturing the fluidity, complexity and craziness of being human on this planet. The resulting nine ekphrastic poems on Picasso paintings anchor poems exploring family, work, sex, love, music, and a broken world in need of repair.
ADVANCE PRAISE
John Palen’s new book begins with portraits from the animal and human families: a grizzly bear sow, his own mother’s primal bonding, poems on his father as Picasso’s “Boy Leading a Horse” and as “a dandy from the wrong side of the tracks” whose “cancer broke in and took everything.” Ekphrasis reappears frequently. In “Small Pieces Refusing” after Picasso’s cubist portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Palen writes: “I wake before dawn in pieces. . . select a shirt and a narrative for the day.” In Palen’s hands, art and poet become one; he embodies each painting with close observation, humor, and wisdom. Must read!
Riding With the Diaspora
by John Palen
Winner of the 2021 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Chapbook Contest
$14.00 ($4.00 US Shipping per order)
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The title poem of Riding With the Diaspora doesn’t come until the end, but facets of the diaspora experience — scattering, displacement, migration, homesickness, alienation, otherness —build toward it throughout. Here are poems about displaced indigenous Americans and their migrant European displacers; descendants of enslaved Africans and refugees from Nazism; the poor, the elderly and the ill, alienated from society and their own bodies; conflicted products of small-town upbringings; even seeds and microbes, scattered westward across the plains with the unsettling “settlers” of American expansion. These provide a unifying theme — one which also offers moments of reconciliation and grace — to a book of solidly crafted, humane and powerful poems.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
In the middle of John Palen’s collection is the poem “Where We’re From.” That seems just right, because in accessible, musical language, Palen pays unsparing but compassionate attention to the people and places of America’s heartland. These are poems that explore such contradictions of the central United States as decency and dishonesty, beauty and plainness, love and “small hatred.” I can’t think of a better guide to this rich territory than Riding With the Diaspora.
— Matthew Murrey, author of Bulletproof, chosen by Marilyn Nelson as the winner of the Jacar Press 2018 book competition.
A shrewd observer and shapeshifter, in these poems John Palen speaks in many voices: as a white surveyor among the Sac and Fox, as his boyhood self, a painting, a connoisseur of small towns, a man cutting button blanks from mussel shells, a jack pine, a Cooper’s hawk. His Midwestern sensibility links an older world to the burgeoning diversity of today. Moreover, he provides a master class in the craft of poetry.
— Elaine Palencia, author of How to Prepare Escargots, Main Street Rag.
