Red Wolf Editions

Red Wolf Editions is an online poetry space. You can find it here.

It is the publishing imprint of Red Wolf Journal. We feel poems speak of and to our soul and constitute a living testament of it, whether it be in an individual or collective sense. A legacy, an immortality ode of self, to borrow from William Wordsworth. When you’re dead and gone, you want your poems to be a testament that you have seen and conquered–“The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” If you’re already a published poet, consider your Red Wolf collection as a sampler. I myself would like read a poet’s work first–call it a poet taster if you like–before deciding whether or not to buy a printed copy. The digital collections are free and hopefully will remain here for eternity (well one can hope can’t we?)

As to why poetry matters, enough and perhaps not enough has been said. I remember the feeling when a poem by Denise Levertov spoke to me, at a time when I needed to hear the words. So it is that Wordsworth had said:

“To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong”

I don’t doubt we need to hear the words. Another one, via Ralph Stevens:

“But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free,
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for those who’ve sailed with me.”
–Bob Dylan

Our digital collections are available in PDF format, published under the Red Wolf imprint.

You may email your manuscript for our consideration at redwolfeditions AT gmail DOT com. Please read our submissions guidelines. Thank you for submitting your work to Red Wolf Editions.

Submit via email here.
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Download your collection here.

A Bounded Space by Ralph Stevens 2

Ralph Stevens’ poems are lessons in mindfulness, of paying attention to the world within and without. So the poems are about looking out—often a window, literal or metaphorical—and taking in what nature unfolds, its story, as well as the people who glide by. The way his images pile up is lovely–a deep contemplation–and sometimes painterly, like when he describes how the winter light turns a room with its sandwich plate and apples into a Vermeer still life. There is a sense of reverence, not just in nature, also in old things, like old houses or barns. The poems are expressions of gratitude in the being and the living, before the dying.
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Download the collection here.

seer by emil sinclair 3

Seer is Emil Sinclair’s imaginary Hero’s journey, following in the footsteps of Odysseus, but more metaphysical. Taking on the mantle of an epic journey–which is art translating vision into form–the hero is another reiteration of Tiersias. It weaves parapsychology and mythology, is a love story, and ultimately a quest, a soul’s journey. It can be read as a story of human suffering and redemption. It is nothing more than a fable. After all, we’re fabulous creatures, aren’t we, in a story of becoming. Until that happens, we’re blind and incognito, relying on intuition, wit and courage in our quest.
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Download the collection here.

the aftermath of everything by irene toh 2

It’s possibilities dimmed, yet
as you practiced drawing in air,
a frank serious blossoming.

After shit happens, what then? Does one become a kind of translator looking through the detritus of life? In The Aftermath of Everything, these poems live in that sort of landscape. In looking back to a past that’s forever gone, does one’s scavenging turn up treasures, mere debris or a mix of both? Is there a loss or increase in faith? If loss is muteness–as one remembers and then cast off everything–what happens in this space? Is this a space in which one–everyone probably–inhabits after living through life’s many seasons? For Irene Toh, in this space she tries to carve up something, and that is somehow predicated on the art of story-telling.

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Download the collection here.

we will all fly by christopher hileman 2

…that my words might mean a thing/for once, and maybe/appear soaring with/
the flock of full-fledged word birds.
–“Not This Time”

Christopher Hileman’s poems are typically brief. So condensed but they pack a punch, stir a cauldron brimming in love and sorrow, hope and despair, in equal measure. You will be carried away by tiny details of observation, in precise language; immersed in intimate imagery of the soul, beautiful like a shoreline. Of his persona, you will be moved by an abjection of his body throughout and a concomitant tenderness; captivated by the rhythms of a domesticated life populated by a dog, a cat and chickens; held by his dream songs of flight and magic. His muse is the Goddess, always. You wonder if it’s real—it feels so grounded—accept that he knows it’s only art, his ruse, a fiction so “divine” that it counts as perhaps the purest art. In his poems, you constantly find a devout seeking of truth, in her. You sense a spiritual rootedness and also a pulling away, in the abiding reality of a deep winter.

