Browse  ▾ How to… ▾ Poetry Prize About the Press shopping_cart search A SWALLOW PRESS BOOK Bread of the Moment Poems By David Sanders “The poems in David Sanders’s beautifully balanced new collection, Bread of the Moment, reach as deeply as any I know, achieving the emotional clarity of poets like Robert Hayden, Robert Hass, and W. S. Merwin. This is wise, expertly crafted work, facing mortality with humor sufficient to the need and with reverent attention to memory, nature, and the poet’s art. I am profoundly moved and instructed by this lucid book.” Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore: Poems “David Sanders’s second collection of poems, Bread of the Moment, contains an astonishing breadth of emotional and physical landscapes in poems beautifully realized and forcefully felt. It is a book haunted by memory—understood as a ‘selective, mythic thing, a lie’—and alive with strikingly memorable images, like the French king’s hunting trophies, ‘sprouting enormous racks, / like dozens of arms, hands, / reaching out to me from the stone blocks, / frozen, locked in place.’ Bread of the Moment is an evocative book, a dynamic expression, and expansion, of Sanders’s art.” Ernest Hilbert, author of Last One Out “‘Every time/ is the last time. That’s what the world keeps teaching.’ Bread of the Moment’s truths are hard won, but its delights are palpable. It is night swimming in cold lake water full of stars.” Jason Gray, author of Radiation King “David Sanders peers into the psychology of a charged or puzzling moment, in most of these poems. Living through such moments can be painful and yet the pondering of them brings a kind of nourishment. In ‘So, I Tell Myself’ he contemplates an odd confluence of small misfortunes, and the poem enables him to escape from a paranoid interpretation of that confluence. ‘Matinée’ notices how a mood of inflated pride (as when you see yourself as Cary Grant or Gregory Peck) inevitably must come down to street level—though a poised account of this humbling descent allows for the more sustainable stardom of poetic insight.” Mark Halliday, author of Losers Dream On A collection of poems about time, solitude, and wisdom that leads readers to hover between acceptance of and alienation from our fragility. Bread of the Moment, the follow-up to David Sanders' Compass and Clock (Swallow Press, 2016), devotes keen attention to the porous nature of the past and how the unbidden evidence of ordinary life pervades the world, provoking a spectrum of moments from which to draw meaning and find solace. These poems, characterized by a mix of free and formal verse, depict quiet days at home or in nature, as well as close calls and brushes with death: chronic illness, a house fire, a car crushed by a boulder. In this way, these poems amplify the fragility of the commonplace, a mystery from which we are, amid the noise of our everyday lives, sometimes estranged. Through this exploration, Sanders constructs a precarious balance between alienation and acceptance, striking a note at once recognizable and new. David Sanders is the author of two poetry collections from Swallow Press, Compass and Clock and Bread of the Moment. For twenty years he was the general editor of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, and he was the founding editor of Poetry News in Review. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is a native of Portage County, Ohio.   MORE INFO → ORDER A PRINT COPY Paperback · $14.36 · Add to Cart Retail price: $17.95 · Save 20% ($14.36) BUY FROM A LOCAL BOOKSTORE IndieBound US and Canada only BUY AN EBOOK Amazon Kindle Store Barnes & Noble NOOK Google Play iBooks Store Availability and price vary according to vendor. SHARE REQUESTS Desk Copy Examination Copy Review Copy Permission to reprint Permission to photocopy or include in a course pack via Copyright Clearance Center DOWNLOADS & LINKS PICTURES High Resolution Cover Image (3 in. wide, 300 DPI) PDFS Contents Sample RELATED SUBJECTS Poetry | American Poetry Ohio and Regional Literature Click or tap on a subject heading to sign up to be notified when new related books come out. FORMATS Paperback 978-0-8040-1233-1 Retail price: $17.95, T. Release date: November 2021 70 pages · 5½ × 8½ in. Rights: World Electronic 978-0-8040-4118-8 Release date: October 2021 70 pages Rights: World RELATED TITLES Compass and Clock Poems By David Sanders The poems of Compass and Clock take their inspiration from the intersection of the natural world and the human, exploring the landscapes in which those intersections occur. Those landscapes range from David Sanders’s native midwestern countryside to the caves of Lascaux and an enchanted lake where relics of lost lives are washed ashore. POETRY Intrusive Beauty Poems By Joseph J. Capista In this powerful debut, Capista traverses earth and ether to yield poems that elucidate the space between one’s life and one’s livelihood. While its landscapes range from back-alley Baltimore to the Bitterroot Valley, this book remains close to unbidden beauty and its capacity to sway one’s vision of the world. POETRY Penumbra Poems By Michael Shewmaker Penumbra—Michael Shewmaker’s debut collection—explores the half-shadows of a world torn between faith and doubt. From intricate descriptions of the rooms in a dollhouse, to the stark depiction of a chapel made of bones, from pre-elegies for a ghostly father, to his compelling treatment of his obsessed, human characters (a pastor, a tattoo artist, a sleepwalker, to name only a few), these are poems that wrestle with what it means to believe in something beyond one’s own mortality. POETRY Flying through a Hole in the Storm Poems By Fleda Brown Award-winning poet Fleda Brown’s thirteenth book examines life and death through a timely, urgent collection of contemplative poems about damage, pain, and loss. POETRY | SUBJECTS & THEMES | DEATH, GRIEF, LOSS · POETRY | AMERICAN · POETRY Sign up to be notified when new Ohio and Regional titles come out. 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