The Orchard Street Press is pleased to announce the release of Bleached Bones & Sycamore, the insightful new collection of poems by Joanna McKethan of Dunn, North Carolina.

“Joanna McKethan…picks her way through memories of a sycamore at the entrance to a drive, its spike balls and shedding bark, blown bubble spheres, and rainbows suddenly formed and just as suddenly found, to help identify what we all seek—the knowledge of a place and what the people mean who live there…McKethan hones in on elements of the natural world, the ‘whittled mammal bits,’ ‘yolk-yellow jonquils,’ and ‘foot-burnished stone’ that help define and refine her focus…she repeatedly holds up the transparent—light, soap bubbles, orbs—so that the reader may at once observe their iridescent presence, peer inside, and, eventually, look beyond the fragility, knowing, as McKethan does, that what’s seen past the shimmer is ultimately what lasts.”

-- Bob Wickless: author of Almost Happy and (riding) shotgun in imaginary cars, and winner of the 2020 Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize

“Bleached Bones & Sycamore is full of rooms we find ourselves returning to as witness of lyrical tendencies that are both absence and presence. This collection is a language of wounds, joy, and filled with reminders of human fragility in the midst of celebrating an exalted life.”

-- Jaki Shelton Green: North Carolina Poet Laureate

Bleached Bones & Sycamore is available, online or via the mail, for $12 from:

The Orchard Street Press
P.O. Box 280
Gates Mills, Ohio 44040

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Orchpress.com (web)

330-264-7733