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Download the collection here.

ars poetica by karla linn merrifield 3

sing to me as you pass through me, all
of me, my ten-thousand thoughts
of wishful thinking
we could be anything
—“ Tonight I Wish Of”

Karla Linn Merrifield’s poems are thoughts about thoughts put into poetic form. When you summon thoughts, you are making a different sort of reality that exists in your mind, your imagination, your reality. Hers lean toward meta poems. Birds figure often in her poems as physical and metaphorical imagery. Her metaphors are exquisite—see how she writes about grief in “Lode”. What stands out also is her fervour for female empowerment. There is a Dionysian spirit which she situates within form—a dialectic between spirit and form. She celebrates love, music, the human spirit, and poetry, in spades.

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Download the collection here.

twilight fox by robert walton 2

The current’s curves
And star-polished boulders
Blend with the ease
Of long acquaintance—
So our friendship
Has flowed years long
—“Tuolumne Solitaire”

Robert Walton’s poems regale us with his mountain-climbing experiences. They speak of snow, cliff, lake, river, mountain, boulders, clouds, stars as unyielding but spiritual presences. His sight of the fauna and flora is on offer—fox, falcon, owl, hummingbird, sage, pine, lupine. His subjects shimmer with light. His language is like delicate paint-strokes. His astute metaphors mesmerise you. Nature’s beauty and spectacle is melded into personal witness and memory as he scales the summits.

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Download the collection here.

earth bound by alan toltzis

Here the task is harder:
look deeply and learn
the true nature of trees,

judge the strength
and weakness of people,
feel the promise of the land,

while squinting into the glare
of proximity
just beyond the horizon.
—“140,000,000 Miles Away ”

Alan Toltzis’s poems explore different aspects of the nature of the universe. They are close examinations, interrogations and extrapolations. His stories are earth bound. Nature, whether it be birds or trees, is transfigured by his language. The moon appears a lot in his poems too, as a dream motif, or perhaps a quest. Or a prayer. He brings the ordinary (such as forays into supermarket aisles) into grand narratives. In doing so he grounds us. He engages with the universe in both small and big ways.

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Download the collection here.

little popple river by jeff burt

Some of us are meant to launch into the air
screaming as we head to who knows where.
–“Somewhere, Anywhere”

Jeff Burt’s poems are about journeying; what is gleaned from these journeys—both within and without—are learned, so every poem is perspicacious, is wrought with intertwined meanings, is a bridge between the past and the present. They contain passages of time. Such learning often takes place in the landscape of mountains, creeks and forests. The imagery of tools is ever present—trestle, ramp, tomahawk and so on–and language is also a tool, for bridging inner and outer worlds, between history and the present, animal and human, the dead and the living. His poems reflect empathy for the enslaved, the poor, the hungry, animals, mothers. So richly textured are they that they lead to crossings, epiphanies, transcendence.

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Download the collection here.

nothing stays here long by martin willitts jr 5

I am alert to what makes the silence/silent
–“The World Is Alert In Its Silence”

Martin Willitts Jr’s poems are a deep meditation, each one of them exceptional in their truth-telling. These are what may be called leave-taking poems, and how the poet does it is in capturing stillness and movement, expressed in quiet narratives and nature imagery that is absolutely lyrical. Above the noise, the poet looks for silence. In his poems, silence is the motif–if you’re as alert, his poems will speak to you through the imagery and move you with their eloquence. His brilliant poems reward close reading — read quietly and feel the resonance in his language.

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growing together by mark tulin 2

My dreams are like flowers
of Emerson and Frost
that suddenly appear
from my lips
in unexpected places
—“Sunflower Poetry ”

Mark Tulin’s poems celebrate hopes and dreams, divine blessings, simple joys under the California sun. His stories follow the adage of looking on the brighter side of life, thriving on growth and enjoyment. The simple life is the charmed life. And you’ll be charmed too, by the vistas of sandy beaches, the oversaturation of sun warding off winter, a sense of well-being and freedom not so often portrayed in poetry.

