Halfway through its one year experiment, Bright Stars, An Organic Tanka Anthology, continues to introduce new and known poets in the fields of tanka and sedoka poetry. Experimental, traditional, and innovative, the bright, noisy, energetic approach of Bright Stars liberates poets from convention to try for themselves how much these deceptively small forms can do.

Bright Stars continues to bring the best mix of innovative, experimental, and traditional tanka to print. Tanka, kyoka, gogyoshi, tanka prose, and tanka sequences, along with sedoka and cherita, fill its pages. Poets, both known and new, take advantage of the freedom to express the possibilities of a liberated form. Bright Stars is as much a conversation as it is a work of literature; poets read and respond to one another, find inspiration, and are moved to follow 'bright stars' to their personal literary epiphany.

Isam Rais, captain of the xebec, 'Sea Leopard, ' is on a swashbuckling adventure in the Mediterranean Sea. Battling unfriendly allies as much as his enemies, he plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with a much more powerful frigate, only to see victory snatched from his grasp by the resolution of the opposing captain. In debt and needing to repair his fortunes, he accepts a dangerous commission from the Dey of the Sallee Republic to hunt pirates-Muslim pirates-disloyal to the country that gives them refuge. Isam finds himself on the unpopular side in a battle of corsair against corsair. In...

"A swashbuckling tale full of colour, adventure and romance - a good read "-Gerry Burnie, Gerry B's Book Reviews Lt. Peter Thorton's divided loyalties are tested in the crucibles of love and war. A pawn in the war for Portuguese independence, he is marked for revenge by the Spanish, and comes perilously close to losing both his life and ship. Discarded by friends and lovers, his health wrecked, and at the nadir of his career, he discovers what really matters and must make a choice that will seal his fate. Heart of Oak, the fourth book in the Pirates of the Narrow Seas series by M. Kei,...

"Slow Motion is a break-through collection of watermen poetry from the Chesapeake Bay by a poet who actually knows what he is talking about. M. Kei crews on the title boat, the Skipjack Martha Lewis. The short lyric forms used in Slow Motion are perfect vehicles for the laconic voice of the waterman. Kei has captured a bit of Chesapeake magic in a bottle and all who love the Bay, boating, and a poetry, are a little richer for it."--Denis M. Garrison, author of First Winter Rain and Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems.

Joy McCall's collection of tanka poetry, circling smoke, scattered bones, is the debut collection of a powerful new voice. Intensely autobiographical with a focus on the details of her daily life, they are also intensely social. Joy is not as an island, but a mother, daughter, sister, wife, friend, neighbor, nurse, helper, and witness to the tribulations and joys of her community in Norwich, England. Joy has compassion for all creatures: the spider dangling from its thread, mice, birds, madwomen, felons, old nuns, drunks, ghosts, and the unnamed dead with their broken gravestones. To...