Available from www.Lulu.com/modernenglishtanka and from major booksellers;
or order from the publisher by mail: Modern English Tanka Press Order Form.
Price: $21.95 USD.
ISBN: 978-0-6151-6501-1
Trade paperback. 160 pages, 6.00" x 9.00", perfect binding, 60# cream interior paper, black and white interior ink, 100# exterior paper,
full-color exterior ink.
Price: $35.95 USD.
ISBN: 978-0-6151-6502-8
Hardcover with dust jacket. 160 pages, 6.00" x 9.00", jacket-hardcover binding, 50# cream interior paper, black and white interior ink, 100# exterior paper,
full-color exterior ink.
“Lip Prints by Alexis Rotella is her most beautifully crafted and imagistic book to date.”
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, editor of Paterson Literary Review and author of Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica Editions)
“These poems are full of life and are, for all their brevity, fully expressed. Lip Prints today, right now, has no equal in American tanka literature. About the anxieties that plague daily life—our relationships, the food we eat, the jobs we work, the displacement we experience—these poems deliver not so much a culmination but an indispensable, immensely valuable reason to relax our angst, draw away from our clutching fears, and get on with our lives. This book is, then, an invocation, a kind of Book of Life, full of truth that grants us forgiveness and a release. To the great increase of our joy, with release comes closure.”
—Michael McClintock, President of the Tanka Society of America
“Alexis Rotella has been writing free-form tanka with a lyrical, confessional voice exploring a wide range of emotions, feelings and insights. Her tanka, though firmly grounded in the American landscape of experiences, follow the ‘no subject off limits’ approach championed by the famous Modernist Japanese tanka poets, Akiko and Hiroshi Yosano (Tekkan). Alexis has the ability to capture a relationship in a phrase and deepen the moment of insightful feeling with surprising attention to details that tell us ‘the rest of the story.’ Her new collection, Lip Prints, is an opportunity for tanka readers to enjoy a rich body of work drawn from over thirty years of being a very alive writer.”
—Randy Brooks, Editor Mayfly Magazine, Professor of English, Millikin University
“Alexis Rotella brings us Lip Prints featuring nearly thirty years of tanka, both published and previously unseen work. Rotella is a master of romantic tanka of the real world sort: the heartaches of love found, lost, won, betrayed, forgotten, and fulfilled; but her skills go beyond that to touch on all sorts of love. Her mother, brother, church, friends, neighbors and rivals all appear in these pages with the adroit brevity of a master sketch artist. Although we have never met them, we cannot fail to recognize the young women disappointed to discover the object of their crush is a priest, or the selfish man with chocolate in his pocket—but not for us. Rotella is alert to the nuances of human behavior that tell us who we really are, but she also has a wry sense of humor that never fails to bring a surprised laugh at the foibles and follies of the very human people who populate her world.”
—M. Kei, Editor of Fire Pearls: Short Masterpieces of the Human Heart.
“Poetry is often defined as distilled language. In Lip Prints, Alexis Rotella shows us how small pieces of a lifetime of experience can be made vivid in five distilled lines. The natural world with its mustard field containing a plum orchard in full bloom, a vanished white cat whose light still shines in every room, a blue flower from childhood. And the ambiguities and complexities of relationships, typified by the couple who, though made of starlight, still quarrel. These poems too seem made of starlight.”
—Jeanne Shannon, Poet, Editor/Publisher, The Wildflower Press
Read Michael McClintock's Preface
to Lip Prints in the digital edition of Modern English Tanka, Autumn 2007.
