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Seringo is an inventive sonnet series that builds completely original compositions around particularly rich quotes from Thoreau's writing in much the same spirit that ekphrastic poets let paintings inspire totally individual narratives. This ambitious system would be disastrous if attempted by a less imaginative or informed mind, but every one of these poems delights with old country idioms, anecdotes and aphorisms numinous with an observant negative capability beyond scientific details of umvelden without rejecting them. As sonnets, the cadence is profound with a light touch and the rhyming is impressively masterful.-William Hathaway, author of Dawn Chorus, The Right No, Sightseer, Promeneur Solitaire, Churlsgrace, Looking into the Heart of Light, The Gymnast of Inertia, A Wilderness of Monkeys and Fish, Flesh, & FowlCharlie Weld's poems capture the best of Thoreau's journal-the steady, meditative observation of the natural world until facts burst into insight, wisdom, and music. Weld uses language from Thoreau's journals and letters, as well as words from other naturalists, the way a birdwatcher uses optics: to sharpen and discipline the eye, to better see what's there, "to observe reality / without all the particulars being blurred." He uses verse-a loose sonnet form that snaps into rhyme the way binoculars lock onto a tuft of feathers in the canopy-to illuminate those moments when "chronology's scaffold falls away," and long study, deeply personal memory, and meticulous observation merge into one. These poems pull you in and take your breath away. -John J. Kucich, editor of Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land and author of Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American LiteratureIf you want to engage with Henry Thoreau, reading his books and essays is the first thing to do. Then a biography or two. But another excellent way is to read Charles Weld's sonnets. Did you know that the odds of dying of TB in Concord in Thoreau's day were one in seven-which are the same odds for acorn potency, something that Thoreau calculated? After reading Weld's poems you will know many things you didn't before-about nature, about 19th-century life, and about how to live-Thoreau's great question, and Weld's as well. With Weld you also get the pleasure of his distinctive skill with the sonnet. Solid, well-made, these poems have flavor, intelligence, wisdom. By all means read them aloud.-Howard Nelson, author of That Was Really Something, All the Earthly Lovers, The Nap by the Waterfall, Bone Music, Singing into the Belly, and Creatures

Robert Nordstrom's splendid new poetry collection, Dust on the Sill, is the perfect book to read on a "wind shorn / gin & tonic afternoon," when one is ready to contemplate life and its "color, like breath, on loan." In poems often wistful, always generous, Nordstrom coaxes profound meaning from spare and elegant lines as he grapples with big questions by engaging what seems small-bread and soup shared by a long-married couple, children boarding a school bus after summer, "the maple toss[ing] its leafy arms / in lament or praise." Dust on the Sill is a primer on how, across a long life consciously, gratefully lived, a person might learn to "greet[...] what rises / rather than chasing / what sets." Nordstrom's poems are beautiful hymns to living and loving; readers cannot help but raise their voice to join in.-Francesca Bell, Marin County Poet Laureate, author of What Small Sound I love this collection of wise and witty poems. They are filled with story and like all good stories, they are peppered with characters-from siblings to Super Moons to seniors having sex on Saturdays. There are school bus drivers and dogs (all poetry books should include dogs). As with any good story, Nordstrom anchors his poetry with a sense of place. Readers are moved from Ohio to Wisconsin to Oregon. There is a gentleness here, a questioning of the why, the way things are. And always the inexorable passage of time-"... how / time traps and releases, / terrorizes and comforts, / simultaneously, / like light..."-Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017-18, author of Ripple, Scar, and StoryRobert Nordstrom's latest poetry collection sparkles with lively similes and surprising metaphors. His poems are, at various times, humorous, serious, and philosophical; but always thought provoking. With topics as varied as love, marriage, dogs, darts, and bed sizes, Nordstrom writes in everyday language that highlights the surprises in the everyday lives we lead. There is something for everyone in Nordstrom's poetry. I highly recommend this book.-Ed Werstein, author of Communique: Poems from the Headlines

