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River River Books

@riverriverbooks.bsky.social

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Where Poetry Moves. Two editors, publishing (at least) two exceptional poetry titles a year & the Plainwater Nonfiction Series. Poetry submissions open in May. Posts by @hanvanderhart.bsky.social www.riverriverbooks.org

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 15d

Happiest of joint publication days to FIELD NOTES by E.G. Cunningham and ENCOUNTERS FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD by Jameela F. Dallis! 🎉🎉🎉

We could not be prouder of our fall titles and their authors. Congratulations, Liz and Jameela!

riverriverbooks.org/store

@egcunningham.bsky.social

Liz Cunningham holding a copy of Field Notes in a soft pastel light

Jameela Dallis sitting at a desk, shelves behind her, in a pink and silver dress, Encounters propped in the foreground

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 9h

Bookshop has free shipping today! Find River River Book titles there 🌊 🌊 📚 #poetry #booksky

Our Poetry Catalog

Checkout out this list on Bookshop

bookshop.org

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Reposted by River River Books

Nate @nfako.bsky.social · 9h

Louise Glück

Vespers
I don't wonder where you are anymore.
You're in the garden; you're where John is,
in the dirt, abstracted, holding his green trowel.
This is how he gardens: fifteen minutes of intense effort,
fifteen minutes of ecstatic contemplation. Sometimes
I work beside him, doing the shade chores,
weeding, thinning the lettuces; sometimes I watch
from the porch near the upper garden until twilight makes
lamps of the first lilies: all this time,
peace never leaves him. But it rushes through me,
not as sustenance the flower holds
but like bright light through the bare tree.

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 15h

Editor @amorak.bsky.social is at home resting, and if you can share a poem or a book recommendation, I know he’d love it 💙🙏💐

Poetry meme from fleabag, wedding scene with both sisters, text boxes being:

Lying in bed

Lying in bed ordering poetry books

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 5d

🥰💙🎉

itascabooks.com/products/enc...

Become mollusk. Notice when these poems crack you open.
Notice when you are reading from your soul places. Your calcified shells. Notice the
intimate irritant becoming pearl.
Mollusks chemosynthesize the radioactive isotopes of volatile earth in the broken places at the bottom of the ocean. This too is the work of these poems.
Become mollusk and notice what
changes.
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival is a Promise
Printed at
BOOKMOBILE
CRAFT DIGITAL
ENCOUNTERS
FOR THE LIVING AND THE
POEMS
DEAD
JAMEELA
F. DALLIS
Available at
ITASCA BOOKS
DISTRIBUTION & FULFILLMENT
A DIVISION OF BOOKMOBILE

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 6d

Golden Fig Books in Durham and Carrboro now have Encounters for the Living and the Dead by Jameela F. Dallis and Field Notes by @egcunningham.bsky.social in stock! 💙📚🎉

Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 6d

Good day at my local bookshop, Golden Fig Books / while dropping off books for @riverriverbooks.bsky.social #booksky

White kitchen counter with a pair of red sunnies and two books:

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
OUR ANDROMEDA (book of poetry, Copper Canyon Press, 2012)

And

Deliberate Prose
SELECTED ESSAYS 1952-1995
ALLEN GINSBERG
FOREWORD BY EDWARD SANDERS / EDITED BY BILL MORGAN
"These essays rise toward the incantatory
power of poetry."
-San Francisco Chronicle

River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 6d

Answer my slaaaaaaack

a puppet with flames coming out of his head says " r-80 "

ALT: a puppet with flames coming out of his head says " r-80 "

media.tenor.com

River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 6d

Some people REALLY don’t! 😂

River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 6d

Sorry if you don’t like the muppets HAN LIKES THE MUPPETS.

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 6d

Second printing? Oh it ships 10/15.

bert from sesame street is wearing glasses and a suit and tie

ALT: bert from sesame street is wearing glasses and a suit and tie

media.tenor.com

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 6d

When you have nine copies of a just-published book remaining and a festival upcoming and more orders coming in and booksellers writing you and it’s a good (?) problem but it’s still a little stressful we’re just human, tbh

a muppet with red hair and a blue jacket is holding a green jar .

ALT: a muppet with red hair and a blue jacket is holding a green jar .

media.tenor.com

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 7d

Oh we’re happy to see Jameela F. Dallis’s Encounters for the Living and the Dead on @bookmobile-itasca.bsky.social’s Top 10 for September list! Thanks to booksellers and readers everywhere 🙏💙📚🎉

itascabooks.com/products/enc...

