"Through textured landscapes and vivid, bittersweet memories, Mary Lou Buschi invites us into a life in which "not everyone wants to be found." These restrained and tender poems which explore grief, family and growing up Catholic in the 1970s also speak to the riddles of life, death and haunting. In a world where "a Cardinal with one wing whispers our names" and where "white clouds, the size of Bowhead whales" loom in our atmosphere, what does it mean to love and to remember? Blue Physics captures the essence of what it means to "open your mouth wide when you bite the sun," to acknowledge the burdens, mysteries and magic all around us as we go on "aiming at some cold invisible moon," and even as we "disappear into a flask of light." Joan Kwon Glass, Author of Night Swim (Diode Editions, 2022)
Mary Buchinger's The Book of Shores is a meditation into the nature of being, one that recognizes that "there once was a self/ known only to self// who carried the sea/ wherever she went." The verses in this collection are both restless and still, formally inventive and thrumming with lines that are "always talking/ about more than one thing." It's a collection that takes risks to name the ineffable, to chart the topography of one's interior landscape, to "[l]ift its lithosphere/ as you would/ the lid of a chest" so that we might explore "within its rifts and/ escarpment something in there/ making new an immensity/ that will not diminish." -Brian Turner, author of The Wild Delight of Wild Things
Slip into this book like you would the halls of a gallery, except here you're allowed to touch. Try on mask after mask; see how they nestle against your face. Here, there are exhibits of your favorite artists: Frida Khalo, Leonora Carrington, Faith Ringgold, but also whole wings of virgin queens and armless goddesses. Rooms of writers like Vita Sackville-West and actors like Tippi Hedren. Women from stories you wear close to your skin: Titania, the Little Mermaid, Odette from Swan Lake. Caplan expertly interrogates and subverts the concept of the fe/male gaze: who is looking, who is being looked at, and the potency in that relationship. You'll want to linger in this gallery, even in the shadows. You'll need to return. -Dayna Patterson, author of O Lady, Speak Again
Seeking Grace is a verse memoir narrated by the mother of a daughter in a religious cult. Based on a true experience in the '80s, each poem reveals the choices and dilemmas of parents rescuing a child caught in an outpouring of words targeted to seduce, induce and ensnare
How does a family heal from brutal trauma? The speaker in Relative Hearts faces the burdens of both his namesake and his past by digging to uncover personal details while there are still witnesses to tell (their versions of) the truth. Having endured a world in which queerness equals endangerment, the speaker struggles to untangle his own survival mechanisms and come to terms with how prolonged physical abuse has shaped his, and his family's, identities. Propelled by longing to find a way forward without shame, these unflinching poems embrace the broken world with compassion and fierce hope.
The Observable Universe explores human wonder and temporality within the backdrop of cosmic and earthly observation. The poems move beyond the narrow confines of self into a wider frame of reference. Love-of people, of nature, of God-is also at the forefront of this collection. From the interior temples we tend to climate collapse to the Webb Telescope studying some of the oldest galaxies, The Observable Universe offers a glimpse into the world of a poet both lost and very much at home on this incredible planet.
In Hive, a book-length poem that explores the poetics of the apiary, Suzanne Mercury creates a meadow: a world, a microcosm, a universe which invites the reader into a renewed sense of the world."Drawing on Cornelius Agrippa's system of magic squares [Mercury] creates a complexly layered text that encourages multiple ways of reading it. Shot through with wonder and mourning, Hive operates as a divinatory text, by which random combinations of words and lines intersect to create arresting moments of fissured beauty. It is a work of lyric audacity." (Patrick Pritchett)"Graceful and humane, Mercury's poems draw out connections between living things, the breathing space between humans and honey bees, oaks and constellations, between the body's many-sensed conjoined impressions." (Andrew K Peterson)
Lily Poetry Review is an international print journal featuring poetry, art and flash fiction. In this issue: Dzvinia Orlowsky, Quintin Collins, Suzanne Mercury, Cynthia Bargar, Jennifer Martelli, Amanda Shaw, Robbie Gamble, Steven Cramer and others.
In Olympus Heights, poets Kevin Carey and Colleen Michaels reimagine the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology as contemporary neighbors in a gated community. You know them: overblown architecture, inflated ego, misplaced desire. This collaborative chapbook, offered up as farce, is the result of a writing challenge between two friends (and neighbors) during one long summer of the pandemic. Each poet would assign the other a god or goddess weekly. Whether as persona, blackout, dialogue, villanelle, or Instagram post, the poems in Olympus Heights call out the privilege, misogyny, violence, narcissism and folly of bad neighbors of this mythic class.
"These clear-eyed, haunting poems map complex and intertwining responses to the question Anne Pluto's collection poses about desire, endurance, and the search for home. This journey en-compasses worlds: personal family histories, the widow poet's grief, and explorations of the politics and brutalities of war, in particular regarding the experience of women, who offer witness and example: from Isis to Hevrin Khalaf, from Akhmatova to Szymborska. In her poem "Books," Pluto reveals: " . . . I carried/grammatic hope and the knowledge that women/are the ones who weave the remains of ruin . . . " Indeed. These are unflinching poems of reckoning, beauty, and repair. - Mary Pinard, author of Ghost Heart (Ex Ophidia Press, 2023)
A deeply moving meditation on place, space, childhood, fatherhood, and family, Going There is also a profound study of arrival and departure, natality and mortality, and gifts of inheritance-from Thoreau, Hayden, Yeats, Bono, Golden Age of Rome poets-and the earth, a verse made exquisite by Heinegg's sensitivity to mythic histories both ancient and futuristic, the "open secret of our solid dust," and the "domestic alchemy" of enduring love. Going There commemorates new life, grief, and the search for grace in timeless, tender poems "riveted to invisible worlds."--Virginia Konchan, author of Bel Canto
These poems, like an aquamarine, are transparent, iridescent, and evoke both sea and light-whether it's the blinding light off a surface, or kaleidoscope images spilling like waves in the rearview mirror. They hold the various facets of joy and mourning, and the spectrum in between.
