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TURNING PLOW PRESS
Publisher of fine poetry and short fiction
Our books are available for purchase through most online booksellers.
New Release
In poems that balance the lyrical with the narrative, Austin explores the inner life of a proud and reticent woman. This is a work of deep sympathy and real human feeling, painting a picture of a love that is as big and real as it is imperfect. Work, love, anger, and prayer are all made equally palpable in Austin’s observant and lively verse. These poems are likely to remind you of someone whom you have loved and fought, someone you have cursed and blessed, and forgiven. There is no baloney here: Mother and Son is real art because it is the real stuff of human life.
--Benjamin Myers
Paul Austin, theater director, actor, author, and poet, has created a poetic drama that advances as a sequence with lyrical impact. The narrative is more than implicit throughout the linked lyrics. It moves in time from 1932 to 1975, a lifetime that feels like a lived life of mother and son. This is a drama that hurts – for “the kid” and equally for the mom – yet the hurt is assuaged by the empathy (so muted) provided by this poet-dramatist.
--Barry Wallenstein, author of It’s About Time.
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Praise for The Look Back
…a journal of the poet’s progress through time, across varied horizons, and within personally-significant as well as culturally- and geographically-shared landscapes, all presented in accessible and familiar yet original language.
--Jonas Zdanys, Poetry International
The geographies of Jennings’ life permeate his poems…the landscape is a character in its own right. It is a presence infiltrating all that lives within it.
--Bob Darling The Tar River Poetry Review
His satisfying lines sing with memory, endured longing, and an imperfect sense of self, striving to make sense of mortality.
--Ken Hada, World Literature Today
Reading the love lyrics…feels like falling in love. We follow the development of a romance that...turns the tawdry dross of adultery into the gold of clean-washed emotion. Everything sparkles freshly in these poems.
--Jay Rogoff The Southern Review
…a Muse book for the most part, deftly dancing with death and the seasons, full of wisdom and rhyme, assonance and alliteration, pace, silence, love, all those elements that are poetry or should define what poetry is.
--Kerry Shawn Keys, Rain Taxi
His gift is to reflect the immensity of life, both exterior and interior.
--Susan Deer Cloud, Stone Canoe
Born in the French Quarter of New Orleans and growing up in southeast Texas and the deserts of southwestern Iran, Michael Jennings once described his work as “one soul’s interaction with the spirits of place.”
Finalist
2025 Oklahoma Book Award
The poems in The Fires of Heraclitus run the gamut from funny, to acerbic, to heartbreaking. Within them, exes spend their last phone call quoting song lyrics, a father longs to play baseball with his son, Medusa roams the dating apps, and the Oklahoma sun flares as it can only there. Here Paul Juhasz exposes a surprise of adulthood: that the drama of our lives often comes without drama but is instead dismaying, subversive, startling, and often quieter than we expected. It is no stretch to say that The Fires of Heraclitus is Juhasz’s finest collection of poems yet.
--Joey Brown, author of Oklahomaography and The Feral Love Poems
Paul Juhasz pulls no punches in The Fires of Heraclitus. He can give a two-word question a two-page answer, and make it a damn good one. He can contain frustration in a haiku. He can break your heart like an Easter egg, or stretch it like a condom. And no holiday is safe. In his long poem “Solitary Journey,” he creates a panoramic photo-sequence out of words—not one picture taken on the trip: “I’ve been driving through / storm clouds my whole life. / I’ll drive into this one. // And the one after that.” There is power and a hard-earned recovery in these poems.
--Nathan Brown, author of In the Days of Our Endurance
This collection of poetry and prose is an almanac of the author’s long journey from
“whistling songs to honor the wound” of a troubled past to emerge with acceptance,
peace and hope for renewal in “the unfathomable beauty of Now.” The collection is
remarkable for the wide variety of places it visits and the wide range of ideas and feelings
they inspire. Juhasz looks trouble in the face and engages it with lively language, a keen
sense of wonder, and a wry irony that makes this book a tonic for heart and mind.
