After the successful publication of Ragged Sky Press’ first poetry anthology in 2009–Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems – RSP editors have come upon two irresistible cultural icons around which to gather a group of poems and poets.

Chocolate and coffee: two items of consumption, sources of pleasure and even addiction, inspiration, and energy.  Earthy and of the earth, objects of tradition and  ritual.  New World cultivars that have transformed the Old World.

Subject to transmutation, coffee and chocolate begin as beans and end in cream, foam, fume.  Flavors that range from bitter to sweet.  For some, coffee is an acquired taste, a bitter portend of vices to come.  For others, chocolate is the vice, the very metaphor for sexual  pleasure, with a melting point on the tongue like no other food or drink.

Like Ragged Sky Press’  first anthology, Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems will present a focused and yet diverse selection of established and emerging poets, including a poem by Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, along with work by such literary luminaries as Elaine Equi, Tony Hoagland, Michael Palmer, James Richardson, Charles Simic, Virgil Suárez, and many more.

Check back for details on the publication scheduled for late Fall 2015.

List of Contributors as of March, 2015:

Dannie Abse
Jennifer Arin
Ishmael von Heidrick Barnes
Catherine Barnett
Richard Brautigan
Carol Buckley
Christopher Bullard
J. Gerard Chalmers
Mary Cheever
Susan Cohen
Elizabeth Danson
Carol V. Davis
Ted Eisenberg
R.G. Evans
Elaine Equi
Joan Fishbein
Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke
Ellen Foos
Dorothea Grossman
Lois Marie Harrod
Carlos Hernández Peña
Tony Hoagland
Adrianne Kalfopoulou
Vasiliki Katsarou
Dean Kostos
Amy Lemmon
Suzanne Lummis
Bernadette McBride
Amy Miller
MaryAnn L. Miller
Carolina Morales
Naomi Shihab Nye
Sharon Olson
Coco Owen
Carl Palmer
Michael Palmer
Kiki Petrosino
James Richardson
Hayden Saunier
Therese Sellers
Lynne Shapiro
Charles Simic
Jody Struve
Virgil Suárez
Maxine Susman
Katrin Talbot
Tomas Tranströmer
B.J. Ward
Arlene Weiner
Rosemary Wright
Ruth Zamoyta

Editors for Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems

Ellen Foos is the founder and publisher of Ragged Sky Press and a senior production editor for Princeton University Press. She was the recipient of a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony and to the Vermont Studio Center.  Her first collection of poems, Little Knitted Sister, was published in 2006 and her poetry has appeared in U.S.1 Worksheets, Corridors Magazine, Edison Literary Review, Contemporary American Voices, and The Curator, among others.

Vasiliki Katsarou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose first collection, Memento Tsunami, was published in 2011. Her poems have appeared in Agave Magazine, Contemporary American Voices, here/there poetry (UK), Poetry Daily, Press 1, Regime Journal (Australia), wicked alice, Wild River Review, and in the anthologies Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books), and Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place. In 2014, Vasiliki was one of seventy national and international poets to read work at the Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry festival in the United States. Her website is http://www.onegoldbead.com/

Lynne Shapiro’s poems and essays have been published widely, including in Myslexia, Trespass, Qarrtsiluni, Switchback, Umbrella, and in the anthologies– Pain and Memory (Editions Bibliotekos); Decomposition: An Anthology of Fungi Inspired Poems, and  Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems.  She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009. Lynne is an arts educator who has worked with the Whitney Museum of Art, Parsons School of Design, and New School. She is the recipient of a number of NEA grants and fellowships for poetry projects in Lithuania and Poland.  Lynne was born in New York, raised in Southern California, and is a long-time resident of Hoboken, New Jersey.