The Cosmos is Alive is a time-bending journey where the "cosmos is alive," a many-armed serpent of possibility and imagination. From The Lunar Kingdom to The Planet X Soap Opera, you might find The Milky Way in L.A. or make a pit-stop at The Moon Country Museum and Bar. We are gifted a "cosmic sight," a view of the Moon, a fresh perspective of Earth in its "pocket of light" as Outer Space "slavishly / pipes the unity of gravity into our universe." Bring your "alien heart" and "gather as one nucleus" as Gaboury gives us so many wonderfully strange ways to return home. -Jennifer K. Sweeney, author of How to Live on Bread and Music There's a new ultimate trip and Gaboury is our director. He'll fly us from a galaxy where we'll "trip / on some cracked dark matter" to The Apollo National Park to see "...a glass case / showcasing Armstrong's / first footprint..." Gaboury celebrates science fiction from its pulpy beginnings to its futureless present. His people are brown-baggers, miners, pulling shifts at The Photon Refinery with their heads "...swirling / at the intersection of host and desire / under the only sky" they will ever know. Gaboury's images and lines elucidate the collision of a space opera and a blues sung by Martian farmers. Gaboury dazzles! -Peter Jay Shippy, author of How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic The speaker of the poem, "Blood in the Cosmos," articulates the brazen project of The Cosmos is Alive: "I look upon the cosmos / like a body sliced open / by my eye of precision / asking questions / under constellations I praise." Gaboury's musings over space legends couple with a down-to-earth reckoning directed towards an earthling's concerns. Every type of unexpected flotsam washes up, as in Planet X Soap Opera, in which, of all things, "flat-earther / swam into the Atlantic, / seeking to breaststroke off the globe." Read The Cosmos is Alive and experience the thrill a mind like Gaboury's milking cosmic strangeness can summon. -Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach

Patrick T. Reardon is a tough Chicago newsman who writes award-winning poetry, a poet who hears music in the all-night thunder of a Chicago El, a historian of Chicago who archives its circulatory system of alleys, streets and neighborhoods, a spiritual seeker so open-minded that he still goes to church. That is why his new book of poems The Salt of the Earth is so damn tough, so rooted in the gritty heart of the city, and so profoundly spiritual. Reardon writes about "tax-collectors and porn performers and the drunk and near-drunk and an assortment of sinners, me among them, as if in a candy box." His book is about belief and doubt, its spine fixed on asphalt and its heart free in heaven. It is everything poetry is supposed to be.- Michael Leach, author of Soul Seeing and Why Stay Catholic? Patrick T. Reardon's poems interrogate the mystery of suffering. His map is an exegesis of biblical texts that move between the hapless figures of scripture, who like all of us, don't quite get it. Yet it is Reardon's own wild and compassionate map of Chicago's forgotten, lost, confused, all of us, that illumines.- Renny Golden, Professor Emerita of Justice Studies at Northeastern Illinois University and author of the poetry collection The Music of Her RiversIn Salt of the Earth, Patrick T. Reardon preaches, prophesizes, even pummels, but this poetry collection's spiritual core resides in a much more recognizable and real milieu than the scriptures. It is an urban and emotional landscape littered with the detritus of a busy, confused, often humor-filled existence. These poems mirror religious and poetic tracts in order to bring us into a world profoundly cluttered, everlastingly unjust, and beautifully incongruent; a world filled with our own mistakes and triumphs. These poems are required Sunday School reading for all of us: believers, non-believers, and those on the fence.- Donald G. Evans, editor of Wherever I'm At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry and founding executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

With vivid imagery and startling intimacy, Alinda Wasner's poems delve into the many experiences of love, not neglecting the edge of sorrow inescapable in our lives. And I love the line: "I feel an angel in my heart...."-John Gallagher, journalist, The Detroit Free Press, author of Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity and The Englishman and Detroit: A British Entrepreneur Helps Restore a City's ConfidenceThe poems in Alinda Wasner's newest collection, The Day Sky Is Also Filled with Stars: Love Poems for My Beloveds-refract the joys and connectedness of love through myriad "prisms of desire." Saturated with gorgeous imagery from the natural world, while ever aware that there may be "an undercurrent of darkness on the brightest day," these unabashed poems celebrate, caress, forgive, and invigorate. Through love's "first lick of heat lightning up the spine" to the "daily lunacy" of family life and the magical bonds between grandparent and grandchild, Wasner's exuberance and purity of spirit are unwavering. I especially love her moments of hilarity and the tenderness with which she weaves the "unending arc of happiness" we all long for.-Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Founding Director, InsideOut Literary Arts Project; Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow; Winner 2010 Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry; Author Escape Artist (2003 John Ciardi Prize); One Less River (Top 2019 Kirkus Reviews Indie Poetry Title)Alinda Wasner's superb new collection of love poems, The Day Sky Is Also Filled With Stars, will catch your "heart in the updraft!" Filled with sensitivity, hope, and passion, her themes and imagery create a deeply felt poetry that enlightens, enriches, and encircles us all, even in moments of loss and longing and pain. Her exquisite prose poem "Sonogram Song, the Aria," captures a "World so dazzling and so full of splendor!" It's just what the doctor ordered for these post-pandemic times. With words that lift off the page in a beautiful mist of truth and understanding, this popular, acclaimed, and widely published Detroit poet demonstrates throughout that life may have many twists and turns, ups and downs, but in the end, "All We Need Is Love." -M. L. Liebler, Michigan Poet Laureate, author of I Want to Be Once; Editor of the poetry anthology RESPECT: Poets on Detroit Music

