Exciting news. After some 40 years of scribbling and typing, my first poetry chapbook is coming out with Finishing Line Press: The Sound of Rain Without Water, shipping December 4, 2020.
To determine the press run, Finishing Line has opened the book to pre-orders beginning, well, now. If you have a mind to, you can pre-order using this link:
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-sound-of-rain-without-water-by-charles-grosel/
Keep in mind that the books won’t be shipped until December 4, and it won’t be available on Amazon until then.
Advance praise for The Sound of Rain Without Water
Back in the day in New Orleans carts came around with the owner calling out Melons! Carrots! Squash! When Charles Grosel‘s cart shows up, get out there. He’s got beautifully polished pieces of lives—and they’re pieces you need. Donald Barthelme once described art as small things strange with fur that break the heart. Here are 25 of them.
–James Sallis, author of many books of nonfiction and fiction, including Drive (made into an award-winning movie) and Sarah Jane, as well as five volumes of poetry, most recently Ain’t Long Fore Day.
What is the sound of rain without water? It’s a koan, an impossible, unanswerable question. Charles Grosel’s The Sound of Rain Without Water (the poem) answers the question in four couplets and two single lines that soothe and cut and devastate, an entire life in ten short lines. We see light flashing off the stropped razor, we hear the zipper close on the body bag, the story, compact and utterly final. This little book explores lives with intense economy. Near the end, Grosel explains what a poem can do, or, really, to what uses you can put a poem, which is everything. Clean your fingernails, wave goodbye, woo beauty to bed. These poems are not gems; they are not just pretty, or a good investment. They are very much more; that is, not superficial.
–Rob Swigart, long-time teacher and author of hundreds of poems and more than a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, including literary fiction, science fiction, thrillers, and business forecasting. His most recent book of fiction, Mixed Harvest, won the 2019 Nautilus Award in the Multicultural & Indigenous category.
Threads of happiness run in, around and through Charles Grosel’s new collection of poems. These threads sometimes appear in the fragility of a spider’s web, sometimes in the thirsty pulse of an alt-country song, sometimes in the remembered heft of a father’s rake. Yet they’re knit together by a sensibility capable of acknowledging both the past’s reveries and the future’s dreams, the fires of grief and the waters of love, the quick flash of pleasure and the legacy of pain. All hail a bold poet’s voice.
–PJ Krass has been teaching at the Writers Studio since 2007, both in New York and online. His poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, New Verse News, Rattle, and elsewhere. His poem “All Dressed in Green” won a Pushcart Prize special mention.
An editor, writer, and poet, Charles Grosel grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and now lives in Arizona with his wife and daughter. He studied English literature at Yale University and fiction writing at the University of California, Davis, where he was a Regent’s Fellow. He has published stories in journals such as Western Humanities Review, Fiction Southeast, Water-Stone, and The MacGuffin, as well as poems in Slate, The Threepenny Review, Poet Lore, Cream City Review, and Harpur Palate. The Sound of Rain Without Water is his first chapbook.
The Sound of Rain Without Water
by Charles Grosel
$14.99, paper, plus shipping
RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-sound-of-rain-without-water-by-charles-grosel/
PREORDER SHIPS DECEMBER 4, 2020
The Tipton Poetry Journal just published my poem, “Ode to Billy Collins,” in its Fall 2018 edition. Thanks to the Editors Barry Harris and Natalie McCann for giving “Billy” a home.
The poem is only a slightly tongue-in-cheek homage to one of my favorite poets, whose plain-spoken verse both belies and underscores the wit and intelligence with which he writes about the profound in the daily, and the daily in the profound. Even if you proudly proclaim “I don’t read poetry!” you should check out his work. Here is one of his most recent: Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems.
For all us writers, here’s to a 2019 filled with an abundance of pages and publications.
In the past two years, I have had the honor and privilege of working with two inspirational women as an editor and ghostwriter. Not only did they trust me to help tell their stories in a book, they inspired me to see things differently—to be more open to experience and more present in my own life.
In The Night of Five Questions: One Ordinary Woman’s Extraordinary Journey to True Faith, Miracles, and Magic, KaRin SuCase (a pen name) tells the story of her life in all its messy glory—her Illinois childhood with an exacting mother and a loving grandmother; her American Dream of three children, a devoted husband, and a beautiful home at the base of the Rocky Mountains; and the spiritual crisis that blew it all apart, sending her on a lifelong journey as a seeker of faith, miracles, and magic. On that journey she went through divorce and reared children as a single mother, found and lost true love, lost a troubled son in a horrible tragedy, and has lived with multiple myeloma for the past 20 years.
KaRin’s is the story of thousands of “ordinary” American women born in and around World War II and living through the social and intellectual tumult of the 20th century and into the technological wonders of the 21st. Through it all she has kept her faith in the goodness of the universe and has striven to help others on their own paths.
KaRin discusses her book in this Facebook interview with her publisher, Dr. Laura Bush of Peacock Proud Press.
As a naturopath and wellness coach, Dr. Melanie Dunlap never thought she’d have to face her own cancer journey, let alone that of her husband Tom—but have to she did. Just as she was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of her own treatment for breast cancer, her husband Tom was diagnosed with lung cancer, and off they went again on a journey both humbling and harrowing, and sometimes even joyful. Uncertain Grace: One Couple’s Journey Through Cancer tells of Melanie’s and Tom’s tears and triumphs as they combine the best of western and holistic practices—along with much love and support from each other and their tribe—to come to a place of healing and grace.
Uncertain Grace is more than their story, however—it also offers common sense advice for caregivers and patients alike and empowers others with cancer to be their own best advocates.
Check out these stories of two fiercely brave women living in the face of the unknown with faith, humor, and grace.