To Phrase A Prayer for Peace
Wildhouse Publishing
March 25, 2025
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And Haunt the World
Ghost City Press
by Flower Conroy and Donna Spruijt-Metz
Free for you to download here
https://ghostcitypress.com/2021-summer-series/and-haunt-the-world
Cover art and design by Melody Stanford Martin
What is prayer for? It’s easy to deride “praying for peace” as a quixotic absurdity in the face of the empire and its industry of mass violence. But Donna Spruijt-Metz’s diary poems “To Phrase a Prayer for Peace” are a frank dialogue with the Psalms during the ongoing Gaza conflagration, engaging in that ancient practice of calling out to the divine, and calling out the divine, in a time of divine silence, to ask for an end to this violence, to imagine a path forward. “I ask YOU,” she writes, “come close.” That YOU, of course, is not just God, but all of us. “Witness,” she writes, “speak light.” We need more poems like this, with their unhardened hearts, in this awful dark.
— Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge
Wu Wei Eats an Egg
Ben Yehuda Press
Poems by Lucas Hirsch in translation
August 5, 2025
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Wu Wei Eats an Egg introduces fascinating Dutch poet Lucas Hirsch. Alternatingly enraged at and bemused by the 21st century, with its traps of bourgeois excess, addiction, and “hollow language,” Hirsch regularly explores the interior self, familial history, and the physical world (in which a tree “writ[es] a poem” each day in front of the speaker’s window). Both personally expressionistic and socially engaged, Hirsch’s poems feel like some combination of Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and later Franz Wright. There’s also an exhilarating mix of reverence and irreverence, popular culture and “high literature”—something translator Donna Spruijt-Metz captures brilliantly in her English versions of Hirsch’s poems. This book offers a unique and exciting enlargement of our understanding of 21st century poetry.
Dear Ghost,
Harbor Review Press
"In exquisitely crafted language and unexpected images, Spruijt-Metz draws us into the invisible world of grief as it exists in interaction with objects remaining in the living world. Dear Ghost is a testimony of grief unlike any other that I’ve read."
—Joan Kwon Glass, author of Night Swim
Donna Spruijt-Metz’s divine (I include both attributes for the word) micro-chapbook translates the gut-wrenching activity of returning oneself to the ordinary world after a death. Like her “most tender protest” the poet’s materializing memory builds a “cathedral /between worlds” to survive this one.
—Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You Nervous
Cover Art Old on Panel by Gershom
Cover Design by David Blakesley & Chloé Brun
Stitched equally with wit, tenderness, and the grace of longing, the poems of General Release from the Beginning of the World reinvigorate the metaphysical tradition for our still-new century. Donna Spruijt-Metz riffs on the very Psalms that she also interrogates, seeking answers from a genderless, nameless deity here referred to only as YOU – answers to the question of hauntedness (“the endless repetition/of the first loss”), of what it means to be haunted by a father’s death, by a mother’s lies about that death. “[R]eel me through, catch me/on the other side/with YOUR hidden hands,” says Spruijt-Metz, addressing a deity as elusive as her father himself. These brave poems prove their own way forward to the difficult doubleness of truth: it can set you free but, first, it’ll break your heart. These impressive poems will, too.
----Carl Phillips
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Cover Art Old on Panel by Gershom
Cover Design by Chloé Brun
Once, Flower made a list of last lines of Emily Dickinson poems. She thought they would make beguiling titles—that we could both work on Emily poems—exchange them with each other. Sometimes a last line inspired its poem. Sometimes a poem that was already partially written was attracted to a particular line as a title. We passed the poems back and forth so often that it was often unclear to either of us who wrote what. Returning to the Emily poems after a brief interlude, we were bewildered by how unfamiliar the pieces had become; a line I believed was mine curled like an unfurled fern leaf unto itself, a muddled melding of my and Donna’s voices (muddled, as in a mud from which eerie stems stake forth, thorned, petaled or gilled and capped) until who could be sure where one hand began and the other took over? What a delight. What a delight to lose ourselves thisway, having been led afield by the genius of Emily.
Slippery Surfaces
Finishing Line Press
Slippery Surfaces deftly brings narrative situation and lyric song into coalescence. Spruijt-Metz’s ultimate subject is memory itself, which she movingly describes in its various guises—as lens, as veil, as mirror.
– Rick Barot
"Daughter and Mother, Amsterdam, Tram 4" alone is worth the cover price of Donna Spruijt-Metz's new collection. This series of conversation poems between a mother and daughter deftly and quietly devastates.
– Maggie Smith