For the Future of Girls is at once family album, inventory of memories, a reckoning with time, and a plea for love to last. Lisa Grunberger's vibrant and meticulously detailed poems lay bare Jewish histories where trauma, loss, and misogyny take both intimate and collective shape. These poems refuse to forget, and their refusal offers a light for our daughters.-Maya Pindyck, American poet and visual artist, Director of writing and a professor at Moore College of Art and Design.To the implacable presence of the collective past, Lisa Grunberger's poems adds the poignancy of a singular present continually slipping away, in poems that are pungent, often audacious, sometimes elegiac, laced with a sharp irony...Here, too, is exuberance, an appetite for life carried in the cadenced lines that, like a runner or a dancer, open the space their movement creates. These vibrant poems provide intimate access to the passionate consciousness of a contemporary urban woman, as her embodied, eloquent voice recovers the dead, engages our moment, and gives shape even to the unborn.-Eleanor Wilner, MacArthur Award recipient, author of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair. Lisa Grunberger gives us a perceptive eye in evocative poems in which an acute consciousness translates into perfect metaphors and surprising images. . . . These poems could only have been written by a woman, a woman deeply conscious of her condition even as her words soar beyond it. These are poems to be read and reread. I believe the years to come will bring us much more of worth from the author.-Margaret Randall, poet, feminist, photographer, oral historian, and social activist.

In Belonging, Wendy Hoffman focuses on a familiar American dialogue-the relationship between the Old Country and the New Country. The dialogue, fraught with silence and shame, occurs over the course of three generations. Much of the dialogue is physical and literally the food the generations consume. In her baking and cooking the grandmother embodies much Old Country Lore. Some of that wisdom is passed on, and, inevitably, much is lost-the tragedy known as "Time." We see in Hoffman's metaphorical flights and blunt perceptions (see her remarkable poem "My Public Life as a Piano" that nods to Bruno Schulz) women thrashing and trying to gain some meaningful footing. The emotional consequences are typically devastating and that is the pity and honesty of this brave book.-Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel In this moving memoir of three generations of women, Hoffman is able to conjure individuals and eras with single sensory details: we hear the "sigh" of the "empty little paper cups" as the box of chocolates is passed around, we lick the "slender cage-like bars" of the beaters, we feel the "knots of sand" squeeze between our fingers to make drip castles-and then the metaphorical significance sinks in. Even as these poems expose the "coffin" of marriage and its abuses from a dry-eyed stance, their imaginative leaps "cry for what might have been different." -Rebecca Starks, author of Fetch, Muse In the /Preface to Belonging, Wendy Hoffman's second poetry collection, the poet forecasts what will follow: "...my grandmother sixty years in her coffin/her rugged hands still rolling out strudel dough..." But she "whom they did not find fetching" will "untwist/their tangled thoughts." Hoffman does exactly that in her memoir-like poems. Grandmother Bella "had to leave Belarus, like all the Jews" whose hearts became "a tribe of terrorized birds." But the "sulfurous wounds" of the past reemerge in America. Despite moments of redemption, Hoffman concludes "I spent most of my life knowing the truth and being told something else." These poems celebrate her victory over that protracted deception.-Angela Patten, author of The Oriole & the Ovenbird and other books

