2012 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition Winner

The 2012 SHP Chapbook Competition winner from the Slapering Hol Press is now available through our website! Check it out here!


Praise for A Disturbance in the Air by Michele Poulos:

"In Poulos's new chapbook there is a wierd equipoise of lyric movement, almost visibly still hammocks of language that work through juxtaposition, through brilliant cupola...I do love this poetry."
     —Norman Dubie

"A Disturbance in the Air ripples with beauty and wonder...Poulos is writing brave and necessary poems for our lives."
     —Cynthia Hogue

"The Golden Age of Herbalists"
(from Poulos's A Disturbance in the Air)


When he throws a fist of parsley into the pond,
                the man believes the ailing fish will heal. In 1540,

        William Turner studdied plants for the resolve
                        within each one: wolfberry for scars;
lye from gentian roots to clean cloth;
        cardamom to soothe snake venom.

As a boy, he had found his mother on the kitchen floor,
        body bent in half, coughing, eyes watering

        and locked on a distant plane. He fed her evening
primrose oil and the immense choke loosened;
                she breathed once again.

They were more than simples to heal bones
        and cure diseases -- he studied their moods, their networks of
be seed, be influence. You, who are always trying.

        When he finally took to the countryside, he carried
                a sack and a knife, dusk settling

on leaf-points as if in the summer months
                their passions were precisely edged.
        Standing alone in the meadow, he knew everything.

he caught sight of was in the dying
               and would die before he would, yet he held

                        in his hands a garden, an herbal
        he would pen against sickness, soreness, wounds,

the formulas behind the labyrinth of green
                                unfolding before him.