Egg Money (Paperback or Softback)

T. Clear tends a handful of hens on a small patch of earth-her mission of care in a troubled world. In these poems, she watches and works with love, grit, and humor, hauling water and straw like a Zen nun, gathering eggs, and daily resurrecting the hen house. With generosity and a poet's keen eye, she offers steadfast beauty against dissolution. Let your heart be lifted: read these poems.

-Kathryn Hunt, author of Seed Wheel and Long Way Through Ruin

We hear their "maternal clucks," see the girls "with their high-cluck strut." The last poem, "Reasons to Continue," is a gem: "This one egg / bedded in straw, / golden-rose / in the middle of winter. / These three hens / fluffing the nest." Reasons enough to live long and raise chickens.

-Phoebe Bosché, Managing Editor, Raven Chronicles Press

Over her lifetime, Seattle poet T. Clear has always wanted more pets than only cats, dogs, hamsters, gerbils, and goldfish. In 2017 she made the decision to become a backyard chicken wrangler when she acquired three hens; and over the course of the next five years, added threemore to her flock. Th is chicken obsession ended with their untimely demise in 2022 by an unidentified predator. Over the past 50 years, her work has appeared in many publications, including The American Journal of Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Atlanta Review, Bayou, Bellingham Review, Cirque Journal, Common Ground Review, Crab Creek Review, Crannóg, Dunes Review, In Parentheses, Iron Horse Literary Review, Lily Poetry, The Mayo News, The Moth, Poetry Northwest, Raven Chronicles, Red Earth Review, The Rise UpReview, Scoundrel Time, Seattle Metro's Art and Poetry on Buses Project, Seattle Review, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, South Florida Poetry Journal, Tab Journal, Terrain.org, Thimble Literary Magazine, UCity Review, The Wax Paper, and What Rough Beast.She's a founder of Floating Bridge Press and currently is an associate editor for Bracken Magazine. Her full-length book, A House, Undone, winner of the 2020 Sally Albiso Award, is available from MoonPath Press. Visit her online at TClearPoet.com.

Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024) is her most recent collection and she has poems appearing in numerous journals, such as The London Reader, Peregrine, and Comstock Review. She lives in Oregon with her beloved husband and fur babies on the unceded lands of the Yaqo'n people. On clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.