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What is the Beloved Republic? E. M. Forster, who coined the phrase, called it a "an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky." They are "sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke." Pitted against authoritarianism, the Beloved Republic is the peaceful and fragile confederacy of kind, benevolent, and creative people in a world of tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouthed bullies. Steven Harvey's fourth collection of personal essays, taking Forster's phrase for its title, can be read as dispatches from that besieged land. Here, in a country under threat of authoritarianism, riots, and insurrection, politics and the human spirit collide. The scope of the book is wide. Essays examine inherent bias toward Trayvon Martin, explicit racism at the Charlottesville rally, the commercialization of the Great American Eclipse, and the cruelty of authoritarianism. One essay creates a collage of scenes from the struggles for civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and international peace and ponders whether the arc of the universe is moral. In a second section, the essays take on solitary experiences including the secular spirituality of a mountaintop vision, the acceptance of death in world without heaven, the solace that personal essays can bring to readers and writers, and the bittersweet rediscovery of a mother's love fifty years after her suicide. Taken together these essays position themselves along the sharp edges of human experience where self, world, and words almost align-the bedrock of the personal essay.

Poetry can speak most resonantly at those times when the distance between our lives and death shrinks, times such as when a parent dies, and we relearn what intimacy in a family context can mean. Such is the beautiful intensity of Andrew Gottlieb's poems in this collection, written with crystalline images and mindful presence. I'm especially captured by how rivers, animals, and landscapes of the American West inhabit the poems as talismans for the inseparability of mind and nature. And for the mystery of how we find beauty while living on the edge of peril.-Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World and Stairway to HeavenThere is scant rhyme but abundant reason to get close to Andrew Gottlieb's Tales of a Distance. Intimacy resides in his far away as comfort winds its way into his wildness. Broken form seems his fix for convention. There's much to admire in Andy's artistry but perhaps most endearing is the invitation the words make to sit and absorb beasts and human beings, the out there and the inside, with equal ease.-J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place and Sparrow Envy With a pleasant density that is relished and an enacted physicality that is revered, Gottlieb's robust cosmology comes to us via field sermon and tourist canoe, via wheelchair fugue and coyote anthem. Everywhere there is rare sense of the poet having fully inhabited not only locations but his own "inner wild." What is gifted the reader, then, (through formal mastery, it should be added) are not mere snapshots but an elemental authenticity that grounds us, again and again, on the edge of the luminous void.-Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water and Ragged Anthem

Michael Schmeltzer's Empire of Surrender asks us to look, to feel-deep in the guts-the vibrating aftershocks of war. Each poem powerfully speaks to the ache of what it means to witness war, especially at a young age. Full of visceral lyricism and tender epistolaries, Schmeltzer dives into the intimate depths of war, violence, familial history, empathy, and lineage. This is a book that is not afraid to ask: how and why do we hurt each other? What is lost in such acts of cruelty? And how can we cling to kindness as resistance? In this complexity, Empire of Surrender returns us to the heart: "with each clang I hear the heart//quiet a bit more. In the great war I become cake."-Jane Wong, author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Books) "We have misplaced our gentleness," writes Michael Schmeltzer in his stunning collection, Empire of Surrender, where he brilliantly weaves tenderness, vulnerability, and love into a realm of war and brutality. Rooted in history and family, these poems do not hold back, fearless and poignant, they ache to be read more than once-"We are hostage to sorrow./Lay down. Rest your head./We can be each other's pillow." Schmeltzer is a voice I need and the world needs. I can't remember the last time I have been so taken by a collection; Michael Schmeltzer has written the best poems of his life, make no mistake, this book will open you in the very best ways.-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press) In these harrowing poems, Michael Schmeltzer meditates on the failures of empire, on war and cruelty, on the fragility of goodness. This book is steeped in brutality and horror, yet the voice that speaks these poems is above all humane, tender, filled with wonder. "What weapon," Schmeltzer asks, considering the sharpness of axes, "can be made of me?" It is a complex question in a world that overwhelms anyone who imagines the end of violence as "pushing a pin back into a grenade." At the same time, it elevates the power of our words, rendering them urgent and vital. This is an important book for our age of war and empire, one that discovers in the individual consciousness both truth and the potential for good.-Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction (Four Way Books)