Denise Sedman's poetry is both rich in original imagery and deeply felt in its emotions. Her poems give us a glimpse into the pain of living along with the darkness of truth. Her work is honest to the bone, and it's important for people to know what goes on behind the ruse of living. From her poems, readers come to understand that while life is not always paradise, it is not meaningless either because we all have a past that is never quite done with us.-M. L. Liebler, Detroit Poet, Professor and Editor of RESPECT: Poets on Detroit MusicThere is little sentimentality in this courageous collection that asks, Why doesn't Hallmark/ have a dysfunctional daddy series? Sedman filters memory through a lens at once distancing and intimate. She delivers the hard particulars of physical and psychological abuse with an engaging voice. It's an important narrative that needs to be told. This well-crafted collection is a gift to the many who've suffered at the hands of others. Here the past paves a road to a future where you are not alone. You'll find yourself rooting for the poet, and for women everywhere.-Diane DeCillis, author of When The Heart Needs a Stunt Double Denise Sedman's collection of poetry, The Past Isn't Done with Me Yet, feels familiar and in a few strokes of words she brings us to our knees emotionally. In one of my favorite poems the father lies dying at his house, in "The Jamaican Woman Zigzags a Broom Behind the Corpse to Make Sure the Spirit Leaves Along with the Body." A photo of the father as an altar boy is flung and smashed on the floor. His daughter finds a broom to spirit away the shards. Sedman's poems are personal and their short lyrical verses echo loudly. From these poems we learn what it is to be human.-Russell Thorburn, author of Somewhere We'll Leave the World

In If the World Were a Quilt, Charles K. Carter walks the line between monk and magician. These meditative poems stop time, pull us from the limbo of memory and hold us from the uncertainty of the future. They turn both mirror and projector to the now inside and around us, in all its gentle and tumultuous beauty, in all its genuine revelation, in all its explosive power as if to shake us awake, to tear down our walls, to say someday 'the sun will swell up / and engulf this whole planet' but until then have the courage to 'be swallowed up by pure sunshine'; until then, open up those eyes-don't blink-and 'be free.'-Bryan Borland, author of DIG, founding publisher of Sibling Rivalry PressCharles K. Carter's poetry collection, If the World Were a Quilt, takes readers on a journey that invites us to question the value of our legacy as contrasted with the life cycles of whales in Bahía de Magdalena, twisters across the Midwest, dinosaurs, generational trauma from parents, and heartaches caused by lovers. Readers will enjoy contemplating the existential wonder of Carter's brief but purposeful poems, replicating a similar level of intimacy found in Clifton's and Limón's poems. Carter's one-sitting poems linger beyond the page with the power to unite many who are 'seeking the love in a human's touch.'-Shareen K. Murayama, author of HousebreakCharles K. Carter's If the World Were a Quilt is a poignant reflection on the planet's forgiving nature despite humanity's destructive need to build barriers. Through an LGBTQ+ lens, this collection coaxes us to follow 'gentle whalesong' back to the sea, to follow nature's escapist music like sunflowers chasing sunlight. These poems illustrate the deep well of yearning we harbor as LGBTQ+ people, and Carter reminds us that even though we're 'suffocating on craving, ' we're connected through our battle scars.-Donny Winter, author of Carbon Footprint

These poems give an authentic sense of life lived with all senses alert to the mystery and richness that surround us. In The Yellow Sweater, Margot Wizansky, a poet and visual artist with an impeccable eye for detail, provides readers intimate glimpses into the landscapes of her life: childhood, long-loving marriage, her soul, its affinity to our tenuous underpinnings, and the landscape of one who came back from a near-death experiences with heightened sense of this world we're fortunate enough to inhabit. Her poems are funny, compassionate, often exalting, as in the poem "Exaltation: " "clear madrigals/ soaring past a multitude / of polychrome saints scaling the Gothic arches / to a place I've never been, / a place I might fly." The Yellow Sweater invites us to fly.-Grey Held, author of WORKaDAYThere is a tender ability in The Yellow Sweater to peer into the fabric of the people from whom the author has knitted her life. Margot Wizansky captures her parent's marriage, the complexity of their relationship, her father's battle with heart disease, her mother's later dementia. She is unblinking in telling secrets kept by loved ones and her own. She writes of reckless young love, and later her abiding love story. She reveals over four precisely crafted sections of narrative verse, life and death, and even the first gynecological exam. This full-bodied book even depicts the poet's near death and exalted life: "every day, the rapture of birds, / sunset approaching in red velvet shoes."-Eileen Cleary, Editor of Lily Poetry Review Books and author of 2 a.m. with KeatsMargot Wizansky's The Yellow Sweater is a song of love in all its forms. Like the titles poem's "Yellow Sweater," Wizansky's vision of love is warm and erotic, comforting and vibrant. From poems that reckon with the abrupt loss of her beloved father and the later slow fading of her mother, Wizansky creates "one long piece that [doesn't] ever break" leading into poems inspired by a lifetime of loving people and the stunning beauty of the world despite the risks that can rend us from our beloveds. These poems invite readers to celebrate human connections and, as Wizansky exhorts in her "Epithalamium for Meghan and Ben," to "Cast [ourselves] to love."-Elizabeth Sylvia, author of None but Witches