"And there it is: beneath the title's light-fingered surreality (the book's signature tone), scenes of hardscrabble tenderness and sometimes unbearable cruelty, scavenged and placed ever so carefully side by side in memory's reliquary. And so it goes, too, in line after stunning line. What did Rilke write? Every angel is terrifying. A truth Jacob seems to know in her bones and one, reading these poems, we feel in ours."--Daniel Lawless, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry
Lily Poetry Review is an international print journal featuring poetry, art and flash fiction. In this issue: Marcia Karp, Yuan Changming, Suzanne Edison, Cammy Thomas, George Kologeris, Jeff Oaks, Mary Buchinger, Chloe Yelena Miller and others.
People Once Real redefines elegy. Elegy for the present of our failing democracy, our failing planet, our failing bodies. Elegy for the futures we had imagined would be. Elegy for the past of our forgotten lessons, for our dead that we must praise or forgive to finally let some part of ourselves die. Elegy for the self that ultimately leads Hoffman toward the grace of love that saves us all from emotional oblivion. William Blake meets Walt Whitman in Hoffman, a voice of unparalleled lyricism that is both utterly intimate and specific, as it is wisely oracular and mystical, with a density of breathtaking metaphors that truly elucidate the life and death, death and life of all things that matter in our lives. Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How To Love a County
Apocalypse on the Linoleum grapples with big stuff - religious and cultural identity, climate change, motherhood, death, history - with an unflinching eye and a paradoxical, active hope. Gutsy, raw, and bold, the poems often use a narrative frame and speak through a Jewish lens to encounter emotional issues. From the intimate details of childbirth to assisted suicide to protestors losing blood to alternate names of God, this collection exposes our relationship to the earth, our place in the universe.
Lusty, vigorous, zestful. It's hard to imagine our parents in the throes of passion, yet jinx and heavenly calling does just that. DuMar culls original text and graphics from love letters her mother penned to the poet's father during 1953-1954. From these letters mailed between first date and marriage, DuMar distills her mother's intimacies, anxieties, and endearments, engaging readers in the captivating dynamic of a couple falling into a 50-year future.
Monaghan's poems are a field guide for seeing our lives with tender clarity. Poems of Hollywood glamour, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, amd surviving romantic deception.
Ranging across the past and the present, Sterling, asks us to not only examine what home means to us but to dream in View from a Borrowed Field
Equally resonant as visual chants or textual mandalas, these 18 poems emerge from the international lineage of concrete poetry. Written during the pandemic in response to prolonged isolation and the perils of a world on tilt, The Palace Of Unbearable Feeling explores the materiality of language while addressing personal and collective issues of loss, right action, consciousness, and possible avenues of renewal. Built as verbal-aural-visual stimulants, the resulting multivalent constructions present a variety of opportunities for contemplation.
Part guide, part vagabond, part healer, part orchardist, part trickster, Archuleta's "researcher" shows what it might mean to lean into each loss as it comes, to search for an opening, gain entry, and from there commence inhabitation. From birth-really, the first trauma we survive-onward, the likes of grief and loss and sorrow none of us can escape, this work vies to say-so why not welcome them, make them sacred, feed them apple slices?
Arboretum in a Jar uses personae to evoke the fractured self that results from a traumatic childhood. The poet revisits stories and fairy tales, invigorating and reframing them in ways that transcend the traditional passive nature of their heroines. She challenges the tropes of childhood, innocence, and femininity.
With a generous embrace, Sarah Dickenson Snyder's poems offer surprising turns and compelling imagery. She explores "the intersection of want and need" on this "trembling planet" and decides Now These Three Remain: faith, hope, and love. This collection will invite you to admit the shadowy backdrop of climate crisis, pandemic, and political unrest, and still consider, "Maybe we all just want to make something sacred while we're here."Ellen Bass, author of Indigo (Copper Canyon Press)
The poems in Deborah Leipziger's Story & Bone are centered around connection, the forging of it, the strength of it and the loss of it. She writes of the connections between mother and daughter and between the daughter and her own three daughters. She writes of the broken and whole sensual and emotional connections between lovers and partners. She explores her connection with nature [especially flowers], with Judaism, with her body, her past, her intentions. This leads to strong, quirky and intelligent poems.--Marge Piercy, Author, Novelist, Poet, Activist, and Feminist icon
The poems in Jennifer Jean's new collection VOZ are a wonderful amalgamation of intelligent and historically aware formal pressures intertwined with an irrepressible joie de vivre animating the language and imagery (even when their subjects are difficult). The work here has such a living pulse, such clarity and warmth and ease in its expression, that I hungered for more by the end. A really wonderful book that all lovers of contemporary poetry will be happy to have in their collections.-Erin Belieu, author of Come-hither Honeycomb
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