#tasha cotter

[looklookhere]

Tree Light Books, the handmade chapbook I run, added another title to our catalog today: Tasha Cotter’s Girl in the Cave. An exploration of the south-central Kentucky landscape and a journey through the caves that lie underfoot, Girl in the Cave delves into the land and how it shapes our perspective.

These poems are thoughtful and inquisitive, both accented and driven by a curious landscape of caves, and “constantly surprising” (Charles Rafferty). Julie Hensley has said “The speakers in these poems follow and mourn the fissures of their pasts, knowing all the while each split makes a future upthrust possible. Cotter is a master at recreating the trapdoor effect of sudden, deep recollection.”

Additional praise, numerous interviews and publications can be found here. Beautiful, handmade (even hand-sewn!) chapbooks can be found here.

[tlhopkinson]

On Mothers and Daughters--guest blog post by Tasha Cotter

On Mothers and Daughters–guest blog post by Tasha Cotter

Lately, I’ve been immersed in two dazzling books: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout and When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams.

Both books deal with ideas of motherhood in ways that are touching, sometimes sentimental, but always deeply honest. So often we read mother-daughter experiences that seem at odds with each other—hostile and distant or sarcastic and dismissive. In these…

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[treelightbooks]

2015 Chapbook Contest Results Announced!

The results are in, folks!

Winner

J. Scott Brownlee, On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County

Finalists

Abigail Zimmer, child in a winter house brightening

C.J. Opperthauser, Cloud the Shape of Bedroom

Tasha Cotter, Girl in the Cave

Duncan Campbell, Joysong Demarcation

Hearty congratulations to J. Scott Brownlee, whose manuscript On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County we’ll be publishing later this year!

The pool of entrants was stacked, and we’re thrilled to be publishing not only the winning manuscript, but also each of our finalists’ manuscripts.

A huge thanks for everyone who participated and supported the press, and congrats to these five fine writers who we’re so thrilled to be publishing in the future!

[almost5q]

#21, spring

from Music Lessons, Finalist, 3rd Annual Poetry e-Chapbook Contest TASHA COTTER

BIO: Tasha Cotter's first full-length collection of poetry, Some Churches, was released in 2013 with Gold Wake Press. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in NANO Fiction, Verse Daily, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.tashacotter.com. 

[silverpetticoat]

What were the circumstances that led to the making of Red Carpet Day Job? Read Author Tasha Cotter's guest post!

[bibliomancyoracle]

You try to remember where you’d wanted to go but the road to those plans faded years ago.

*

from "A GUIDE TO GETTING AWAY" by Tasha Cotter

[allyourprettywords]

"Lies We Tell in Winter," Tasha Cotter

            That winter there was a density to the snow. I told you stories  about Bird City, Kansas, unscrewed the glass jar of silver pushpins             and dreamed myself a sun-washed Selinunte temple.  Dreamed myself a crippled pet returned home.             Dreamed myself a child making angels in the snow.  Outside families arranged and walked in curls to the coast.             That winter I invited you to a maze you could find your way out of.  To a quarter mile drag strip that I constructed next to a red line cemetery.             I said think hard when you hear I will and I can't ten times an hour.  One winter there was a deep path dug by my hands,             traveled by the children who got out of school early,  attenuated by the sky warming itself because it was bound to. I admired it             only to erase it. You look out the octagonal window and find absence  consuming what was there yesterday. It's undoing the roof, displacing walls.             You do the odds once and dream it all back: a cooled thicket  of well-trained angels reaching through a long-held death and finding permanence.

[almost5q]

-no. 22-

A Leaving | TASHA COTTER

  You identify the past as a switch of green

and speed, which was not how it felt those years

  that stand in the distance now, like the end of a property,

a split-rail in the grass. The sun, dunking in a den of sky. Back then

  you could go fast, wheeling through pasture,

falling from a horse the color of a copper penny

  you called pretty. A pond you drained and restocked.

The water bled into the field for a week

  though the decay and skeletons you fingered

in the dirt still stick to the memory of the life

  lost that summer. How you could matter when you worked

pushing the tobacco plants into plots the size

  of quarters, shoes digging into the loose dirt, arrowheads needling

you with flint of their heels. You realized you could re-write the story:

  airy clouds passing over a monarch butterfly in a swirl of clover.

A fire is built. Maybe a whole family could exist, if you called out.

from Spectacular Girl, Semi-finalist, 5/Q First Annual Chapbook Contest

BIO: Tasha is the author of That Bird Your Heart (Finishing Line Press), and Some Churches (Gold Wake Press, Winter 2013).