Raíces, Relics, and Other Ghosts is a lamentation for the loss of familial connection, and with it, the people and the history that are the seeds of identity. Using the life cycle of flora-plants, trees, and the complex network of roots that tie them to their native soil-this collection explores displacement. To lose a home. To lose a language. To lose connection to one's own ancestors. To lose a grounding sense of self. This litany of losses, mourned in Raíces, Relics, and Other Ghosts, creates a constant sense of absence. Explored visually, metaphorically, and linguistically, with Spanish and English entwining like vines, this collection is restorative, a reclamation of personal and cultural history that has been denied.-Jenny Irish, author of LupineRaíces, Relics, and Other Ghosts is an ecosystem where every poem becomes an organism working together to grow back a buried history. A history sprouting life into the hands of an "orphan Boricua" searching for belonging in Puerto Rico's cornfields, rebellious orchids, guavas and platános, as well as in the stories of loved ones no longer here. This is a collection of poetry that declares, "Our histories and legacies/ could be groves instead of the tools chopping them down." And before understanding the self, S. Salazar confronts and grieves lost land, language, and family ghosts, because "How I handle the past/ is how I'll heal." Witness how roots dig deep beneath the soil the sun cannot reach, working its way toward the top of a mountain with a voice demanding to be heard and seen despite what is lost.-Karla Cordero, author of How to Pull Apart the Earth

Thomas DeFreitas gives voice to his own wonder and worship in this collection that shows us "a metaphysical / Somerville, / where pigeons / recite scripture." The poems are prayers of joy and longing, where the poet dreams of "summer-limber dancers," "the Armory," and "a lake of grace." I know the places DeFreitas brings us, but in his poems, I'm greeted "with a mad patch / of song." His city-with its churches and church basements-is transformed into a "shrine more venerable than this grey," and is "graced with a trailing vine of flowers." The poems in Swift River Ballad revel in words, in "shame and roses, embarrassment and lilies." I will return to this place, "to thole, to muddle through, to thrive."-Jennifer Martelli, author of The Queen of QueensJoy is what Thomas DeFreitas brings us with Swift River Ballad-earthy devotion, spirituality grounded in the ordinary facts of Creation. Whether in his friendship-tributes ("Her Mind, Her Heart"), a dream-elevated celebration of Somerville, Massachusetts, or the sensibility seeing "hearth-gather, harvest-hoard, cider-huddle" in November's decline, the poet puts mud between the toes of mortality's Great Matters. This festival-feeling hasn't come easily, as we see from the title poem and others such as "She, Barkeep, to Him, Barfly." If he tells us, remarkably, that he does not "approve of death / Unless it is sensual," we have to imagine that he will and must approve when the conditions are right. So let us consider this, then turn back to the rejoicing of "My Belly"-"catholic and capacious ... brave with bombast." Let DeFreitas remind us that the swallow passing above our heads has come from everywhere.-David P. Miller, author of Bend in the StairSwift River Ballad knows where it is situated. Like a river, it flows along, at times swift, and others lingering. It remembers those who came before, persons public and private, paying each homage in equal measure as only a river could; DeFreitas is generous in his sweep and deep in his scope. This collection runs along the landscape of a life-from dive bars to church basements, from "Sweet Caroline" to the Cistercians, from Andy's Diner to Cooke's Hollow. In each reading, you will find someplace new to linger, some new twist in the turn, some new delight to discover, some memory that rises to the surface, recovered.-Christie Towers, author of and again i heard the stars

