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With Sober Ghost Jeffrey Skinner presents the reader with a kind of eschatology of the past, as well as of the future. He writes of visitations by the "ghosts" of a life's worth of people loved and lost, including father and mother, as well as previous selves. One of those ghostly selves is addicted to drugs and alcohol, and even though "present" Skinner has been clean for nearly half his years, the alcoholic self is a stubborn one, ever ready with an itemized list of the catastrophic errors and choices of the past. Nevertheless, the book retains Skinner's usual humor, as well as his unique, shaded species of hope. The poems leave the reader with a redemptive glow, in which the vastness of our ignorance is balanced against our joy in creation, and our joy in each other.

MAMMAL probes how the inescapable rhythms of our physicality govern our emotional hungers. We like to view ourselves as in control, but the reality is that desires we don't quite understand determine how we relate to ourselves, our partners, our children, our parents. Even metaphysical, spiritual quests are launched from the plane of the sensorial, which hinges on our animalistic need for survival. Intimate relationships, too, are at the mercy of our inborn-and often opposing-longings for both emotional stability and adventure, generating subtle layers of conflict with others that we have difficulty comprehending. Mammal sings from deep within these layers.The book is organized into three sections, each prefaced with a quote by authors whose voices are crucial to the text-Sharon Olds, Anne Carson and Elena Ferrante. Within each section, poems, lineated and prose poems are used to explore different facets of motherhood, pregnancy, and the body, without prescribing to obvious reproductive patterns. Rather, the book exists in a state of atemporality. Several of the poems are titled Week XX and feature a different number from one to forty, suggesting the gestational process, but these poems are dispersed through the manuscript outside of the established numerical order. They appear to signal our disordered, disheveled selves.The tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to explain (and thus attempt to contain) it are plumbed in MAMMAL's pages. No entity can claim credit for the way our bodies work, and as such any attempt to brandish the body as a weapon is baseless. Embodied experience is murky ground, at once the root and lofty branch of consciousness, but if we are to disassemble the narratives that are used against us, we must first dare to name them-without romanticism or preciousness.MAMMAL lifts the veil off romanticized motherhood to challenge the notion that sacrifice is a virtue. Its lush, multivalent verse gives voice to what is left unsaid in that all important space of the home.

"tommy noun." employs familiar systems of knowledge and construction-grammar, dictionary, myth, legacy-as anchor to speak to the death of someone too young. What happens when sorrow deluges the capacity, the rules, of comprehension? This collection attempts to write itself into understanding and grace, in the voices of the mourning and the mourned, both human and animal.

Brian Ascalon Roley's poetry collection, The Ice Beneath the Earth, is an exploration of the intergenerational effects of the violence of war, illness and occupation on individual lives and families. The collections' personas and characters, who belong to the Navarro clan of his previous works, live in the shadow of the intertwined histories, at times violent, of the United States and its former colony in Asia, the Philippines. Set in the Philippine diaspora in the United States, and in the Philippines itself, this collection spans the 20th Century and explores this history's aftereffects on the level of personal lives. The characters in these poems grapple with the challenges of disability, illness, and caregiving, as well as their effects on familial relations, in the context of the complex interplay between these countries' entangled cultures.

Curtis L. Crisler's Doing Drive-bys on How to Find Love in the Midwest is a lyrical poetic topography embodying his "urban Midwestern sensibility" (uMs). Through his uMs lens, his poems transfigure and chronicle the humanity of the past, present, and future of Black Midwesterners (and all globe-stompers)-transforming our dead and living into one sacrosanct body that traverses this earth with our surreal and haggard breaths.

Through intimate lyrical prose and fractured, nonlinear snapshots, From the Womb of Sky and Earth recounts a poet's coming-of-age through a maze of abusive relationships and mental illness, woven through with glimmers of fierce love and ferocity. Punctuated by meditations on mythology and the Maya creation story, Contreras Schwartz examines the journey to hard-won autonomy, resilience, and self-discovery through motherhood.Winner of the C&R Press 2022 Nonfiction Award

Rocketflower is a collection of stories about the burgeoning relationship between a parent and a child. Full of messy tenderness and complicated hurts, the mosaic shaped by these stories reveals a broader overstory that wonders what it means to be human. Narrated by an often perplexed, sometimes agitated, and always curious new father, each of these tales is a message pressed into wet cement, a sigil knifed into the trunk of a tree, initials tagged in spray paint on the side of an old delicatessen; language misused to get to the untidy truth of things. The result is a work that is earnest, raw, whimsical, and furiously honest.

"Gregory de la Haba's memoir is in the tradition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In a narrative that is engaging, insightful and precise-much like the drawings and sketches by de la Haba that adorn the book-he tells a story of artistic enlightenment, first through youthful attempts to enhance "the work" through life experience, and then, finding his muse within the people and places that matter most. Read this book to discover what it takes to be an artist, a friend, a husband-a man. Curriculum Vitae is a keeper." -T.J. English, New York Times best-selling author of The Westies and Havana Nocturne"Curriculum Vitae is a wild book, as eccentric and electric as the talented artist that wrote it. Fantastic." -James McBride, New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Water and The Good Lord Bird, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction"I don't recall the last book I read continually, maybe because they've all been dry nonfiction, as opposed to what Gregory de la Haba has done with Curriculum Vitae. Aside from What Happens Next in the life of a memoirist (wanting to know), I have to be surprised, at least once a page or so, by the language, meaning, I have to be thinking 'I didn't see THAT coming...' then this follows: 'but somehow it's just right-perfect' in nuance. This way each vignette becomes a story with an ending and ENDINGS ARE EVERYTHING. No ending, no story. Period. Apart from being an incredible artist, Mr. de la Haba is a natural writer and storyteller. Anyway, a great service has been done, but only for those who love life... no wait, not necessarily that.... but a service to those who have an intense INTEREST in it... it.... it's doings, the cause and effect of it." -Allan Weisbecker, author of Cosmic Banditos and In Search of Captain Zero

Doug is quiet and aimless when he meets Sophie, an extravagant, excitable artist. They live together on box wine, ramen and peanut butter until their world is fractured by violence. Eight years later, they rediscover each other as Sophie approaches a startling decision.Cloud Diary is Doug's story about Sophie and the shattering, transformative nature of intimacy. In considering the ways our histories can both scar and rescue us, it reminds us that the past is never simply the past.