ITASCA'S TOP I0, SEPTEMBER '25
1. Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People
- Organize the Rich - Eds. Michael Gast, Marian Moore & Alex T. Tom
2. Your Year of Wonders - Beaver's Pond Press - Nick Tasler
3. Lucia Morning in Sweden - Nodin Press - Ewa Rydecker
4. Mistër E's Eclectic Compendium of Wondrous Hits
- Beaver's Pond Press - Elias Mondegreen
5. Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction
- Rose Metal Press - Dinty W. Moore
6. Fam: The Remarkable Story of a Canada Goose Adopted by Sandhill Cranes
- Beaver's Pond Press - Martha Harding & Gary Noren
7. Little Deaths All in a Row - Jaded Ibis Press - Elizabeth Earley
8. Beyond Grit - Wise Ink - Cindra Kamphoff
9. Encounters for the Living and the Dead - River River Books - Jameela F. Dallis
10. Hiro Doggie
- Literati Press Comics and Novels - John Eric Osborn & Charles J. Martin
Find More Great Books at www.ltascaBooks.com
ITASCA BOOKS
DISTRIBUTION & FULFILLMENT
A DIVISION OF BOOKMOBILE

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 7d

Excerpt from Beth Gilstrap’s forthcoming THERE IS NEWS ALONG THE OHIO RIVER (@riverriverbooks.bsky.social, 2026!) 🌊

Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 7d

“The shower floods the kitchen. Slugs come through outlets to mate on the walls and the mess of it is revelation. The voice of ancestors saying, No, love, no.”

Beth Gilstrap (@bettysueblue.bsky.social) in the new @pitheadchapel.bsky.social!

pitheadchapel.com/xi/

Beth Gilstrap There is news along the Ohio River: Some days she has no idea why she moved here to live alone in a house built when her Mee-maw was still sweeping the speck of yard out front of mill…

pitheadchapel.com

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Reposted by River River Books

Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 8d

Send me your students’ poems! 🌸💫📖

Nomination details at link below.

awpwriter.bsky.social @awpwriter.bsky.social · 8d

The 2026 AWP Intro Journals Project judge in poetry is @hanvanderhart.bsky.social, author of LARKS and others. Read their bio, along with the bios of the other judges, on our website. AWP member program directors can submit nominations October 1–November 30, 2025.

AWP Intro Journals Project Judges

awpwriter.org

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 8d

Ohh sweet 😍🙏🎉 Dusti, thanks so much for your order!!!

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 10d

Yess ☺️🙏 So good to meet you, Niina!

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Reposted by River River Books

niina pollari @niina.bsky.social · 10d

Cameo from the nice folks of @riverriverbooks.bsky.social whomst I aggressed into posing for a photo at their book fair table

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Reposted by River River Books

niina pollari @niina.bsky.social · 10d

I covered last week's Punch Bucket Lit Fest for Zona Motel. open.substack.com/pub/zonamote... featuring a dog, a cat, and many good humans in beautiful Asheville, NC. (Also a running tally of how much I cried)

DISPATCH: Punch Bucket Lit Fest, Asheville, NC

"A far cry from the engulfing desperation and pretension of AWP"

open.substack.com

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Reposted by River River Books

Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 10d

Field Notes 🌾 🐋 by @egcunningham.bsky.social

riverriverbooks.org/store

Field Notes, in my office, under a lamp and a whale painting by Mark Cunningham, and a lake print by Georgia O’Keeffe

Cover design by Alban Fischer

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Reposted by River River Books

Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 10d

“…like landlocked whales of grief”

—E.G. Cunningham, from Field Notes

#SmallPoemSunday
@riverriverbooks.bsky.social
@egcunningham.bsky.social

Years of destruction. Summer and green. We grew older, rebellious, steely. Outdoor day drinking like we wanted to, like landlocked whales of grief, sweet and lonely, blunting our histories. Thought we knew art this way. Went cruel and wanting. An adopted process of blacking out. Residual fields cross back and cross over—

B&W image of a field and sky and a fence running through it and a tree line in the distance

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 11d

“America, aromatic // with ravages.”

