GREAT NEWS! I’ve secured a reversion of rights to my poetry collection, Chameleon Moon, and the book has been reissued by Bellevue Books (February 2019). The paperback edition is now priced at $6.99 and the digital at $3.99, but, through Amazon’s MatchBook program. . . . 
My first full-length poetry collection, Chameleon Moon, was published by David Robert Books in 2014. That edition is now out of print.
About Chameleon Moon
Chameleon Moon includes poems of love, loss, awakening, and peacemaking. The first section, “Smoke and Mirrors,” contains some of my most personal poems. Though many are about the loss of loved ones, they also speak of how the dead go on living, always present in our lives. The second section, “Dawn in the Glass House,” illustrates a growing awareness of oneself and one’s place in the world. The speakers in these poems stumble forward, sometimes with a kind of blind faith, through bad relationships, confusion, and illogic in search of solid ground and self-understanding. It comes. As we are told in “Afternoon Rain,”
A woman holds back the truth of her life
as long as she’s able, then spills everything,
learns that she’s always been insatiable.
The final section, “Amends,” contains poems of reconciliation and acceptance. They are about perseverance and of finding peace and comfort in a world that often cannot give us the answers we seek. A life settles into a pattern, knowledge settles into the bone. In the final poem, “Directions,” the speaker concludes,
If anyone should ask, I can say this much:
Turn anywhere, and then keep going.
The gorgeous cover art is the painting “Moondance” by Michigan artist, Lauren Everett Finn.
Chameleon Moon
On some fall days, you could smell the fires
everywhere. Backyard leaf piles, rubbish in rusted
metal drums, smoldering tires at Ratty’s junkyard.
At night, smoke drifted over the roofs, seeped
into windows and dreams with news of bombed cities,
midnight arsonists, flames that licked slyly
along baseboards or leapt from kitchen cupboards.
Wind scurried ashes along the streets and gutters.
And the chameleon moon blinked its liquid eye.
We shivered in the heat, kicked free of the sheets
and pulled them up again. We turned to our lovers
and turned away at the touch of burning flesh.
Oh I can’t wait to read the whole collection! I love what I have read so far in the author’s preview. The poems are visceral, emotional, descriptive, elusive enough for the reader to interpret in personal ways…like a chameleon moon.
I am excited about getting my copy of Chameleon Moon. I have “Smoke and Mirrors” and have read it over and over. Toni’s poetry is a beautiful intermix of gorgeous phrasing, intelligence and insight; funny, at times, in penetrating ways. Her poems are a direct hit to your heart and mind; reading them over often unveils some new glimmer into a nuance you didn’t catch while at the same time, being poetry that is accessible upon a first read. This is exciting. Oh, and, love the cover.