--Paul Austin, author of Notes on Hard Times
In the long, elegiac, “Solitary Journey,” the poet, himself a transplant from New Jersey to the Oklahoma plains, declares himself “An itinerant without an itinerary,” tells us “I have not taken any pictures on this trip. It is not that kind of journey...It is not memory I want, but presence...speaks of the vast difference between alone and solitary.” After crossing the Continental Divide, Juhasz realizes that the horizon he’s been looking for has been there all the time: “we carry it within us.” If this reminds us of Gary Cooper, Tom Joad, Superman, this is no accident; Juhasz’s “fuse” is Heraclitus’s fire, the foundation of the universe, and Juhasz shares Heraclitus’s view that there is no “is,” only “becoming,” that all is flux, and standing still is not the objective.
--Bob Dean, author of The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing
Finalist
2025 Oklahoma Book Award
Cullen Whisenhunt’s collection is a force field, vibrating with energy – at times distant, at times closer to the surface. His keen observations of Nature and perception of history, layered with precise language and controlled structure, offers a cautious celebration of what it means to be human at this time in Oklahoma. Cautious, but a celebration nonetheless.
–Ken Hada, author of Come Before Winter
In Until Air Itself Is Tinted, Cullen Whisenhunt approaches his poems with a photographer’s keen eye, drawing into sharp focus everyday details that often go overlooked. In this collection, Whisenhunt creates a rich poetic texture, interwoven with cranes and herons, leafy sidewalks and cypress teeth. Indeed, these are poems we can sink our teeth into, the rich imagery set against a vivid backdrop of birdsong and Oklahoma soul.
–Jessica Isaacs, author of Deep August
Oklahoma Book Award, 2015
Within these pages are poems that present childhood and parenthood with equal frankness, that edge the everyday with humor, and that touch base with lyrical masters. Whether he writes about baseball players, the terrors of our modern world, or the little dis/comforts of home, Berecka’s poems verily zing with presence.
--Joey Brown, The Feral Love Poems and Oklahomaography
The title of Alan Berecka’s new book of selected and new poems is Atlas Sighs, and the reason Atlas is sighing instead of shrugging has a lot to do with the lightness Alan injects into the world with his poetry. What he’s given us here is a book that pulls from four previous collections and adds a new collection’s worth of poems to the mix. It’s a lovely way to re-visit Berecka classics side by side with new permutations of that world weary yet world loving point of view of his that reorders the broken world just the tiniest of bits so that we can carry on, like Atlas, still burdened but lighter of step.
--Hank Jones, Too Late for Manly Hands
Generally speaking, the use of humor in poetry is a characteristic of “light verse.” In the case of Alan Berecka, however, humor is not only pervasive in much of his poetry but skillfully enhances his exploration of family quirks and eccentricities, philosophical introspection, spirituality, and trenchant social commentary. Hence, Berecka’s body of work is anything but “light verse.” This reviewer has been privileged to witness Berecka’s poetry readings on numerous occasions and has never witnessed an audience erupting into laughter in the manner this poet’s audiences routinely do. He utilizes humor with the skill of a brilliant comedian, but a comedian whose mastery of the written word rivals that of his extraordinary performance on the stage.
With the new poems in this long-awaited volume, Berecka has blended the “comic” and “sublime” into a poetic conceit uniquely his own. The following lines from his stellar poem, “Of Spiritual Storms and Ports” illustrate the poet’s remarkable achievement: “…we use wine not grape juice / at communion because that joyous buzz / from a good belt of wine is a precursor / of the joys we can find through the Lord…”
Alan Berecka is a poet to be carefully read and heard.
--Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate
Winner, 2023 Spur Award (Western Writers of America)
Author of As If Light Actually Matters: New & Selected Poems
"In the Choctaw language, Oklahoma means 'courageous nation' or 'brave people,' and in these Oklahoma stories by Mark Walling, readers encounter different varieties of courage from characters who feel grounded in this region—and rooted to it. I Can Hear Everything From Here is an important collection from a writer who burns with hopefulness and heart."
--Aaron Gwyn, author of All God's Children and Wynne's War
“Mark Walling writes about his characters with great empathy, but his tone is never cloying. He puts us in the minds of these people, tells us what happened to them, and gets out of the way. Consequently, I felt very close to all of them, and I admired this book enormously."
