Check back in for these forthcoming books:

CHIGGER RIDGE, Winner of the tenth gate prize, word works 2024

& SLIP, winner of an Alma Award,Saturnalia Books Spring 2025


available from terrapin books

                                                 

“If I made a list of my fears, it would begin this way,” writes Nicole Callihan in This Strange Garment—and indeed, this collection faces down a barrage of threats. The pandemic seeps under doors as cancer faces off with radiation; physical and emotional pain are ubiquitous. Enduring surgery and treatment for breast cancer while caring for children, the speaker explores mortality and attempts to understand what is happening to her. Nevertheless, her terror does not preclude moments of ravenous hope: “I write the same word over and over, and mostly that word is light.” While she reflects on reconstructive surgeries, Callihan says, “If you say belly button over and over, it’ll start to sound like something else. Like saying hydrangea until it becomes a bomb.” Callihan’s poetry captures that very power of defamiliarization, creating poetic space where flower meets explosion and light meets cancer. “I am not the same woman who began this story,” she writes, and I am not the same woman after reading This Strange Garment.  

—Jessica L. Walsh, Book of Gods & Grudges

Reviews & Interviews: Publisher’s Weekly, EcoTheo Collective, The Rumpus, Harvard Review, Harbor Review, Heavy Feather, Counterclock, MER, BOMB, Lily Poetry Review, and The Critical Flame.

 

Winner of the 2019 Sixth Finch Prize, ELSEWHERE, is the second collaboration of Nicole Callihan and Zoë Ryder White.

Longtime friends and collaborators, Nicole & Zoë’s latest collection examines desire, motherhood, and what it means to be in a body. “I don’t know how I reckon,” the book ends, “but I do.” And the book is that very reckoning, the reaching out to be heard, the navigation through snow-driven streets, PTA pie drives, and middle life wanderings. An intimate portrayal of female friendship, ELSEWHERE, makes it feel like you’re peeking into the heart and brain of the lady next door.

 

Mason Jar Press is proud to introduce the Novella Series with the release of three stellar chapbooks by Nicole Callihan, Jaime Fountaine, and Tomas Moniz. These thematically linked pieces speak to one another while containing a strength and style all their own.

Tomas Moniz’s All Friends Are Necessary follows a young man in San Francisco as he navigates love, addiction, and the struggles of adulthood on his way to maturity and independence.

In Jaime Fountaine’s Manhunt, an unnamed narrator experiences a summer on the cusp of womanhood, exploring her own sexuality, the deep cuts of her teenage years, and the extreme ennui of suburban decay.

The Couples, by Nicole Callihan, finds a woman at a crossroads in her marriage and her family life, remembering and re-experiencing her first relationship and all the damage her youth imparted upon her.

Watch the trailer here; read an excerpt here, and an interview here.

 

translucence

في ديوان “بين قارّتين” للشاعرة سمر عبد الجابر، جرأة فتح السؤال على البدايات. ثمة فلسفة تخترق المعاني فتتبدّى بدايةً.. أظلال الدلالات والإيقاع؟.. “متى بدأ الحزن؟”.. مناخات عميقة وخصوصية شعرية تنهمر بسلاسة.. أإيقاع الغياب؟! “كيف كانت الأرض حين هطل المطر للمرّة الأولى؟”.. تقف القصيدة، في معمارها الشعريّ-التأمليّ، على مفترق لحظة العدالة.. على مفترق الغيابْ حيث فلسطين تنتظر. “كان عليك أن تحدّق جيّداً في عينيّ الغزال الواسعتين قبل أن تطلق النار.. نظرةً حزينةً إلى الأبد”.. حكايات تنهمر من الماضي والآتي.. في البدء كان الشعر.

هالا محمّد—

How do languages speak to each other? Through poetry, of course, and Translucence illuminates such a correspondence, an exchange, a dance. Abdel Jaber and Callihan’s parallel scripts and lyrics shine beautifully side by side, over and under, voicing loss, longing, and love. These poems address and redress “what it might mean/to disappear/into the self/into the sea."

Joseph O. Legaspi

Co-written with Palestinian poet, Samar Abdel Jaber, Translucence reckons with what it means to translate across bodies, culture, and time. The poems which appear to be translations of each other, but are not, explore the ways in which we utter ourselves and our experiences.