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visitations by ron lavalettee 3

Tomorrow/you can call me Smiley Nirvana;/Tomorrow I’ll be Karmic Bailout.
–“Metamorphosis”

In Ron. Lavalette’s collection, writing’s a bit like having visitations, in the form of seeing or hearing or soothsaying. It is to embody desire; to be brightened by the light of the sun and be dogged by its shadows. There’s a certain play on that. The desire for someone out of reach. The repetition of writing, or waking, like the sun rising and setting in a quotidian life. Ron’s poems come at you sideways, like a smirk. They’re not straight; as if the world needs to counter gloom with something yellow. His favorite tropes are the egg, the sun. His characters are not the Kates of the world. His stories are wonky–an endearing dark humor present yet light prevails.

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autumn and other poems by debi swim

Our lives are a journey toward what has always been waiting for us to find.
— “Élan vital — Evolution of My Soul “

Debi Swim’s collection is wonderfully evocative of place, of seasons, of aging and death, of familial stories, of self-questioning, of relationships with nature, people, animals and God. Most deeply the poems are embedded in belief, in the soul’s yearning. They address a fundamental question, what living means, touching both its philosophical and lyrical aspects. Her poems are characterized by metaphorical and descriptive richness, display a dexterity of language that is dazzling. A richly textured collection–poem after poem, she nails all the important themes.

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the poems of the air by alan walowitz

Nothing much ever happens here. But just enough so it feels like it does.
–“Fall River Transfer”

Whether it’s an accident, or a funeral, or a friend’s surgery, or a hailstorm, or a signage he drove past, Alan Walowitz’s poems take off from wherever it was, and juice it out in language, conversational, jocular, yet oozing with his inimitably wise, funny style. Nothing is more personal than his poems, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. A poet who is wont to pay attention to an occasion like a wedding or an everyday moment–all becomes grist for his natural story-telling skills. His stories are tributes to people and events, from which you’ll emerge both entertained and enlightened. There will always be a glint of insight in them, if only, perhaps, a yearning for safety and home. These poems also feel much like denizens of New York City because that is exactly where home is.

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In the tradition of NaPoWriMo, or National Poetry Writing Month, this collection is largely the result of writing a poem daily in the month of April 2022. The title of this collection, Ars Poetica, was the theme I had in mind. Writing poems daily imbued one with a sense of purpose and it is, as Jane Hirshfield said, language waking up in the morning and looking into the mirror: what it sees, and how it answers that world. Here then is a true-to-life, quotidian response, or how I processed the world in my head, or life as a spiritual experience. While it isn’t possible to cut up a brain to see its spiritual contents, it is possible to read the poems to see what’s inside one’s head. That is magic maybe or perhaps, just poetry.

Download the collection here.

Ars Poetica by Irene Toh

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It’s frightening,
but everything must die.

The quiet poems in George Freek’s collection belie a grief that has troubled the human soul for all of eternity—fumbling, unparalleled, blind unstoppable grief. Death comes for us all. The living mourn for loved ones who have passed. Grief resides in us, day after day. For the wounded ones, we take solace where we can, funneling the pain of loss in whatever form, as evoked in this reflective, somewhat bitter collection. Poem after poem, it is to nature that the narrator turns his eyes, to instruct, to pacify, to soothe, as he grows old.

Download the collection here.

melancholia by George Freek

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Josh Medsker’s collection is about what restores you when you’re mostly in solitude surrounded by nature. It is an invitation to daydream to the sounds of birds, trees, earth, grass, creatures and such. What affirmation it is to find that plenitude can be found in what thrives in the natural world. He recreates and immerses us in that experience in the most direct, delightfully sensory ways. Terns call…Kip! Kip! Kip! Come!

Download the collection here.

park selection by josh medsker

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Centaurs, unicorns, and flying horses
are dreams, but these are possible to ride. (“Zebra”)

Royal Rhodes’s paean to beasts will surely delight. Inspired by the medieval bestiary, the collection is a series of 28 sonnets with animal subjects. Richly descriptive, invocative of medieval texts and fabliaux, the poems are felicitous of meanings associated with each beast. Being earthly and mythological, these beasts which breathe and die like us, partake of our imagination.

Royal takes each animal subject, riding along with it in myriad ways.
I ride hard naked, while the flying mane
whips me, purging me with ghostly pain. (“Horse”)

Does this give you an image of Lady Godiva?