--Steve Yarbrough
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Nominated for the
2024 Griffin Poetry Prize
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Finalist
2023 Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry
Come Before Winter is a polite invitation written with a keen and pressing awareness of time passing, measured and marked by the turning of seasons. Like the pastoral letter from Paul to Timothy, from which the title is derived, these poems arrive as exhortations to the reader to meditate, as Emerson says, on “the flux of all things.”
“Ken Hada’s poems in Come Before Winter are exhilarating: richly textured, humming with energy, and deeply felt. Hada finds depths where no one else bothers to look. I read this book twice and I’m just getting started with it.”
--Lou Berney
Read a review of Come Before Winter in World Literature Today.
Click here to order a copy directly from the author.
Praise for The Currency of His Light
Roy Beckemeyer, in his shining new collection of poetry, explores, questions, laments, and celebrates the mystery and power of light in language, art, spirit, and life. His deep and abiding investigation of the natural world generously gives these poems grounding, heft, and precision so that what’s often beyond words can take flight. From murmuration at large to robins in particular, he brings what’s often the backdrop of our lives into clear view, amplifying “the last August cicada saws” as well as the “Vidalia onion’s dream.” His homages to the arts and artists, including Monet and Milton in the title poem, reveals the sparks that make art, “…coined by eye and hand/ and light’s merciless vicissitudes.” Going deeper into mercy and its opposite, he writes of grief, love, and memory with startling tenderness, especially in the villanelle, “A Father Who Lives Longer Than His Son.” Beckemeyer speaks intimately to the reader and his beloved, telling us, “You are the beguiling yin-ness / and yang-ness of mythology’s shape changer,” encapsulating in this poem how light is the ultimately shapeshifter. This whole book is an ode to wonder, and the kind of wonder we especially need to illuminate our lives right now.
--Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2009-13,
author of How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems
Roy Beckemeyer’s penetrating and beautiful new book of poems, The Currency of His Light, illuminates the wonders and mysteries of the natural world, the depths and hopes of seasoned love, and the power of his elegant poetry to enlighten and delight. These are poems to relish; they lead to myriad inroads of joy. And throughout is the light. At first blush, we notice how it quickens Beckemeyer’s perceptions and poetics. In his expert hands, the vividly painted birds of the Kansas plain burst into a sharply focused new existence: They not only obey their nature, but they incarnate the poet’s words, emotions, and meditations in their fluid movements over the fields. What’s more, their avian glory is underwritten by the poet’s imagination – the hidden fourth dimension of all things. With it, nature blossoms into its full essence, encompassing the yearnings of our lives, as well. And for Beckemeyer, nature’s finest demands poetry’s best. And in this book, his best, he delivers. As with E. E. Cummings, love transports Beckemeyer’s poetry to its rightful place between heaven and earth. The light shines on it, and beauty blooms from the shadows, sparkling with elevated diction, visceral imagery, keen metaphor and “the color of blessing.” Highest recommendations.
--Arlice Davenport, author of Kind of Blue: New Poems.
Winner the 2023 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry
"Our stories must be told” ends the poem “Augusta Savage: In Her Hands,” and in this dynamic debut collection, poet Mary Gray does exactly this, telling stories of African American lives from myriad perspectives through her artful, musical lines. Bass Reeves, Augusta Savage, the Fultz quadruplets, Michaela DePrince, Doris Payne, and Michelle Jones are some of the more famous figures who appear alongside girl scouts, WW I soldiers, the poet herself, hiplet dancers, and victims of police brutality. Gray makes this polyphony of voices cohere through her elemental, mythological language as well as her deft use of rhythm, rhymes, refrains, themes, and forms. At the same time, she uses these voices to explore concepts such as freedom, violence, duty, self, family, country, and pleasure that are often less than coherent, especially given African American history, which is synonymous with American history. In sum, this collection provides real knowledge, shining beauty, and disciplined hope.
Timothy Bradford, author of Nomads and Samsonite
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Contour Feathers
poems by Ken Hada