 

 

aging

"Nicole Callihan’s chapbook, Aging, takes the reader on an exquisite and magical journey. Her poems catch snippets of a life in motion, while repetition serves as an effective thread, connecting, unwrapping and surprising us along this journey. The mood of these poems is delightfully unpredictable. In a nod to aging, she tells us in one line “I keep wandering to graves” yet, a few lines down, in the same poem, Callihan shares, “I hope at least to keep my teeth” and I imagine the poet delivering this line to us deadpan. These poems are kaleidoscopes, each reading reveals a secret and unexpected nuance. Nature and family and musings on life and death all take center stage here. Callihan’s language is delicious. When she offers up the alliteration “I fickle and fume and finger the flowers” the reader can’t help but savor how her words and images roll off the tongue. She leaves us wanting more. Aging is a guidebook you will find yourself returning to again and again."

JP Howard

 

"Reading Nicole Callihan’s Aging is like walking a labyrinth: each poem takes the reader closer to the center of self-reflection before journeying back out into the world. This deeply meditative collection is grounded in the body—the ways it fails us and our shame—and the small joys of being alive. Though the poet asks, “What else can I offer,” ultimately she affirms, “This must be enough,” where enough is sometimes sufficient and sometimes too much. These poems do not promise a panacea for aging; they “tilt toward meaningfulness” and ask for reprieve."

Emari DiGiorgio, author of Girl Torpedo and The Things a Body Might Become

 

DOWNTOWN

“The energy of Nicole Callihan’s new chapbook, “Downtown” is kinetic. Image to interwoven image, the poem shouts out a revelation, then moves around the corner to find another: “I wander the sky until morning. / Oklahoma floods./ My mother drives home from her 12-hour shift at the ER. / What gets washed away?/ I am an old dirt road./ Washed away, out, up.” Callihan is a master of juxtaposition.  A crane seen from a hospital window that’s lit up with lights forming a heart becomes just a few lines later, a reminder or a beloved, dead poet: “Heart. Crane.”  Callihan’s images in this beautiful book resonate, stay fixed and return to your mind again and again: a man leaning against the blue wall, an apartment high in the sky, the Ancient Greek chorus of the people on the Brooklyn avenue below.  “Downtown” will pull you in and not let you leave its dreamlike trance until you, like the speaker, transform.”

Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2016-2017

“It’s tempting to imagine we’ve surpassed the era described by Sexton and Plath, but in “Downtown,” Nicole Callihan takes us into the broken heart of Brooklyn, where to be poet, wife, mother, teacher, Southerner, and resident of a tall glass building is to wrestle, as those earlier poets did, with invisibility, loss, and “disgraceful appetites.”  Fragments and layers, lies and secrets, jokes and unanswered calls—Callihan makes a world, between earth and sky, in which nothing is as it seems and the person whose poem we’re reading is too distracted or wounded to truly inhabit her own attitudes or identity or body.  But the poem she writes—or rather, it “writes itself”—is magnificent, knows itself perfectly, and tells the entire unsettling truth, so that everything important can begin.”

Matt Longabucco, author of The Sober Day (DoubleCross Press) and Everybody Suffers: The Selected Poems of Juan García Madero (O’Clock Press 2014)

 

THE DEEPLY FLAWED HUMAN

The poems in The Deeply Flawed Human re-imagine the poet as artist describing 30 works of art in the form of museum wall labels at a retrospective exhibition. Check out the catalog from the July 2016 art exhibition, Nicole Callihan is the Deeply Flawed Human, which featured artworks alongside the poems that inspired them.

Praise for The Deeply Flawed Human:
"These poems -- lush, vulnerable, deeply playful, and wise -- dazzled me. The great gift of Callihan's imagination is the way it lights yours up, as you're reading.  The cumulative effect is brilliant: Callihan has made a shimmering gallery in honor of the heart-breaking, hopeful art of inventing life."  
 

Kristin Dombek, author of The Selfishness of Others (FSG, 2016)

 

"The "I" is deeply flawed and gives off a helluva lotta noise.  But in The Deeply Flawed Human, Nicole Callihan explores her deeply flawed "I" in ingeniously artful setting after setting.  And it's so much fun to watch as more and more disintegrating selves pop out of this deeply flawed matroyshka where microwaves and funfetti share the frame.  And it's also sad and honest and beautiful to watch these selves studying the face they share, beneath which they're all angling hard for a shot at the light." 
 

