"In poet and artist Elena Botts' new poetry collection: epochs of morning light, we see a shimmering, variegated new voice; we hear: "where the trees still talk to each other, and winter feels like a song..." (from When I have died we will be here). We feel the weather of her emotions; a contract with the ethereal and the visceral, as when we stand within the short but large poem: blossoms back to under the earth: "I felt your ghost move through me out past the Baltic as though you had been in my heart the whole time." In this sensual canvas, beauty never suffers from loneliness, nor the sublime. Each poem herein as Botts wanders memory and weaves tapestries of word worlds, reveals a true and original voice in modern poetry: allowing light to conquer darkness; darkness to defy the estate of the sun, and colors mixed in ways only an artist of the pen could fathom..." - Robert Milby, Hudson Valley New York poet, Poet Laureate, Orange County, NY 2017-2019

As you will discover Kate finds a book which begins her journey. You soon realise this book is not normal, it possesses great powers that she does not understand. As she unravels its secrets she finds herself in the past. She is in deep trouble; there is no escape from medieval Knights and Lords. There are battles being fought and lives being lost. 'men screaming and falling to the ground. Blood flying in every direction.' 'He swung his sword heavily at her it came down hard and fast and just missed her head. She swung back at him and her blade ripped through his chain mail just catching his flesh beneath.' The medieval time she has entered is brutal. She must fight to save her life and to find her way home. Along the way she meets many people such as Uncle Toddy and Cecil. Along with these new friends Kate finds her way back, but will she ever leave the past behind her. All is revealed in Epoch.

Books One through Four of the Blessed Epoch When mage Yarroway L’Estrella and knight Duncan Purefroy are both assigned to escort Prince Garith to his new bride and kingdom, neither is sure he trusts the other, but a disturbing secret and another ally forces the three to work together, in Ashes and Echoes. After Yarrow leaves Duncan and Sasha to find a cure for his magical affliction, in Ice and Embers, the pair are left on their own to deal with Duncan’s new realm of Windwake and Sasha’s former family of assassins. Sasha gave up everything when he chose to stay with Yarrow and Duncan and to not kill Prince Garith; now, in Iron and Ether, all three must face the consequences and deal with a threat to Garith’s twin kingdoms. In Cairn and Covenant, Octavian Rose was given a second chance thanks to an assassin’s unexpected mercy. Through the years, determined to make a name for himself and retain his morals while doing so, his actions will have much larger consequences than he could have ever imagined.

Epoch is the literature and art magazine of the Upper School at New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math (NEST+m), a public school in the Lower East Side of New York City. Epoch's mission is to capture with each issue a moment in time in the NEST+m Upper School literary and artistic community.

When Escape Becomes the only Lover is a continuation and crystallization of issues dealt with in A Portrait of Defiance. The poet deals with a broad subject matter, love in all its forms, spirituality; this spirituality is individual it is the artist’s spiritual world. He deals with dreams, voice, word, numbers, poet’s vocation, wars, language, etc… He is the prophet of his dreams, his world, his future… There is strong experimentation and innovativeness in the writing, in the text, in form, in style, in content matter, the writer is a discoverer, every horizon is a life horizon. There is the dissecting of that space where art criticism meets art mimesis, and this space is offered as the future of art criticism. The storyteller refuses to die thus the collection proffers escape as the ultimate lover who can help us deal with the insanities of our time.

Smeetha Bhoumik is an artist celebrating her deep engagement with poetry. Her main theme of work is the Universe Series, exploring the mystery, oneness and unifying energies of the universe in oils and new media, shown in national and international exhibitions.