As creatures, they clearly inform a teleological view of our universe—do you see God’s hand in them, does one need more evidence of a God?

The creature that we think bizarre and odd,
creating awe, no odder is than God. (“Kangaroo”)

Of course they’re also emblematic, and we need go no further than “Tiger” whose meaning is of “all our body’s burning,/tongue and touch”. Royal embraces that as a referent of mortality:
If you embrace the dread, the heart will know.
Only a mortal hand or eye could trace
and hold such rare ones close, and let them go,
while deadly terror shows its holy face. (“Tiger”)

The poems treat language with a sense of play, to switch meanings, generally using humor in generous dollops, rinsing out seriousness as a panacea probably.

The sea is rising. All our future ends,
when great white bears will swim where Broadway bends. (“Polar Bear”)

The final sonnet, “The True Zoo” sums up the menagerie nicely, a final indictment of man, but funny.

Download the collection here.

a book of beasts

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A Book of Beasts, The Illustrated Edition

Red Wolf is pleased to collaborate with Royal with a special illustrated edition. The animal subjects, it is thought, deserve a visual presentation. Irene, who took up the mantle, played the wild card. Untrained, yes, but does the result bring joy? Yes, we think! It led her to a close scrutiny of her animal subjects, and with it, an affirmation of their mesmerising beauty, even the darn spider! We hope you enjoy our serendipitous collaboration.

a book of beasts illustrated edition3

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Through madness and
moonshine, I rise from the
jaundice of January

And with that, dear reader, you’ll be enraptured by the poetic reverie that defines Emalisa Rose’s delicate and delightful collection. Hers is not a journal of facts nor actual events. Hers are figments born of imagining; it’s the elsewhere that we dream about in word images. It’s an almanac that reaps as it sows in language, what might be called ‘scribbles’. Yet there’s nothing pejorative about it as it is rich and sweet as it fills the air.

We are words seeking
exit; concentrically
circling, babbling echoes.
–“On the whims of the crosscurrents”

It could be likened to birdsong, the musicality that awakens us in the way the sun does. Indeed birds are a major trope in Emalisa’s work.

And you, sweet songstress

of the scarlet night, set between the
barren branch with voice that breaks
December’s still life –

with Winter wings, forever singing
–“With Winter wings”

Whatever “it” is, Emalisa’s lyric dapples our world with the colors of the seasons. It echoes our heart’s song be it in winter or spring, rain or shine.

the
droplets of rain splashing
the streets in the swirl
of asymmetry

painting of poets; we make
art, then step back; our reds
blending blues into purples.
–“Watercolour poems”

The poems see the imagination as both a salvation and an indictment. But of course, it’s just a dream. But “she” is all the richer for having the dream isn’t she?

How did I know that your wings
had brushed by, with my window
eyes barred to the rapture of raindance

but somehow I knew
as I got ready

‘cause down here – we shiver.
–“Damaged goods”

A worthy discourse on the imagination indeed. Is it real or unreal? But cast that aside, for as reader, you’ll be rewarded by Emalisa’s poems tracing all those momentary highs as well as lows.

Download Emalisa’s debut collection here.

On the whims of the crosscurrents by Emalisa Rose

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What happens when everything that passes you have passed? Your life worn like one last garment shrouding you; you’ve become all woozy until you hit “recall”. Emil’s poems trace an intense soul searching, coupled with the remembrance of love and loss, so as to find its own light in the poetic landscapes, in borrowed mythology and imaginative re-enactment.

From the despair of “I can discern no center/within myself” to the realisation that “it is all/inside me,/now”, from forgetting to remembering, such that “the only healing is art”, his collection brings eloquence to the kind of ripening that brings the soul’s trajectory into the river of a remembrance, an ever fluid crossing between times past and present. The poems stir the reader into a tragic empathy, from which one emerges more human than when one first began.

Download the collection here.

Only Borrowed Light Collection

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Reading Jesse LoVasco’s collection is like having a sojourn in nature, for it is from nature that her poems get their inspiration. The poems embody the journey of a feminine self in communion with nature’s wilderness, its elements of earth, wind, fire and water (snow and ice), its fruit (corn, peas, pickled beets, beans), its spirit animals (horse, rabbit, fawns, coyote, owl, wolves, bear, moose). The rich amalgam of images calls the self to unmistakably return to sacred nature.

