(Cover photo by Gail Goepfert)

CONTRIBUTORS
Poets:
Arya F Jenkins * S Wallace * Elizabeth Tornes * Elizabeth J Mitchell * Art Heifetz * James Sanchez * Ronnie Hess * Monika John * Bonnie Durrance * Ronda Broatch * Loukia Borrell * Davita Joie * Kim Hunter Perkins * Karla Van Vliet * Nancy Bevilaqua * Annette L Grunseth * Paula Schulz * Ethel Mortenson Davis * Martin Willitts Jr * David K Wheeler * Susan Martell Huebner * Fred Kreutz * Jeannie E Roberts * Yuan Changming * Scott T Starbuck * Gary Glauber * Mary Jo Balistreri * Liz Rhodebeck * Chris Abbate * James P Roberts * Tom Montag * Peter Piaskoski * Ray Young Bear * Jordan Sanderson * Rachel Dacus * Anne C Kaiser * M J Iuppa * Charlene Langfur * Jamie Lynn Morris * Hannah Marie Nelson * Laurie Kolp

Artists:
Gail Goepfert * Laurel Best * Jason Iffert * Pd Lietz * Holly Kallie * Dawn Eves

Please visit the Blue Heron Review Issue 4 Summer/2015 page of this site, to enjoy a selection of poetic offerings and visual art by our contributors.

We have another wonderful collection of poetry and artwork to share! Our summer issue sings with color and vibrancy. There is a call to reach for life, and one’s source, with grateful hands in these poems and images. Under the careful watch of the sun, this issue definitely blooms. I hope you enjoy the eclectic mix of writing styles and visions for living, in this collection, as much as I do.

~Cristina M. R. Norcross, Editor
Blue Heron Review

The Blue Heron Speaks page, where we feature one poet per month, will be on a brief summer vacation for the months of July and August, but we already have 2 fabulous featured poets lined up for September and October!  Don’t forget to stop by to check out our June featured poet, Pam Uschuk, and all of the wonderful poet spotlights from previous months.  Our SUMMER 2015 Blue Heron Review issue will be launched on our site at the very end of JULY 2015.  We have an amazing issue of poetry and photography to share.  An announcement will be made on our home page!

~Cristina M. R. Norcross, Editor
Blue Heron Review

Artwork by Daniel Adams

PAM USCHUK

Welcome to the Blue Heron Speaks feature for June 2015. This month we are shining a spotlight on the work of poet, Pam Uschuk. Her latest collection of poetry, Blood Flower, was recently published by Wings Press (2015). Uschuk’s unique voice is both raw and honest, with a deep reverence for the temporal beauty of life. We follow her skillful thread of imagery to the very end of each poem, knowing that every word is chosen with great care. In our feature this month, nature sings to us in memorable ways. Please visit the Blue Heron Speaks page of our site to read two sample poems by Pam Uschuk.

About Pam Uschuk

Political activist and wilderness advocate, Pam Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including Crazy Love, winner of a 2010 American Book Award, Finding Peaches In The Desert (Tucson/Pima Literature Award), and Wild In The Plaza of Memory (2012). Her new collection of poems, Blood Flower, appeared in February 2015.

Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, Parnassus Review, and Valparaiso Review.

Uschuk has been awarded the 2011 War Poetry Prize from Winning Writers, 2010 New Millenium Poetry Prize, 2010 Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and Amnesty International.

Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Fort Lewis College and Editor-In-Chief of Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, Uschuk lives in Bayfield, Colorado. She also has a home in Tucson, Arizona. Uschuk is often a featured writer at the Prague Summer Programs and was the 2011 John C. Hodges Visiting Writer at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She’s working on a multi-genre book called, The Book of Healers Healing; An Odyssey Through Ovarian Cancer.

Blood Flower (Wings Press, 2015)

MARTIN DICKINSON

Welcome to the May 2015 Blue Heron Speaks feature! This month we shine a spotlight on the work of poet, Martin Dickinson. With imagery that leaps off the page, Martin Dickinson’s poems from his new collection, My Concept of Time (Finishing Line Press, 2014), are to be savored, read, and re-read in order to fully appreciate both the words presented and the beautiful silences in between. Each poem is a sacred reverie – a meditation on the experience of life itself. This collection speaks directly to the most thoughtful reader, who instinctively pauses after each line.  My Concept of Time is an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable collection, which gracefully transports the reader.

Visit the Blue Heron Speaks page of our site to read and enjoy 3 poems by Martin Dickinson: “The Tao at Sixty-Three,” “Ninety-Six, Weymouth,” and “My Concept of Time.”

(Photo credit: Tamzin Smith)

About Martin Dickinson
Martin Dickinson lives in Glover Park, Washington, D.C. His poems focus on family, work, nature and time and frequently echo classical carpe diem and ubi sunt motifs. The poems in Dickinson’s recent chapbook, My Concept of Time, have been praised for the deft ways in which they lock minuscule bits of time into place for the pleasure of the reader. Poet Michele Wolf (author of Immersion and Conversations During Sleep) cites Dickinson’s use of evocative, crisp diction to wed the concrete and the abstract, the quotidian and the grand with special sensitivity to the bounty of the natural world. Dickinson’s poems have appeared in on-line and print journals including California Quarterly, Heartlodge, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Isotope, Nth Position, Poeticdiversity, the Litzine of Los Angeles and (in Russian translation) the Russian language weekly, Kontinent. He has two sons, one living with his son-in-law in Brooklyn, New York, and the other in Geneva, Switzerland. His daughter, son-in-law, and grandson live in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He is a distance runner, T’ai Chi practitioner, and works as vice president of an environmental organization.

My Concept of Time (Finishing Line Press, 2014)