Places We Return To: A Celebration of Twenty Years Publishing Fine Literature by CavanKerry Press, 2000-2020 (Paperback)
This collection features work by renowned writers of contemporary poetry and memoir such as David Cho, Robert Cording, Ross Gay, John Haines, Joan Cusack Handler, Marcus Jackson, Gray Jacobik, January Gill O’Neil, Jack Ridl, Mary Ruefle, Maureen Seaton, Jack Wiler, Baron Wormser, and many others. Places We Return To is the perfect introduction to CavanKerry’s catalog, representing the deeply resonant writing for which the Press is known. Several authors in the CavanKerry library have gone on to find acclaim as poets laureate, Pushcart recipients, and finalists in national prizes. Places We Return To is a collection of work of the highest caliber.
Gabriel Cleveland is the managing editor for CavanKerry Press. He is a poet and fiction writer and mental health advocate, working to raise awareness, visibility, and money for psychological and psychosocial issues.
Kevin Carey is the coordinator of creative writing at Salem State University. He is a poet, filmmaker, fiction writer, and playwright. His previous books include The One Fifteen to Penn Station, The Beach People, and Jesus Was a Homeboy.
Baron Wormser is the author of twenty books including novels, a memoir, a book of short stories, and many books of poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005, he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. He is the founder of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont.
Joan Cusack Handler is the founder of CavanKerry Press. She is a poet, memoirist, and a psychologist in clinical practice. She is the author of four books, most recently, Orphans.
— Eric Hoffer Book Awards
"Just the way CavanKerry Press joyfully merges two Irish counties for its name, so its philosophy jubilantly combines Passion with Craft. Places We Return To is a treasure chest retrospective featuring a single selection from each CavanKerry book published in the last two decades. Valuing emotion and all its secret sources, as well as those bursts of interior song that surprise us when we reach a wellspring, CavanKerry prizes the personal voice—knowing what a radical act that can be, and also knowing it’s the way to the universal. That’s all here in this celebratory anthology, produced with the stunning design that has distinguished the press from a zygote of an idea to its full, expansive, generous presence today. There’s another important fusing, too: each poet here became part of a CavanKerry family of authors, the splendid result of voice, line, and design that makes marvels of their books."
— Molly Peacock, author of 'Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems' and 'The Analyst: Poems,' and President of the CavanKerry Board, 2004-2009
"The poets of CavanKerry Press tap your shoulder and invite you into their living room. You can sit here, and warm your hands on the different variants of what happens to humans, poem by poem, page by page, book by book, year by year. The best poems know how to catch experience and sing it true, and this book is filled with nothing but best poems. These gathered voices-old, young, rich, not so rich, urban and rural, love verse and they love the world. The house CavanKerry builds in this anthology suits its mission to a T; there are rooms available for all of us to wander. Think of our world. Now, think of our world without poetry. Now, open this book."
— Cornelius Eady, cofounder of Cave Canem