Four accomplished poets, with four distinct voices, come together to create Edge by Edge. Read and listen to excerpts.

REVIEWERS’ COMMENTS

Maybe it’s true that, as Tomas Transtromer suggests, we can think of poems as meeting places, places where a connection is made and we’re surprised into recognizing ourselves and the world. Edge by Edge is a terrific example of what Transtromer has in mind, it sets four very active and impassioned voices in motion, and it asks us to let those voices pass through us as they travel toward each other.

David Rivard
from the Foreward

Like newly minted or completely renovated Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse, Carr, Hart, Bolden and Teter arrive as revelators with swords and scales, in high spirits, working to transform, by poetry’s insistent preoccupations, the news that if we fail to pay attention to this world we do so at our peril.

Dara Wier

You will often, traveling this volume, simply have to stop breathing.

Ginger Murchison,
The Cortland Review

Toadlilly Press, with its four-in-one chapbook, introduces us to a quartet of especially fluent poets. . . . Here we have the jittery boldness of the lyrics and monologues of Gladys Justin Carr; Heidi Hart’s astringent mixture of ardor and formal precision; Emma Bolden’s wry, magical, realist inventiveness; and finally the visionary authority of Vivian Teter, whose Dickinsonian clarity is accompanied by a deeply engaged social consciousness.  They are all quite different writers, but they share a lyric urgency that is often sadly lacking in the poetry of this new century. Edge By Edge is a welcome event.

David Wojahn

MEET THE EDGE BY EDGE AUTHORS

Emma Bolden is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer whose work has appeared in Verse, MARGIE, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals.  She’s won awards from Alabama Writer’s Forum, American Theatre Co-op, Georgetown Review, and New England Writers.  She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.  She is an assistant visiting professor of English at Georgetown College and a poetry editor of the Georgetown Review.

Gladys Justin Carr, a former Nicholson Fellow at Smith College and University Fellow at Cornell, left her day job as a publishing executive with McGraw-Hill and HarperCollins to write full time.  Her work has been cited in Literary Magazine Review, and has appeared in over fifty publications including North Atlantic Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The New York Times, South Carolina Review, Potomac Review, and Worcester Review.

Heidi Hart, author of the memoir Grace Notes: The Waking of a Woman’s Voice (University of Utah Press, 2004), and a finalist for the Utah Book Award, also received a 2007 Utah Arts Council grant for a book-length essay project.  Other poems and essays have appeared in Northern Lights, Quarterly West, Cimarron Reivew, Lumina, and Pilgrimmage. She received a Pushcart Prize for her poem Door Psalm, published in Edge by Edge.

Vivian Teter, Professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan College (Norfolk), holds a BA from Hollins University and MFA from the University of Arizona. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, Poetry East, Jabberwock, Green Mountains Review, and other journals.  She has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Byrdcliff Arts Colony.

For review copies or to schedule readings, contact editor@toadlilypress.com.