Staff Pick of the Month: Crow Mercies

Crow Mercies

We at CALYX Books are so excited to say that Crow Mercies by Penelope Scambly Schott, winner of the first Sarah Lantz Memorial Poetry Prize, is now available as the Staff Pick of the Month!

Penelope Scambly Schott leads readers through a surreal world in which imagined visitors, realities, bodies, and animals create a ripe emotional landscape. Her depictions of love, family, sex, and death through vivid images of spiders, orchids, bear-husbands, and more will startle and delight the imagination. Upon reviewing Crow Mercies, Claire Keyes notes, “Schott’s inventiveness makes the preposterous seem both real and poignant.”

Crows, Schott observes, are smart and relentless, and they practice a measured mercy. Likewise, the poems in Crow Mercies survey large territories, sometimes with an overview and sometimes close-at-claw. In her review, blogger Stefanie Hollmichel of somanybooksblog.com writes, “Schott also has a strong, firm, voice and an accessible style that invites the reader in to share an intimate moment.” This unique style allows the poet to use her provocative poetry to survey the long course of women’s history as she studies her dying mother.

Penelope Scambly Schott has published three poetry narratives, five chapbooks, and four poetry collections, including Six Lips (2009). She is the recipient of the Hopwood Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Poetry Society of America prize, and four fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Her recent collection, A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth, received the 2008 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Schott has a PhD in Medieval literature from City University of New York.

If you missed your chance to preorder and save on this fabulous collection, you still have time! As the Staff Pick of the Month, you will receive 20% off and free shipping!

Look for more blogs about our favorite poems from the collection all this month!

Happy reading

Kelsey Connell, Assistant Director

Staff Pick of the Month

For this month, we’ve chosen The Woman of Too Many Days as our Staff Pick of the Month. This poetry book by Mary I. Cuffe truly touched the editors who worked on it at that time. One even said: “When I finished reading, I was almost crying. Not sad—catharsis, joy.”

One of my favorite poems from the collection is called “In Front of the Library.” Having a mom who is a school librarian definitely started a library addiction at a young age. So maybe it is because I’ve grown up loving libraries and all they have to offer. Escape, adventure, experiences far beyond our own imagination. This poem made me reflect on what the library can mean for the community and what books can mean for those who feel the weight of  too many days (and all of us for that matter). Books have the power to remove us from our everyday life and transport us into a different world. With books we are always among friends. Each book has something new to teach us and a new character to introduce. For these reasons, the lines that most struck me are the following:

You see a lot of pigeon people in the library, she says.

It’s one place they can go where the city

don’t turn em out.

They come in for more than a warm place to sleep.

They hope one of those books will take em in.

But that only happens to a few.

That portion is just one of many lines that will echo with you throughout the day. Making you wonder about the “many days” of those around you.

Of course as always, the pick of the month is 10% off with free shipping. You can order your copy here.

~Kelsey Connell, Assistant Director