2023: The year of new poetry

I am overwhelmed with delight to announce I have 2 new poetry collections coming out this year. This is beyond a dream come true. I am so grateful to the presses. Cover reveals soon!!!

When All Else Fails is coming this spring from The Poetry Box edited by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders.

Here are some quotes:

“…Lana Hechtman Ayers takes the raw material of extreme childhood poverty and abuse and turns it into one arresting poem after another. Even more remarkable is that the poet emerges from this crucible not just alive but fully alive, willing to embrace everything, knowing that she’s here “to touch / the blank page with reverent ink…”

—John Brehm, author of No Day at the Beach and The Dharma of Poetry

“Lana Hechtman Ayers’ unflinchingly honest and sensual poetry traces her journey from a difficult childhood in Queens spent in ‘the dark house of my mother’s anger’ where the poet grew ‘scrupulous as an owl’, to a wildly luxuriant maturity in the Pacific Northwest where she revels in intimacy with sky and water, trees, birds, and a loving partner…”

—Alison Luterman, author of In the Time of the Great Fires

“…These poems sing with joy and reverence for a world ‘hard as agate but twice as beautiful.’ Ayers’ work speaks to us in a vividly rich lyric voice ‘born to be the sky’s reporter, mood ring for the rain.’”

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

Overtures is coming this summer from Kelsay Books.

Here are some quotes:

“…these poems have arisen like miracles of what the book calls “today’s grace”—something elusive in life, but indelible in poems. This is a book co-authored by many poets, their visions woven here anew…and by the sea, varieties of shore light opening and winking into shadow as the sky changes…”

—Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

“Lana Hechtman Ayers’ Overtures is capacious and lyrical, a compendium of poems that showcase her imagination and her empathy, her attention to the small miracles of daily life, the passage of time, the natural world, as well as to the disorientation bred of our disconnection from the real, the ancient, the sacred. It includes fables and fairytales and homages to other poets, from Pablo Neruda to Wallace Stevens to Mary Oliver… ”

— Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan