Moon Tide Press, founded in 2006, is a publisher dedicated to showcasing the finest poets in Southern California. The press has released books — many of them first collections — by national award-winning poets, Pushcart Prize nominees, longtime reading hosts and gifted up-and-comers. Authors published by Moon Tide have featured across Southern California and out of state, been covered in numerous publications, read their work on KPFK 90.7 FM and starred in the press' own reading series at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.

Welcome to the online home of Moon Tide. Browse this site and you'll find all the press' titles, a calendar of upcoming poetry events around Southern California, options for patrons and subscribers, the Poet of the Month feature and much more.

 

 

Here is what literary critics across America have had to say about Moon Tide's books:

 

"Tide Pools, a new anthology of Orange County poets, captures a poetic sensibility which has developed there over recent years. I say sensibility because each of the poets here definitely has their own style, yet something unites them, and makes this a coherent collection. It incorporates the best of performance and literary poetry. … This is highly literary stuff, well-crafted and complex, but with an emphasis on clarity and conciseness."

—G. Murray Thomas, Poetix, on Tide Pools: An Anthology of Orange County Poetry

 

"It's hard to think of another poet who's reflected Orange County poetry in the past decade better than Mindy Nettifee. … Sleepyhead Assassins is an extremely satisfying read, the culmination of an escalating potential that is only now beginning to come into its own."

—Victor Infante, OC Weekly, on Mindy Nettifee's Sleepyhead Assassins

 

"W.H. Auden once said 'a poem is like a story … with all the boring parts left out.' Buckley certainly has many stories to tell, of birth and deaths, abandonment and murder. And she is a gifted storyteller."

— Allison Elliott, The Adirondack Review, on Kate Buckley's A Wild Region

 

"Carine Topal’s collection of poems, In the Heaven of Never Before, is a heaven rich in imagery. … Topal has the ability to focus on small moments that constantly surprise the reader. And so does certain diction. Just when the reader starts to feel comfortable, complacent, as if she or he can take the poem for granted, Topal will come up with a stanza such as 'An ambulance of mourners exits/ the adjacent room. Nothing is attached/ to their weeping but the low clouds/ above a tribe of black umbrellas.'"

— Laurel Ann Bogen, New Southerner, on Carine Topal's In the Heaven of Never Before

 

"This collection of 66 poems covers an eclectic range of emotion, character and subject matter. … These are the kinds of poems you take with you in your purse or shoulder bag because they can be read again and again without growing tiresome."

— Julia Bemiss, Poetic Diversity, on Carving in Bone: An Anthology of Orange County Poetry