Announcement from

Middle West Press

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In her second electric collection, “Permanent Change of Station” (Middle West Press),poet, mother, and U.S. Marine Corps spouse Lisa Stice lovingly interrogates and illuminates life in a modern military family. The 96-page trade paperback is available for $11.99 U.S. purchase via Amazon and other booksellers worldwide. A $5.99 U.S. Amazon Kindle edition is available as well. Via Amazon’s “MatchBook” program, a bonus Kindle copy is available FREE for instant download to purchasers of the print edition.

Here’s what people are saying about Lisa Stice’s “Permanent Change of Station”:

“Lisa Stice’s new poetry collection […] is spare and lovely. Shadowed by deployments and military moves, Stice demonstrates how the smallest, most tenuous moments in life can illustrate a family’s larger joys and fears.”
—Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone and The Confusion of Languages

“By using a language […] that plays philosophically with the meanings of military terminologies, Lisa Stice produces a cartography of domestic space that is riddled with loss. […] Stice celebrates the moms and kids who ‘hold down the fort’ back home, expressing awe at all the ways they find to survive and thrive.”
—Lynn Marie Houston, author of the poetry collections Unguarded and The Mauled Keeper

“The experiences [Lisa Stice] writes of—the losses and realizations—are part of a military life that often feels simultaneously impenetrable and inescapable. Absence, isolation, and relocation become habit we don’t often read about, because part of us breaks in every move we do not choose, every uncertainty we are told to sustain […]”
—Abby E. Murray, author of the poetry collections How to Be Married After Iraq and Quick Draw: Poems from a Soldier’s Wife

Together with her toddler daughter and little dog Seamus, Stice explores the in-betweens of separation and connection, and the quest for finding one’s place in the world—whether child or adult.

Stice’s signature style is open and accessible—this is poetry for people who think they don’t read poetry.

Frequently, for example, she borrows phrases from texts she finds readily at hand around the house, including quotations from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” and Dr. Seuss’s “The Sneetches.”

In another point of entry, the family’s beloved Norwich Terrier often appears as a sentry, companion, and guide.

In one poem, “The Dog Speaks,” Stice writes:

He says, I can’t leave.
This place is mine—
I claimed all the trees.

I say, There will be more.
After all the temporary homes
and all the stops in between,

this whole country
will by yours.

 

Middle West Press LLC is a Central Iowa-based editor and publisher of non-fiction, fiction, journalism, and poetry. As an independent micro-press, we publish one to four titles annually. Our projects are often inspired by the people, places, and history of the American Midwest, as well as other essential stories.

 

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Desert (Prolific Press); chapbook; $8.95 

Set in the deserts of the Southwest United States, these poems explore dreams that sometimes dry up and get lost, people who sometimes feel small in an expansive landscape, an environment shaped by inner struggles.

In Lisa Stice’s Desert she paints an American landscape with sharply focused details and deep insights into the fates of its inhabitants. The people she sketches yearn to transcend or escape the sun-baked world that holds them in. From the young woman who kicks “rosy boa and sidewinder slither marks” to the dreamer who thinks he can find a lost Spanish galleon in the Mojave Desert, the poet shows us these lives with the knowledge of someone who has lived in this world and the compassion of a writer with true heart.

Zack Rogow, poet and translator; author of Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music

 

Desert by Lisa Stice welcomes readers into a world so richly rendered, you can almost hear the coyote song. Each poem pinpoints an element of desert life, whether it’s the experience of the locals, tourists, or the landscape itself, with its “rippling Mojave heat.” Stice’s precise craft reminds us that magic lives among the mundane, or even that the mundane is its own sort of magic, either through a “dusty pilgrimage” or a “sky of fishes” or in searching for “a flying nun/ who had fallen out of the sky.”

Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, poet; author of Dirt and Honey