Poetry of the places between.
Established in 2022 and dedicated to publishing beautiful books of poetry by both new and established poets, Riparian Press is especially interested in poetry in which language itself navigates some zone or liminality or other transition, in any of its many forms. Perhaps it is the state between waking and sleeping, or the experience of non-binary gender identity. Or perhaps the poems themselves enact a leap from some solid world into a fluid one in some other way, and take the reader there—poems in which The riparian leads to the littoral (Mary Ruefle, “Favorite Song").
We are therefore less interested in poems which express and opine than in poems which question, and explore: when we read a collection, we want to participate in the process of discovery and surprise, rather than be led on a guided tour of familiar sights.
RiparianPress is pleased to announce the publication (August 1, 2022) of Send Word, a new collection of poems by Donna Henderson.
“Donna Henderson has a transforming power of sheer attention, a grave, distinguished focus, so that even grief is changed by precision, an exhilarating quality of getting it right. […] In truth, the two kinds of precision are one: a self-aware mind sees this well, and the custom of meticulous looking—in this poet’s work—sharpens insight.”
—Robert Pinsky
Donna Henderson’s poetry evinces at every turn the one unteachable characteristic of a poet: an ear. to reread any one of her poems is to experience that poem afresh”
—Marvin Bell
I lay in a well of words,
read by their darklight.
Dry guides they were,
boring with sighs,
sighs their only sounds for now.
Stars shimmered in a distance,
in the circlet above of sky.
Shimmered with the glistening
silence that language held,
if only I could find it.
