Currently soliciting submissions for “A Year of New Mexican Poetry.” Submit here.
Currently accepting abstracts for “(Re)Reading the World: A Festschrift Celebrating 50 Years of Place as Text and the Legacy of Bernice Braid.” Submit here.
Unfiltered: A Cancer Year Diary
Amaris Feland Ketcham starts her daily diary comic without knowing anything about the cancer diagnosis awaiting her partner. Yet even in the thick of his tests and surgeries, she chronicles her cats and her meals, they take hikes, and the world-at-large somehow continues on. This graphic memoir shares the ups and downs of their cancer year together with honesty, humor, and always a sense of resilience.
Published 2023
“This wonderful book flips your expectations about what a graphic memoir can be and do.”
– Kelcey Ervick, author of The Keeper: Soccer, Me, and the Law that Changed Women’s Lives
“Funny, poetic, and wholly charming-this book has it all.”
– Teresa Wong, author of Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression
“This grounded journal of a year of uncertainty, life, death, and hope is a must-read.”
– MK Czerwiec, RN, MA, “Comic Nurse” at graphicmedicine.org
Buy your copy of Unfiltered: A Cancer Year Diary
Best Tent Camping: New Mexico
Whether you seek a quiet campground near a fish-filled stream or a family campground with all the amenities, grab Best Tent Camping: New Mexico. It’s an escape for all who wish to find those special locales that recharge the mind, body, and spirit. This guide is a keeper.
GLITCHES IN THE FBI
The truth is out there… and it’s in this collection. Amaris Feland Ketcham uses the technique of found poetry-limiting her word bank to the transcripts of episodes of The X-Files-to craft entirely new and vivid poems. Indebted to the show’s writers for using such interesting and precise words, this collection retains a sense of mystery and inquiry, mirroring and adapting big ideas and issues, and a smattering of references and slang that make them read like a kind of 1990s Homeric.
2020
“In these poems, Amaris Ketcham repurposes words from a television show of the last century, whose mythology told of unknowable forces darkening a world alienated from the truth. The result is poetry that invokes the alienation of our own day, in broken strands of recombinant pop culture DNA: psychics and strip malls, little green men and forlorn motels, mutants in the shadows of bureaucracy. Walt Whitman among the Reticulans, home at last. But the dream tapestry woven by these poems transcends their provenance in the dark imaginings of American television long ago. They breathe on their own. They are songs for the republic of night now being born. Their rhythm and urgency cast a spell, beckoning at mysteries beyond words. And the possibility of grace.”
–Ed Merta, microscopic cog in the catastrophic plan; contributing author, Suez-Deconstructed: An Interactive Study in Crisis, War, and Diplomacy
“Amaris Ketcham, juggling bright images triggered by dialogue from The X-Files, turns her poet-play on such diversity as aliens, foxes, Lake Okoboji. Bizarre or warmly ordinary, her words take sudden rights, lefts, and lift-offs. ‘You’re just getting motion sickness / from enlightenment, ‘ she writes, as she shows us that portals to other worlds-or this one-are anywhere they open.”
–Betsy James, Roadsouls, Finalist, World Fantasy Award
“Amaris Ketcham is no stranger to experimental writing. Her latest work, Glitches in the FBI, is an ingenious collection of poems utilizing re-purposed script dialogue from the iconic and surreal television program, The X-Files. The select script fragments, carefully re-assembled in free verse form, create a ‘third stream, ‘ a new form based on the originality of idea and organization.”
–Kevin Zepper, Moonman
Buy your copy of Glitches in the FBI
A POETIC INVENTORY OF THE SANDIA MOUNTAINS
A lively exploration of history, memory, and identity within manmade and natural landscapes, A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains illuminates the Southwestern wilderness through lyric research. Playing with the concept of a “scientific inventory” of a location’s biodiversity, this chapbook catalogues the flora and fauna of Albuquerque, New Mexico, its urban wilds and surrounding mountains, river, and mesa. Against a graffitied, adobe backdrop, the desert ecosystem reveals itself: hummingbirds fly drunkenly after slurping fermented nectar; cottontails slip through the space-time continuum; and chollas guard sleeping beauties.
Amaris Ketcham’s A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains does exactly what I want a book of poems to do–surprise me, enthrall me, take me away from the expected, the work-shopped, the writing school monotone where every poem is “professional” and virtually interchangeable. Her poems have what William James says makes “life significant.” As he said in a word, “zest.” In this poetic inventory, the human and the “natural” are no longer forced into faux distinctions. Ketcham’s poems, like wild landscapes and cities, are to be experienced as one would blaze a trail, keeping track of scat and paw prints and herbs and hobos, noting each leaving of identity and imagination. Their richness and amazements make just one reading impossible.
–V. B. Price, author of Broken and Reset: Selected Poems 1966-2006
Grab this chapbook and follow Amaris Ketcham into the field. Don’t worry about getting these pages dirty. Here we find bears, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, aspen and pine and juniper, amid the wilds of Goodwill, drainage tunnels, strip malls on bulldozed Indian graveyards, and a potholed Route 66. Plastic bags bloom off sagebrush as drunk hummingbirds swerve. As Ketcham reimagines the genre of the scientific inventory in poetic terms, she locates wilderness wherever she is and takes us along on her trek. The trail doesn’t lead straight through the Sandia Mountains, rather retraces time through place. “When am I?” she writes, and “What does the next switchback promise?” Read this promising writer to inhabit this landscape that bewilders, to be wilder, leading us astray as a hawk’s “home untethering.”
–Gretchen Henderson, author of Ugliness: A Cultural History and The House Enters the Street
Amaris Feland Ketcham leads us through Southwestern wildernesses, suburban sprawls and urban ruins with the humor, wonder, local knowledge, and companionability of a talented guide. These brilliant poems remind us ours is one world, shared with the critters and trees–yes–but also with our exes, teen rebels, Chevy trucks and graffiti. As powerfully as any young poet I know, Ketcham shows us what it means to be at home in this confusion.
–Jonathan Johnson, author of The Desk on the Sea