Part of our summer my son and I spent with family in my Ye Olde Hometown. We ate organic foods. Socialized con gusto. And my soon-to-be-3rd-grader attended a local summer camp. His hands were slobbered by the purple tongues of giraffes, he watched vultures eat dead rats, he made animal-related crafts and, most importantly, he met kids for 5 event-filled days.

While my son was at camp, I wrote, beach power-walked, I accompanied one of my sister’s to her uber-exercise class and I survived. I ran a 5k with same sister. And survived. I tasted craft beers in the Funk Zone and wines from Santa Ynez. My older sister and I lounged in Adirondack chairs, catching the late afternoon sun in her California Nature Habitat Approved garden. All so very summer, my favorite season (except for when my portion of heat-socked Valley lunges into the triple digits–something that’s been going on since June–JUNE).

My husband joined us one Saturday. He brought a package addressed to me that had arrived at our house during the week. I thought it was the replacement pestle for our lonely, inherited mortar. And then this happened:

Oops–I mean, this:

Copies of my chapbook were in the package. Finishing Line Press did a beautiful job–they even incorporated all of my last minute edits. Thank you, FLP.

I am organizing a couple of Fall, 2016, readings. One in Los Angeles–it must be a San Fernando Valley venue, as my chapbook’s content is Valley laden, this overheated, tobacco-obsessed, sea of streetlights Valley–and a reading in my hometown of Santa Barbara. And one in my spiritual home of Kauai. Just kidding. About Kauai. For now.

Future posts will include the names of the poets I hope will read with me.

If you would like to order a chapbook, or, as I call it (like the English called theirs way back when), chappie, click on this FLP link. If you pre-ordered a copy (thankyouthankyou), the press assures me it’s on the way. I appreciate your patience.

Yours in chappies and generous blurbs,

PB

In poems of narrative and lyric complexity PB Rippey weaves the daily concerns we all share–love, work, children, family memory and personal history–into moments of quiet epiphany and redemption, into the realization that every moment is grace if we can see it. –Chris Abani, Sanctificum and Hands Washing Water

PB Rippey gazes beyond Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, collecting its history and hazy views into an elegance to be treasured through its tarnish. These poems are trail maps that lead beyond the Hollywood sign to reveal “California—a spine brown / as the air blurring scarred peaks.” In the Valley, if a lover confesses his belief in past lives as a dolphin, sea turtle, or soldier, she opens “I like it. How can I / not?” That narrow space between mystery and lunacy, “this pocket of breathy Eden,” teases discovery where “although / nothing is unfamiliar, we are shocked / to find it here…” The sprawl is a place of rose gardens and phlox, an urban ocean where Rippey writes, “I can’t take my eyes off the sharks”—a place where the wild circles just beneath the surface.
–Chryss Yost, most recently the author of Mouth and Fruit

This chapbook is a landscape of the earth and the heart, tracing geographical locations alongside intimate confessions. This is a Southern California book, a Valley book, a Los Angeles book, about the intersection between people and places, between light and despair, between now and what lies ahead.
—Millicent Borges Accardi, author of Only More So, Woman on a Shaky Bridge and Injuring Eternity