The poems in Lori Levy's chapbook burst with color, a world filled with the "scent of eucalyptus," "under skies pregnant with treetops/and the flapping wings of birds." Poems travel from a kibbutz in Israel, to Panama and Vermont, places ripe with pumpkins and yams and "the rattle of Mexican maracas." When a guest slices and plates a papaya for breakfast it is transformed into an unforgettable experience. Even the sadness of a relative sick in the hospital or a parent aging is gracefully accepted. These poems demand the reader pay attention to even "a whisper in the woods," all the sounds, tastes and especially the colors that make life meaningful. This collection dazzles with color and taste and vibrancy.-Carol V. Davis, author of Below ZeroFull of wisdom and experience, the colors in Lori Levy's poems explore a range of subjects in terms of hue, lightness and saturation. They surprise and delight like the refraction and dispersion of light through a prism. Whether she is writing about "the scarlet of crepe myrtles in LA," "a brown bird hopping on a garbage can lid," or "vines sprouting from the sand in the Negev desert," Levy offers us a kaleidoscope of successive reflections on the things that matter to us most in life. They speak to us of the importance of family and, from a wider perspective, of the need for tolerance and understanding in an increasingly fragmented world. -Neil Leadbeater, author of The Gloucester FragmentsI've been in love with Lori Levy's poems for years, and What Do You Mean When You Say Green? And Other Poems of Color contains some of her best. The memories in a blue/brown/pink mug painted by grandchildren, the allure of a red-orange sliver of mango, the majesty of gold in the afternoon sun...these poems paint portrait after portrait of love, pain, understanding, and absolution. Lori takes us from a kiosk in the LAX airport to a kibbutz sunroom in the Negev desert to a hammock in Panama. This poetic rainbow will make you smile, make you think, and make you grateful for this colorful world we live in. -Jayne Jaudon Ferrer, author of Dancing with My Daughter and editor of YourDailyPoem.com

James Allen Breitweser's poetry collection Trekking Downrange takes you behind the scenes of war and combat. His poems arise from his own personal experience and are filled with powerful imagery, true-to-life recollections and cutting satire. He writes about days that were "a treadmill of tedious monotony," questions why "soldiers merit less value and concern than the gear we carry," how sometimes "free will slips away," about the difficulty of writing letters home, "survival only by blocking/loved ones from thoughts" and many other topics. The poems retained my attention from the first one to the last. I know I will be returning to read them again and again.Tina Hacker, Poetry Editor of Veterans' Voices magazineTrekking Downrange is a marvelous and heart-wrenching collection of verses spanning the poet's service as a medical officer through the Persian Gulf War and the Global War on Terror. The idiosyncrasies of those conflicts are captured lyrically and with immense compassion, touching on the physical and psychic cost of the wars for civilians, enemies, and servicemembers alike.David Ervin, Editor-in-Chief, Military Experience & the Arts, Inc.

Now Before and Ever goes the title, unpunctuated to keep the temporal perpetual, just as life itself flows on without interruption; and just as this extraordinary book so exactingly demonstrates in poem after beautiful poem, each one a time capsule of poignancy and visceral memory. "The poem is a teacher / like earth it sings / mysteries into the skin," Holly Guran writes in the introductory poem. And everywhere that lyric instruction is driven palpably home with enormous subtlety and a profoundly heartfelt understanding of human limitations. In "Broken Lines" two voices speak across an ungraspable gap in the center of the page: "She and I walk on cups / feel porcelain shatter and cut. // We retrace, look for a pattern. / What did I say, was there a better way? ...// She misses her brother. / I miss my son." The lines break up-and then reconfigure themselves on the page in the silent tracery of mutual pain that leaves us walking on familiar and familial eggshells, yet fortified by every unflinching moment. -George Kalogeris, author of WinthroposNow Before and Ever reads like a love story. The lover, by turns expectant, ecstatic, bewildered, is steadied by her "team of flora and fauna." In Guran's poems, "the soil's integrity" is easily misread as the soul's integrity, so knitted are the two in this collection. With love and deep regard for the natural world, for family, for fellow humans and all creatures, this work acknowledges what disappoints and celebrates what sustains. The reader feels akin to the speaker in "Fallen Sleet," "After a sermon on miracles, I'm ready to cross the icy street." -Mary Buchinger, author of Virology and Navigating the ReachThe poems in Now Before and Ever can truly be said to be visionary in the way they transform what might seem to be ordinary observations of a plant, a place, or a person into luminous and moving portraits. Each time I read one of the poems, it reveals more of its depth and resonance, or as the poet writes, "like earth it sings mysteries into the skin."-Dorothy Derifield, author of Zero Plus Time

