LATEST RELEASE
Sappho Prompts
A poetic conversation across miles and millennia, Sappho Prompts engages an ancient voice in contemporary poems of life and love. Margaret Lee’s collection responds to ancient Greek fragments of Sappho, known in antiquity as The Poetess. Using Sappho’s fragmentary lines as prompts, Lee’s poems reflect the myths, desires, and longings that characterize Sappho’s ancient songs. Sappho Prompts features Lee’s translations of Sappho from the Greek with extensive notes, cover art by the author, and an explanatory essay explaining Sappho’s context in ancient literature and her enduring influence.
CHAPBOOKS
Orange Persephone
Margaret Lee’s fourth chapbook explores depths of a mother’s love amid tragedy and loss. Orange Persephone invokes the mythical story of mother and daughter, Demeter and Persephone. Demeter, Greek goddess of fertility and harvest, periodically loses her daughter, Persephone, to Hades, god of the underworld, who holds Persephone hostage there. The poems in Orange Persephone cry out in pain, burrow into grief, seek solace in a nurturing earth, and range the unlimited scope of a mother’s love for her offspring.
Oklahoma Summer
Summer in Oklahoma always brings heat, storms, and explosions of life on the tallgrass prairie, one of the most severely threatened ecosystems on earth. In recent summers, human drama has eclipsed its natural wonders. A global pandemic caught the state in a death grip, along with new moments of reckoning with Oklahoma’s painful demographic history, including the removal of Native People to Indian Territory after the Civil War and the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. Oklahoma Summer registers its summer heat, celebrates Oklahoma’s beauty, laments its people’s pain, and reaches for new possibilities.
Sagebrush Songs
Sagebrush Songs arises from the northern New Mexico landscape, remote and unique. The area encompasses the Rio Grande rift and the Taos plateau, a desert mesa encircled by the mountains of the Tusas and Sangre de Christo ranges of the southern Rockies. Prominent features include Wheeler Peak, the highest point in New Mexico, and Pueblo Peak (locally known as Taos Mountain), source of the Taos Pueblo’s water supply. As a transitional zone between alpine forests and shortgrass prairie, the sagebrush scrubland supports diverse animal and plant communities. Such landscapes and their empty spaces became the primary focus of classical Chinese poetry, with its Taoist and Ch’an Buddhist roots. Sagebrush Songs is Lee’s meditation on northern New Mexico landscapes as manifestations of the Way of all things.
Someone Else's Earth
A tantalizing figure, the ancient Greek poet Sappho, continues to inspire, more than two millennia after her death, although little of her work has survived. This poetry collection uses the fragmentary remains of Sappho’s poems as a framework for contemporary lyrics of nature, life, and love.