Gigot's Feeding Hour deftly reimagines motherhood and devotion in the most tender of ways. This book will remind you how to care and be cared for. I'm so smitten with these love poems that dare promise a possible landscape where "...we can finally have everything, be everything we are called to be; Ourselves, in our own parade. Riding the elephant in the room, back and forth between home and away." -Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic and World of Wonders It might perhaps come as a surprise that a book immersed in the experience of motherhood-carrying, birthing, and raising a child-would also be so replete with hunger. But motherhood is all about the mutual desire of bodies and their ability to sate our endless thirst: the mother's body, the child's, and, in Jessica Gigot's new collection, the earth's, as well. From new lambs to tulip bulbs, from pelicans to pink moons, these poems are a meditation on the world's generous offerings. These tender poems, like bare-rooted, spare-spined saplings waiting to be planted, possess the delicate heft of haiku and a heavier weight, too-that of all the promising leaves those trees will someday bear. As Gigot says, "what we care for comes / back to us in hard / and mysterious ways."-Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms and The Keys to the Jail Jessica Gigot tells us "the earth laughs in grass," as she composes a poetry of hard-earned joy sewn in the fertile soil of motherhood and farming. A shepherdess, Gigot speaks with authority about the sacrifices of care, the shared happiness and grief that braid like an old rope around the life she has chosen. There is magic in this collection as the poet "dreams herself into the bodies of these sheep" and tells us about the changing landscape, strands of past and present, the possible futures that her own pregnancies remind her still await. She proclaims, "I sing to / The one I am welcoming to this strange world," and her poems are an openhearted host for lucky readers like us.-Todd Davis, author of Native Species and WinterkillThe Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield said, "everything has a beginning and an end. Make peace with this and all will be well." In Jessica Gigot's Feeding Hour we encounter this basic truth again and again. What can one animal teach another about the harsh hours of labor, mothering, and letting go? How much are we part of a universal family of beings? As Gigot states our lives are "...separate / and also glaringly interwoven." As a farmer engaged with the life cycle of her sheep on a daily bases and her own experiences of motherhood Gigot turns a keen eye on the vacillations of birth, growth and departures evident in the instinctual nature of all animals. These poems reveal that "life spawns more life/ and what we care for comes/back to us in hard and mysterious ways."-Tina Schumann, author of Praising the Paradox

Vanish is exquisite, painful, tender -- a book of ghosts – mother, father, friends, lovers, intermingled with the ghosts of the poet’s earlier selves. Kevin Miller takes on difficult topics about family, aging, and love, his voice embodying a cherished privacy, while generously giving clarity to our own lives. These masterful poems feel like sacred stones, concentric, smooth, each word solid, needed. For anyone who has been in a long relationship, his poems on marriage are so honest they awaken us to, and we find humor in, our own daily reckonings on devotion. Vanish begins with lost memory “this tremor of fear/when the ripples left by the stone fail to reach the edge, and the pond is a space as dark as swallows….” However, it becomes the threshold where with heartfelt exploration, Miller gives us poems that are superb and passionate, as we search our way with him through his fine intellect and blazing images.—Nancy Takacs, author of The Worrier, Juniper Prize winner This collection teems with ghosts and their reckonings, and in their service Miller raises narrative to new elegiac heights in exceptional poems that both contain and release his quiet and unquiet dead. To the living he offers wisdom hard won; he celebrates the eternal verities of endurance, common decency and compassion, and unveils the mysteries behind the everyday interinanimation of friends, neighbors, family. This book, so rich with epiphanies, charts the songlines of Washington State, the magnificent watersheds and mountains and the memory held in her human communities. Clear eyed and visionary, this work is a triumph.—Paula Meehan, 2013 Ireland Professor of Poetry Turn the pages of Vanish, and you're met by beguiling surprises: quirky narratives, the heartfelt voice, jazzy soliloquy, and lyric meditation. These poems feel pressured into being by what remains peripheral: at the edges of memory, at the rim of experience. —Nance Van Winckel, author of Our Foreigner Kevin Miller’s collection Vanish exists in the quiet certitude of lives lived moment to moment, hour by hour and generation to generation. The poems illustrate that it is the varied stuff of this life that makes us whole; farmhouses, sparrows and mackerel, smoke from a cigarette, candles in a window, a question asked over dinner;  illuminating each small gesture and ache as they vanish into time, but permeate the living and the land they occupy.—Tina Schumann. Author of Praising the Paradox

