COMING IN 2025!
Hysterian is a full-length book of poems about midlife and beyond. It's about aging as a slow and sometimes shadowy carnival. It's about losing parents, betrayals of the body, and the changing nature of love as we age. It's about reasons to wonder at and to celebrate the wisdom seasons of our lives. Out from Finishing Line Press in August 2025.
Stroke, Stroke is a chapbook of poems that chronicles the before, during, and aftermath of experiencing an ischemic stroke. The book explores the fascinating and sometimes devastating process of stroke, and the almost miraculous ability of the human brain to heal and transform itself. Out from Finishing Line Press in August 2025.
The Book of Crooked Prayer
Finishing Line Press, 2020
Honorable Mention, Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition, National Organization of State Poetry Societies, 2017
The Book of Crooked Prayer is a book of poems about the sacred nature of everyday life--marriage, parenthood, farm kitchens, fraught relationships. It's a book of prayers, pleas, gratitude, and grace.
HELP THE AUTHORS YOU LOVE! Your review of your favorite authors' books are so helpful and greatly appreciated! Reviews help both authors and small, independent presses. ANYONE who reads and loves books can write reviews; they can be brief and copied & pasted in multiple places. Please consider leaving reviews for the books you enjoy!
about The Book of Crooked Prayer:
from Christine Stewart-Nuñez, South Dakota Poet Laureate and author of several books of poetry, including the latest, The Poet & the Architect
Marcella Remund’s The Book of Crooked Prayer is the lovechild of Walt Whitman and Anne Waldman, the poetic offspring of Allen Ginsberg and Gwendolyn Brooks. These are American poems, heartland poems, full-of-love-and-grief-for-the-world poems. In lines so musical they’ll make you want to sing, Remund breaks it open and breaks it down. She brings us wings, bones, clay, and light; she moves us from birth to death and beyond. These poems grip, sting, and slice; these poems hush, inhale, and salve. This book isn’t about you, but you’ll trace yourself in its words.
from Jeanne Emmons, author of several books of poetry, including the latest, The Red Canoe
From St. Frances Gumm (Judy Garland) to St. Joan of Arc, Marcella Remund’s The Book of Crooked Prayer chants a litany of traditional and uncanonized Saints, braiding her fierce prayers and petitions with portrayals of contemporary life, the achingly beautiful natural world, and the dark longings and longsuffering of women in their prairie kitchens. Throughout, we are made aware of the thin membrane between the sacred and the profane (“my heart pours out, holiness/ spilling down a storm drain”). The ordinary is always erupting into a realm of light and vice versa, just as wings seem on the verge of piercing through the shoulder skin in the poem “Angel.” Even as Remund challenges and questions traditional faith and gazes unflinchingly at the brokenness of our world, these poems, infused with the “certainty that we have been bathed/ in love since the beginning,” continually bear witness to the “radiant center” at the heart of things.
from Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of several books of poetry, including the latest, Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
Marcella Remund’s The Book of Crooked Prayer is a powerful canticle that sings its heady songs in a gorgeous, comet-silvery voice of the cosmos. At the same time, these poems all have feet firmly planted in the humble and quotidian details of everyday labor, in a practical distrust of the hegemonies and misogynies of dogma, and in the alternately frozen, fallow, and fertile ground of the South Dakota prairies. These poems are prayers of supplication, illumination, and desperation that celebrate both the small and immense beauties of living, while simultaneously grieving its profound losses and evanescence. This is a book of glorious imagery, profound compassion, and rueful wit, and you will be transformed by its unflinching and gracious spirit.
The Sea is My Ugly Twin
Finishing Line Press, 2018
The Sea is My Ugly Twin explores water--as a medium of transformation, an elemental spirit, as the cradle of life, as a fascination and necessity for those who are "landlocked."
Your review of The Sea is My Ugly Twin on Amazon or on Goodreads would be helpful and greatly appreciated!
Here's a link to the book on Goodreads:
Finger Bones & Other Relics
Three Graces Press, 2008
Out of print. Signed copies available for $10 from me. Send request in message section of "Contact."