Lauren Camp, An Eye in Each Square

riverriverbooks.org/store

MUST LEARN NEITHER

I had plundered past nervous. A tense Walmart truck clanging the interstate. Smoke gnawing the

face of some mountain. America, aromatic
with ravages. In schism. Sacrificed. I stayed

woke most nights near the door. Occupied with every handle. Four years

my father had gone from corridor to quiver and I mustered my saddle to get to him often. Four

years of crinkled conversing.
Yes, and ginger. I shivered through rooms of my

home in the desert with its stoic astonishments
and took on some needles. I couldn't settle the ache.

The curt country and my family. Every ache size, every shape.
To reset, I've come to the distance, to watch the

ocean repeat how to unfinish. I brought with me a light jacket and a thick book
about Agnes Martin. I'm not sure

why I packed it, what it celebrates, but I know the artist
and her simple lines against excess. Know she

made sacred an emptiness. Maybe I'll hear thin strands of refuge

apart from the chaos that circles. What I want is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more. I've run away

with the most fragile questions. Haggard in a small room big enough for a bed
with its modest blanket. I let my watch doze on the sill.
Minor details hurtle over grasses. A windribbed fence.
The land around me tugs. I don't know it. Fog covers.
Blank space consumes me.
I figure every day I'll navigate to the tail end of this small town with its translucent leavings. What I want to figure out
is what could be in the neithers. I am entering
a conversation with Agnes for no reason I yet understand. I am not looking
to rivet to her, but to be extracted
from the sharp cuff of politics, of dementia-tweaked presence, of the gravity
of a future that keeps rolling toward me. How do you recover from a decisive wound? A line, a line: it never leaves you.

An Eye in Each Square cover

Designed by Alban Fischer

Featuring mountains and wheat field in graphic squares

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Reposted by River River Books

Beth Gilstrap (she/her) @bettysueblue.bsky.social · 12d

It’s blurb request time for There Is News Along the Ohio River, a hybrid flash CNF collection forthcoming from @riverriverbooks in February. It’s a quick & I hope, impactful read about my life & life in general at the Kentucky/Indiana border/ Louisville from 2020-2022. Details below. HMU.

An image of a typewriter w a paper in it w “typed” note that reads: “Hey y'all-the time has come for me to seek blurbs for my forthcoming hybrid flash/CNF collection. I'll be
sending emails this weekend but hey if anyone out there is interested for real, please reach out be that makes it much less mortifying
Cheers,
Beth”

A screenshot w book description that reads, “There Is News Along the Ohio River is a paean to careful attention and riverwalks. Beth Gilstrap locates the trauma and grief and gratitude of everyday life in the landscape and history of the Ohio River where it separates Louisville, Kentucky, and Jeffersonville, Indiana. This book offers readers the experience of taking a daily walk along the same path - on the surface, each day is much the same; yet if one looks closely enough, each day also holds new beauty, unexpected strangeness. Written in vignettes that exist somewhere between micro-essays and prose poems, Gilstrap explores personal loss and how it intersects with the world one inhabits: the flora and fauna and human-wrought damage at the space between the urban and the natural, the personal and the profound.”

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 12d

Jameela F. Dallis reading from Encounters for the Living and the Dead at So and So Books in Raleigh, last night! 💙📚🎉

We had to place a second printing, two days after publication, because we were nearly out of books! 🎉🎉🎉

riverriverbooks.org/store

Jameela in a long blue dress and black shawl and red glasses reading in front of bookstore shelves. A pink oyster scarf is draped over a music stand in front of her. An abalone shell is on the floor nearby.

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 14d

Beammmingggg ☺️🙏💙 Ahh so glad you love Field Notes, Nate!!!

Reposted by River River Books

Nate @nfako.bsky.social · 14d

Just finished this book and. Wow. @riverriverbooks.bsky.social The way the poems shift their language in a parallel gesture to the ever changing photographs. So good!

A photo of the cover of Field Notes by E.G. Cunningham. The cover shows a vast hazel field with gray sky above.

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Reposted by River River Books

Donna Vorreyer @djvorreyer.bsky.social · 15d

Are you thinking about treating yourself to a book today? Here is my weekly reminder that Unrivered is now in pre-orders at @sundresspub.bsky.social - on sale for the price of a couple of fancy coffees - AND if you order soon, this little broadside swag included.

tinyurl.com/4pj96v59

Blue ombre backgrouns with white wavelike lines and a collaged image of a woman's robed figure with haloes at her head and feet and streams coming from her outstretched hands in shades of blue, white, grey, red and black. Text reads: "I salvage a self, unrivered" from "Bloodline" Unrivered by Donna Vorreyer/Sundress Publications 2025

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