Books by Our Contributors
Explore poetry collections written by poets whose work has appeared in Sparks of Calliope.
Message from a Floating Dock
Kelsay Books, 2026
In Message from a Floating Dock, Terence Culleton transforms fleeting moments into richly musical poems of memory, loss, faith, and renewal. With wit, reverence, formal skill, and inventive language, he observes nature, childhood, music, and ordinary encounters, discovering permanence within the ephemeral. These vivid lyrics celebrate life’s ungovernable beauty and the enduring human need to remember, wonder, and sing on.
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Reduction in Force
Bauhan Publishing, 2026
In a literary moment when so much lyric poetry seems preoccupied with private experience and ready-made epiphany, Hugo Dos Santos’s Reduction in Force is revelatory… Dos Santos maps the experience of a true believer who must come to terms with the betrayal now inherent in what used to be known as the American dream and work through the humiliation of starting over.
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I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died
Kelsay Books, 2025
This collection explores the effect of long-term trauma when a troubled marriage finally dissolves. Issues of loneliness, anger, shattered self-image, and dissociation are all woven into the poems, whose metaphors involve everything from gardening to house decorating to pushing a weighted sled. Trauma leads to both fragmentation and self-realization, as the poet searches “for all the parts that fell away.”
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The Burglars’ Ball
Independently Published, 2023
Leslie Lippincott Hidley and Peter Bellwood offer this charming forty-stanza poem inviting young readers into a playful world of burglars, mischief, and merriment. Enhanced by Lucy Bellwood’s delightful illustrations, The Burglars’ Ball offers children and families an imaginative, lighthearted reading experience made for sharing aloud.
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The Wild Parrots of Marigny
Querencia Press, 2022
The Wild Parrots of Marigny explores life in New Orleans and Louisiana—the oddities, the frustrations, the unique culture, and the sometimes breathtaking natural beauty. Egrets, Creole tomatoes, the big oil spill, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Louisiana’s swamp splendor are all included in this poetry collection.
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Shaded Pergola
Tropæum Press, 2022
In this poignant collection of haiku and short poems enhanced with exquisite original botanical illustrations, Eleni Traganas transports the reader into an intense micro-world of nature’s transformative beauty in its timeless passage through the seasons. Shaded Pergola guides devotees of the flora and fauna kingdom on a journey into an evocative literary garden where nature is illuminated and magnified through the lens of human nature.
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A Tree and Gone
FutureCycle Press, 2021
Set in shopping malls, bookstores, and beaches, Culleton’s sonnets in “A Tree and Gone” find mystery in the familiar places of modern America. His colloquial language carries the music of the form so naturally that the poems invite reading aloud. Each offers an insight that lingers, then deepens with another reading. Wherever he finds himself, Culleton confronts the mystery of who we all are–and what we have become.
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Eternal Life
Independently Published, 2021
Terence Culleton’s Eternal Life explores family, love, faith, work, desire, parenthood, grief, and the mysteries embedded in everyday experience. Witty, passionate, and compassionate, these poems honor the dead, uncover beauty in the overlooked, and give voice to what has long been suppressed, celebrating the human soul’s fortitude, eccentricity, grace, and enduring capacity for wonder amid life’s heartbreak and joy alike.
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Memoirs of a Witness Tree
Kelsay Books, 2020
Memoirs of a Witness Tree is a collection of formal and lyrical poetry exploring memory, family, history, mortality, conscience, and the passage of time. Blending traditional forms with accessible language, Randal A. Burd, Jr. moves from intimate reflections on fatherhood and loss to poems engaging history and the wider human experience.
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A Communion of Saints
Anaphora Literary Press, 2020
Terence Culleton assembles a conclave of fictional saints whose legends, sins, sonnets, and songs echo the heroic loneliness of the human condition. They starve, flagellate, isolate, and emasculate themselves in pursuit of transcendence. Some succeed; others fail. Their struggles unfold in meticulously crafted, metered, rhymed verse—ironic, raucous, mysterious, and alive with communion between imagination and form, spirit and flesh.
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