New Poets, Short Books, Volume V
ISBN: 978-0-9844510-8-1
$16.95 , 18.95 (Canada)
5.5" x 8.5"
“The poets in this volume–Valentine Freeman, Robert Peake and Jensea Storie-like those in the first four volumes, deserve to be better known, but public promotion of the poets was never my primary aim. That would be a bonus, but only a bonus. Rather, I hoped the chance to put together a short book for print would reconfirm for each poet the personal, even intimate, value of the imagination in general and of poetry in particular. Their own imaginations, and their own poetry.”
About the Author(s)
Robert Peake
I was born in 1978 in the Imperial Valley of California, and grew up near the U.S. - Mexico border. My schoolmates were the children of farm workers, immigration judges, crop duster pilots, and geothermal engineers. I dictated my first poem, an epic, to my patient mother at the age of five. Later, I entered the computer engineering program at a large university during the height of the dot-com era, but soon felt like a cog in a machine. My career counselor made me sign a form stating that I had considered the implications of leaving engineering to study poetry, and that I would not try to beg my way back in. I never did. I still earn a living with computer technology. But after the death of our infant son, poetry became a lifeline for me. I currently live in Ojai, California, with my wife, Valerie, and our cat, Miranda.
Valentine Freeman
I was born in 1979 in Portland, Oregon to a midwife and a construction worker, two hippies barely of legal drinking age. I started writing poems in second grade with an epitaph for a fish, and writing has since seen me through five American cities and innumerable forms of underground employment. I live and work in Portland, Oregon with my cat, Muffin.
Jensea Storie
I find the fact that I became a poet both legit and laughable. That a poor girl born in 1951 at Hope Hospital in Los Angeles, and raised by two hillbillies south of L.A. County—home of glitzy Hollywood stars—a scrawny hippy who for twenty years drove her little humpbacked purple 1958 Volvo up and down the California coast, should, after age forty, decide to write poetry strikes me as both shameful and inevitable. I spent twenty years of my adult life waiting tables in small beach towns along the California coast: Trinidad, Lagunitas, Pismo Beach. It was a kind of "waitress failure" that I could never decide which beach town to settle down in, yet I made a decision to stay with poetry—not based on my own poems, but because I came to know the remarkable poetry of others. That I might find a tidbit of genius in an occasional line of my own is both agonizing and humorous. I write from South Oceanside, California, near the Pacific, fifty-three miles from Mexico.