The poems also touch on the themes of ancestry, sisterhood and human aging. The song of the poet calls out to those who have gone on before her.

I will
lay down a carpet of leaves,
make my home in a grove of trees
and sing out from my heart in sacred notes, until they recognize me.
(“Authentic Reintegration of the Wild and Sacred”)

It ascribes the journey of the poetic self who writes these things down, “galloping/
over the inner worlds” (“Horse”), an image that is reinforced elsewhere in the collection:

saddling the horse
of my legs
up steep mountains,
feeling wind blow
the mane of my hair
(“West”)

Often the images hold the reader enthralled, like this one:

The farm woman yields to passing time,
sighs on the chair by the stairs,
her work complete.
(“Corn Maidens”)

A few poems, such as “Murmuration” or “Snow Ghosts”, take on a concrete shape following the birds’ trajectory or simulating a whirlpool.

Jesse’s poems affirm the sacredness of life in its varied forms, all within a natural universe that is home and serves as the end point of the human journey.

Download the collection here.

Imprinting Waves by Jesse LoVasco (1)

Jesse’s book is available in print. If you wish to order a copy at $12, plus shipping, please email redwolfeditions DOT gmail DOT COM.

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Download the collection here:

Conflicted Excitement by LindaAnn Loschiavo

LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s debut collection is an Italian memoir about coming to America. It traces the first footsteps to a country that would become home. The sense of belonging proved to be elusive for her immigrant grandparents.

“Fit in!” advised her husband. Neither did,
Unnoticed by America’s embrace.
–Merletto [Lace]

Setting up roots would be reflected in the efforts of her grandfather, affectionately called “il nonno mio”, growing fig trees in Brooklyn. In fact the poems about her grandparents endearingly anchor this collection.

Her poems—peopled by her grandparents, parents, her sister, her relatives, her friends–engage us in an effusive warp of story-telling. Sometimes one gets the feeling of being wrapped in a cocoon of Italian babble but thankfully there’re translations to get us through them. For of course one brings one’s own language along with oneself, and LindaAnn’s poems reflect that. We also learn where she got her gift of narrative from…her father! (See “The Wizard of Words”).

Along with her native language, religion is weaved through her personal rite of passage, enabling her to cope with death and the question of eternity.

Where Jesus, spotless, guiltless, is then beaten
For others’ sins returns me to my oyster
Shell, hard home where I dwell with grains of sand,
Intruders I coat with a glaze to make their
Existence not so scratchy, making it
All easier to slip around till I’m good
And ready for that opening up.
–A Little Choir Girl at Passiontide

For us then, the poems are secret musings of oneself, but how delicate when she makes leaps towards the sublime in lines like this one: “Like death’s jewels, feathers fell from pelicans.” (“Aboard S.S. Guiseppe Verdi”).

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Dah’s poetry collection, Say This In A Whisper, should perhaps come with an advisory: there are sexually charged poems such as “How To Love A Lover”, “Summer, Ocean”, “Pulsar” and “Underwater, Still Breathing”.

Their nexus is the relationship between lovers which leaves you in no doubt about where the potency lies. “Summer, Ocean” carves out physical intensity in an almost predictable way yet doesn’t strike you as being facile:

“You, the matador
drinking the bull’s blood
Me, the bull goring you into ecstasy
until we lay finished off
our bodies trembling
smelling of ocean summers”

The collection’s first poem, “Oceans Of Rain”, sets a kind of framework by disavowing religion. The speaker is “an old inmate” with the gravitas of age:

“Now, I’ve seasoned
to this gray winter
an old inmate
waiting for light
to reap darkness
waiting for darkness
to bear down

Dah writes with disarming physical candor in his love poems. There is so much light and shadow in them, that it’s most certainly spiritual while being physical. But after the ecstasy comes the agony. The lover’s absence leaves the speaker emotionally stranded. The poems segue to a requiem. Every poem shines a different light on the grieving process of remembering. There is savagery in “you were the feathers/plucked from my mouth” (“A Missing Story”) to distraction where “we drink wine each night/to reach that neon glow/in the dark of a cloistered room” (“Pictures of You”).