When I reached the final lines of the first poem in Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage, my mouth opened-but this was only the first of several jaw-dropping moments in Nadia Arioli's new collection. Their ekphrastic poems and lyric essays draw from paintings, the artist's biography, and a deep well of personal experience, and the results are incredibly sensory pieces, a book that feels like it might burst with grief, with love, with memories that are hard to hold alone and also difficult to share. This book is for those who have never heard of Kay Sage and for those who have, for those who have been very close to depression and suicide and for those who know someone who has-which is to say, all of us need this book.-Katie Manning, Author of HereverentKay Sage might be the most underappreciated and overlooked artist of the 20th century. Be Still makes a case for Sage's relevance and genius more compellingly than any work of art criticism could. Nadia Arioli's book fully inhabits Sage's surreal landscapes, with each poem providing a map and compass for navigating the aesthetic pleasures and unconscious desires that haunted her canvases. [. . .] Arioli crafts a fluid symbiosis where Sage's vision pollinates Arioli's words [. . .] By the end of the book, it is impossible to ever view a Kay Sage painting again without hearing Arioli's voice echoing through the brushstrokes.-Chase Dimock, Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine and Author of Sentinel SpeciesIn Be Still, Arioli channels the paintings and life of Kay Sage to explore the oddity, the beauty, and the danger of living. In these surreal and tender poems, the speaker can be "the key that goes nowhere . . . the list in your pocket, the shrieks of a maid." [. . .] Here things have teeth. But through all the pain and strangeness, connection is the most valued commodity. Arioli writes, "I am trying to learn tenderness," and these poems are a primer for the rest of us trying to do the same.-Donna Vorreyer, Author of To Everything There Is

Like Kate Baer and Sharon Olds before her, Katy Luxem takes scenes from motherhood and family life, and makes them into beautiful, magical things we can each hold in our hands and hearts. Her poems "blossom into their abundant selves," like the children she cares for so tenderly, offering us all immense comfort at the same time. Luxem knows from years of hard-won experience: "Love is a body that mothers in the dark, a salve for any painful thing." Every poem in this book is a balm for the weary soul.-James Crews, Author of Kindness Will Save the WorldEvery now and then you come across writing that stops you in your tracks and moves you simultaneously. These poems are progressive, yet timeless, with lines that will unearth you and have you revisiting over and over again. I found myself coming back to her words in certain poems often and letting them settle with their sharp and meaningful imagery. Every word has a place and has carefully been crafted in a way that feels like a deep exhale. A voice for women's triumphs, heartaches, and hopes. Honest and powerful.-Jessica Urlichs, Author of You Hung the MoonIn her debut collection, Katy Luxem holds a magnifying glass to the small, beautiful moments that constitute a life. These poems are rich with imagery and soft with tenderness, inviting you to step inside their world and look around. Within its pages, you'll be greeted by vibrant snapshots of joy, grief, love, and family, sure to resonate with anyone that's walked the unsteady path of this world. Until It Is True is a book that you'll want to read, reread, dog-ear, and then share with absolutely everyone you know. I guarantee it.-Caitlin Conlon, Author of The Surrender TheoryUntil It Is True brilliantly captures how it feels to love, to grieve, and to parent. This work weaves together the mundane with the extraordinary, the routine with the transcendental. A stunning collection.-Lisa Bush, Creator of Stories Within Us and Author of Teaching Well

Scarlett Peterson's debut collection, The Pink I Must Have Worn, is haunted and haunting. Through sharp and luscious lyricism, this intimate portrayal transforms the speaker's dead and disowned into a heartbreaking catharsis as she explores the thin boundaries between desire and addiction, silence and abandonment. Formally varied, vivid, and visceral, these poems disclose the betrayals of a traumatic childhood, but also arrive at stunning moments of compassion, erotic beauty, and the grace of nourishment offered in love. In doing so, she reveals the synchronicity between the past and present, as she does in the poem, "Metaphors" "Go back to the gentle, gentle creaking of the bars. If you close your eyes long enough you're still swinging."-Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of Desire MuseumScarlett Peterson's debut collection, The Pink I Must Have Worn, is a deeply moving reckoning with family grief, lineage, love, and violence. These are courageous, hauntingly honest, and commendable poems. Peterson artfully renders the heart-wrenching subject matter and ultimately offers the reader an experience of transformation, acceptance, and a genuine recreating of selfhood.-Andrea Jurjevic, author of Nightcall

