Half Acre Press Publishes 'Paper Lanterns,' Sloan's First Volume of Poetry

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Gerry Sloan’s first full-length book of poetry, Paper Lanterns, has just been published by Fayetteville’s Half Acre Press.

Sloan is a professor of music at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he has been teaching for over forty years.

Zohreh T. Sullivan wrote that Sloan’s poetry “orchestrates a life of observation and attention, of figurative ideas captured in verse, and of love for the things of this world. It is divided into suites linked thematically and delicately by family, politics, history, music, love, and loss. ‘I think about the crazy / creatures we’ve become— / our constant contradictions, / predilection for metaphor— / towns named after conditions / for the lives we share and are.’ Gerry Sloan’s command of metaphor, tone and rhythm together with his keen eye for the contradictions of everyday life make for a powerful volume.”

David Sanders, editor of Poetry News in Review, wrote of the book: “In Paper Lanterns, Gerry Sloan doesn’t allow anyone a pass. With a calm and dispassionate eye, Sloan shows us all to be complicit and forces us, sometimes by wit and sometimes by presenting the world in the cold, clean lines of these masterful poems, to admit our hand in the creation of our own predicaments. But by the act of including himself in this, and because he brings us so close to the truth and allows us to witness it as he witnesses it, we are able to find there a kind of redemption, a kind of love as well.”

Sloan's poetry has appeared in such journals as Yarrow, Negative Capability, The Nebraska Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Christian Science Monitor, plus the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. An essay won The Missouri Review Preternatural Readers Contest in 1987, and he received the 1990 WORDS award in poetry, sponsored by the Arkansas Literary Society. He has also been a featured reader at the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective.

Half Acre Press is an independent press founded by Liz Lester, publishing uncommon Ozark writers slightly off the beaten path, and found online at halfacrepress.com.