During the cold spring of 1942 in upstate New York, US government officials steal away German-born farmer Hans Müller in the middle of the night, leaving his wife and two sons alone and without explanation. Does Hans' odd obsession with his shortwave radio and foreign newspaper clippings mean that his quaint American life has been a lie? Or has the government made a horrible mistake that threatens to undo their family? Lucy Müller is met with furtive glances and outright prejudice. Her sons are bullied at school and confused by their father's absence. Hans tries to keep his head down and simply survive the camp's fences, guards, and fellow prisoners, as his frustration mounts. The Müllers each endeavor to redefine themselves and their places in society, and while some family bonds strengthen and others wear thin, the question of Hans' guilt or innocence looms over them all like a storm cloud. The first book in an ongoing series, Fertile Ground is a haunting drama that straddles both historical and contemporary fiction genres. Splitting the perspective between Hans and his wife Lucy, Fertile Ground speaks to both the mystery and pain of World War II internment experiences and the struggles and internal growth of a family ostracized from their small town.

Passenger pigeon. Carolina parakeet. Eskimo curlew. In this timely collection of elegies, award-winning poet Holly J. Hughes gives voice to these and other bird species that no longer fill our skies. If their names sound a litany of the hundreds of species we’ve lost, these fifteen poems serve as a reminder that their stories are still with us, offering a cautionary tale for the many species whose habitats face threats from climate change. In her afterword, Hughes reminds us that it’s not too late to learn from these birds’ extinction and take action to protect the species that remain. “Take note,” she writes. “These birds are still singing to us. We must listen.” "In poems at once heartbreaking and illuminating, Holly Hughes gives extinction a very personal face,” writes environmental editor Lorraine Anderson. “She makes it clear that the bell tolls not only for the fifteen species she elegizes, but for us as well.”  Recipient of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 2017, the first printing of Passings by Expedition Press sold out. Wandering Aengus Press is honored to bring this chapbook back into print and give the birds a voice again. 

In these deeply personal and intellectually curious essays, Heather Durham explores wild America weaving the unique perspectives of trained ecologist, inquisitive philosopher, and restless nomad, probing intricacies of the natural world as profoundly as she does herself. She wanders from New England vernal pools to Pacific Northwest salmon runs, Rocky Mountain pine forests to Desert Southwest sage flats in search of adventure, solace, authenticity, and belonging in the more-than-human world. Part scientifically-informed nature writing, part soul-searching memoir, Going Feral is the story of a human animal learning to belong to the earth. As one way to be the restoration architects of Eden, we can kindle a saving kinship with earth through the kind of sensory immersion, and resulting engine of discovery, described evocatively by Heather Durham's Going Feral. To go into the wild like this requires a kind of rich hurt that teaches viscerally, and Durham takes the reader through accounts of deep engagement that pay dividends in awareness, curiosity, and wisdom. She's not afraid to be afraid, not timid about the threshold to true encounter, and we are lucky for that. Read this book as a field guide to building your own agenda for going feral for moments of insight, and a life of change. -Kim Stafford, author of A Hundred Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared "Is this loneliness for people, or for earth?" To answer, Going Feral sets out on a quest conveyed in many small epics. These are the essays kicked up by a rowdy wanderlust. . . but also won in quietness and long attentiveness to the natural world. Durham might find that she belongs in forests or in deserts, on mountain peaks waiting for raptors, or in ferny, rooty hemlock hideouts. The payoff: She sees things. Dragonfly. Butterfly. Bunny-eared bat, bison hanging out in rural restrooms, a decapitated Bambi, and more cougars than anyone has a right to. "Who am I now?"she wonders, captivated. A reader could be stirred up here, could be reminded to wander a little (or a lot), could be inspired to shut up and hunker down and let the awkward perfection of the wild reveal itself. Something like hope could appear. Something like spirit. -David Oates, author of The Heron Place (Swan Scythe) and Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature (Oregon State) In Going Feral, Heather Durham pries our world wide open to expose marvels everywhere-frogs in ice, kites with bumblefoot, baby possums, a cougar in her path, a bat in her palm, heart racing, the smell of sagebrush, and the clackety clack of a train -and she's a marvelous narrator, too, full of gentle humor and deep passion, rueful and joyful, and always attentive. This book is a delight! -Ana Maria Spagna, author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going Heather Durham is a nature essayist and naturalist who holds a Master of Science in Environmental Biology from Antioch New England University and a Master of Fine Arts from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. She currently lives and writes in a feral river valley northeast of Seattle where she serves as an administrator at Wilderness Awareness School. Her essays have been published in a variety of literary journals; Going Feral is her first book.