Sure, there’s pathos there, but someone has said, if you haven’t loved deeply enough, haven’t had that kind of physical experience, you don’t know anything much. Such pathos may be another path to transcendence, if not through religion. Why, to speak of eternity as “a strange fracture/always breaking/before one reaches the line/the mood variations, another farewell” in “Another Picture of You” to the discernment of trees in “Pulsar”:

“I look through the grille
of bare trees
through the mineshafts
of shadows”

A tender, riveting read for all lovers!

Download the collection here.

Say This In A Whisper by Dah

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A daughter’s labor in grass-cutting epitomizes these elegiac familial poems. The three sections of this endearing collection act together as memory and catharsis, with an overall tone of love and whimsy. The first “green-weak” section opens with the remembrance. It defines the father-daughter relationship, its roots in the practice of scissoring the cardboard found within her father’s Roxy shirts into a child’s hand-made cards.

The poems take us through art and illness, a mother’s sense of lack, a brother’s divorce and other undoings. At heart the poems honor the perfection of imperfections: “And I loved him/to the end/despite a lifelong lack/of luster.” (Song for the Colorblind Artist). The collection’s title refers to her father’s congenital “green-weak” colorblindness, a faulty perception of reds and greens.

Her idyllic musings while cutting grass by scissors is at center, a meditation (glimpsing “the conjuring garden knot, its green snaking”) serving as transition to the third “regreening” section. It deals with death and loss. It is grief contained by noticing “an opened bag of nougat and milk/chocolate truffles” at her mother’s cremation and tellingly endured through the arrayed riches of Morocco. The reader takes each mouthful of poems, cupping them, full of weight and weightlessness.

Green is the trope, whether in the Moroccan silk of “Paradise Green”, or in grass’s “emerald blade”, or “the neon L sprouting from Google’s trademark.” How deep sorrow, how deep the green.

Download the collection here.

green-weak_poems-by-therese-broderick

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Our first two poetry collections were announced here.

Cover artwork: Carmen © by Catrin Welz-Stein

HAVING TAKEN VOWS
By Christopher Hileman

Christopher Hileman’s poems in this collection shine. But if you feel the blaze in the words, you feel the ashes too. These poems are courtly, filled with longing, passion, gratitude, despair. Startlingly accessible in their human range, they oft use the lover as mage, always part of a spiritual quest. The poems feel like soliloquys. You’ll feel the tenderness and poignancy, hope and truth, dream and reality, flight and fall, all tangled up, finely wrought. As if the poet had sat at an overnight loom as he formed a blanket for spiritual comfort. In all of this, amidst all of love’s yearning, God is never far.

“I live in squirming under
God’s wide ranging eyes
And all things would shift, and I
Love you for this dream.”
–“Having Taken Vows”

These poems are about finding truth in heart.

Download the collection here.
Having Taken Vows First Collection

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Cover artwork: The Moon Ship © by Catrin Welz-Stein

DUET
By Christopher Hileman and Irene Toh

Poetry duets work as a kind of dialog, not unlike the old haiku orations of the teahouse that were made up on the spot and traded back and forth by poets gathered there of an afternoon. These poems were written in collaboration. The first poem was written on 27 March 2014, inspired by the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian plane, MH370, on 8 March 2014. It was carrying 239 passengers. The plane’s wreckage was never found. If there’s any connection at all to these poems, it is perhaps the mystery of life on our planet. We come up with stories. That’s all we can do. These poems mythologize, speak a kind of ineffable love whose essence is both permanence and fragility. In the process, they seem to weave a precious, breakable thread that runs through life and art. The last poem in this collection, dated 20 June 2014, may be viewed simply as part of a piece of tape that had been snipped off.

“So which secretion is yours,
from ripeness and sun
and which mine from sour
grapes all in a bunch?”
–Christopher Hileman, “I So Very Much Love You”

“What is heaven except in stooping
to sweet apples fallen? Sphere
an Edenic fruit: to know is heaven.”
–Irene Toh, “Heaven Is A Deacon”

Download the collection here.
Duet Collection