Jennifer L. Knox, author of Days of Shame & Failure (Bloof, 2015).

 

A STUDY IN SPRING

with Zoë Ryder White

Winner of the 2015 Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Contest. Chosen by judge, Bob Hicok.

Praise for A Study in Spring:
“Part friendly (and at times flirtatious) correspondence, part lyrically charged banter that ignites the playful brain spasms, and part academic conversation that's gone delightfully awry and landed in someplace altogether more fascinating than any assigned essay, A Study in Spring is a strange and welcomed poetic delight. Acrobatic in its construction, but satisfyingly candid and scintillating in its execution, this is a terrific chapbook made for those who love the intriguing act of eavesdropping.”

Ada Limón, author of “The Carrying”

 

SuperLoop


Borrowing her title from the old carnival ride that loops its riders round and round, Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop is as familiar and as thrilling as another go on a long loved ride. Paired with artwork from fellow Brooklyn-ite Re Jin, Callihan’s poems—sometimes wild, sometimes quiet, always unassuming—take us to a place we’ve been before, but through her eyes that dusty place becomes a bit more magical. Here, the waitress always brings extra whipped cream; divorced parents fall into each other’s arms; orchids grow; and, in spite of themselves and the world around them, people find love and walk, albeit reluctantly, into the sunset. Fierce, funny, at times, downright sweet—for Callihan, just making it is a miracle, and it’s a miracle she’s not afraid to name.

Praise for Superloop:
“Precise, graceful, and generous, the poems in Super Loop, seem to be born out of a deep, careful attention
and a profound compassion. Sometimes the quiet observer, sometimes the kid in the center of the messed-up
carnival, these poems are the fireflies you've missed all winter, the longed-for return of the bees. Unaffected
and inherently hopeful, Callihan's work is as merciful as it is moving.”--
Ada Limón

“These poems dig deep into the ragged nature of what it means to be alive, unveiling in bristling clarity, the
cracks, quirks, “thorny edges,” and great beauty of being. A master in the language of blush and bruise, Nicole
Callihan tells stories that rub the mind like a fever in a cool wind.” --
Dawn Lundy Martin

“So unpretentious and alive and interesting.”--Jean Valentine

Read a review: here.

 

Henry River Mill Village


In 1904, the building of a planned community began, and the Henry River Manufacturing Company started producing fine cotton yarns in 1905. In its time, Henry River Mill Village was a completely self-sustained town: it operated under its own currency, generated its own electricity and churned its own moonshine. While the mill thrived during its operating years, the twelve-hour shifts often proved back-breaking for workers. By the time the 12,000 spindles slowed to a halt in the early 1970s, many workers had hoboed out of town looking for higher wages. The mill itself burned down in 1977, but the two-story company store and many of the worker’s houses remain, creating an eerie silhouette—and serving as inspiration to both artists and filmmakers—in Burke County.

Writer Nicole Callihan, whose grandmother grew up “on the hill,” combines forces with longtime Henry River resident Ruby Young Keller to create this compelling account of a mill village turned ghost town turned Hollywood movie set. Having gathered stories and photographs from former residents and their families, Henry River Mill Village emerges as not simply a rich account of North Carolina textile industry but as a true testament to a community that flourished even in hardship.

 

 

Anthologies & Teaching Editions

 
 

four american poets

 

Four American Poets is a collection of incandescent poems about the experience of living in, and trying to understand, America. In streetwise ballads and searching monologues, Philip Fried, Nicole Callihan, Jay Passer and Michalle Gould reinvent form and stretch the boundaries of poetic language in their quest for truth and integrity in a dangerous and fragmented world.

 

from medusa to the sky

THE EXERCISES IN FROM MEDUSA TO THE SKY grew out of Teachers & Writers Collaborative’s long history of providing creative writing programs for students in New York City’s District 75 schools and classrooms, which serve students with special learning needs. 

First published in 2001, Medusa has proved to be a favorite resource for teaching artists—writers working in K–12 schools—as well as classroom teachers. Although the exercises were developed by Teachers & Writers Collaborative teaching artists who taught special needs students, the ideas in this book have been used as a starting point for lesson plans to engage a variety of young learners in imaginative writing.