In America many elderly people are made invisible, but the poems in D. Walsh Gilbert's collection bring one such individual vividly into focus. In poems such as "Mary's Disorderly Conduct," "Mary Opens the Window," and "Mary Faces Firebrand and Ember," we see Mary as vulnerable, stubborn, vivacious-uniquely herself. In "Mary Receives Treatment," she refuses to look at her wound or at the doctor. "Not-looking is an absence / which has held her together before." But the poet looks, and sees, and gives us insight into a woman who once lived an independent, exciting life in New York City, but now must find her way toward acceptance of a life lived, as one poem suggests, "in little rooms."-Ginny Lowe Connors, author of Without Goodbyes: from Puritan Deerfield to Mohawk KahnawakePoets are taught to notice and appreciate small things, forgotten and overlooked and invisible things. In D. Walsh Gilbert's [M]AR[Y], those things-Easter roses, antique mirrors, a room key-add up to the journey the poet's Aunt Mary takes from old age to assisted living, an entirely other province of life where things are often replaced by memories and the silence of waiting. But [M]AR[Y], with its astonishingly lovely phrasing and love of language, is also a gift from niece to aunt which, everybody hopes, will last a very long time indeed.-John Surowiecki, author of Chez Pétrouchka"Don't we all just live in a world // reaching for things?" asks D. Walsh Gilbert early in her poignant and powerful collection of poems about her Aunt Mary. Through exquisitely insightful metaphors and stunning images, Gilbert explores the losses suffered by her aunt, and by extension all of us, as she ages, moving from "independence to bruised // squirrel on the roadway alone." With enormous skill and attention to detail, Gilbert shows Mary's courage and resilience. This moving book is about the reality of what we will all face, and Gilbert's fearless honesty and unflinching eye illuminate each line, as she offers us the gift of truth about life and loss.-Edwina Trentham, author of Stumbling into the Light

All the sonnets from this collection highlight the many joys found in everyday life, from the people we interact with to the natural world that surrounds us. They are as uplifting to read as they are tantalizing when recited aloud.... This collection is a soothing experience sure to bring a smile to the face of any readers in need of a reminder that life is filled with promise.-RECOMMENDED by the US ReviewThis thoughtful and beautifully written collection of sonnets virtually jumps off the page and into your head and heart.Redolent with emotion and keen observation, each section can stand alone in strength and sagacity. But together in one book, this collection of sonnets is graceful and creatively contemplative.The writing style is intelligent, sensitive, and incandescent. Coupled with a robust vocabulary and a knack for creating vivid word pictures that virtually jump off the page and into your head and heart, this collection of sonnets is quite an achievement.It's a thoughtful work that's meant to be sipped and savored slowly, like fine wine. Indeed, readers are likely to return again and again for additional helpings of this finely crafted collection.-ReedsySonnets of Love and Joy, a collection that is a welcome uplift for these...times, when the effort to capture joy and love is too often replaced by angst and a sense of doom.Here lies respite from the modern crisis that provides existential relief and a sense of well-being. Here, too, is relief from the less seasoned free verse format, returning stricter rules to the poetic effort while demonstrating that it can remain accessible to contemporary audiences.[E]ach poem contains a grounding in landscape and a heart throb of emotional connection that inspects the various facets and incarnations of love and joy in the world.Sonnets of Love and Joy's diverse, spirited life connections reach out to readers to capture and describe moments of harmony, awakening, and interconnectedness with life and nature...the perfect example of how poetry's forms and rules remain relevant to modern living.-Midwest Book ReviewBuchheit sets himself up against some of the literary greats. It's a difficult task but there are moments of great beauty and exquisite insight in Sonnets of Love and Joy for which Buchheit should be applauded.Sonnets of Love and Joy collects beautifully crafted and unapologetically old-fashioned poems on a variety of subjects. Paul Buchheit's skills as a poet are clear, and traditionalists will find much to treasure in this contemporary call back to the poetry of the past.-Indie Reader