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The fifty-three poems in Deciphering the Desert by Susan Cummins Miller, award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, arise from the mysteries that surround us in the intersections of landscape, science, history, prehistory, and Time. These poems excavate what lies behind, beneath, and beyond surface observations and experiences-the extraordinary in the commonplace-and they capture the healing power and renewal to be found in the desert West.

Anyone familiar with autism knows that it consists of a devastating spectrum of developmental disorders that affect a child's ability to learn, communicate and socialize. Connie Post's And When the Sun Drops relates the tale of one mother's experience of her son's autism. In "By the Window," the speaker addresses her son about "...the dawning of other worlds / of prisms that would take you from us / that would take language from you". Post's poems are focused, direct and unyielding. Her language expresses strong sentiment, but never descends into sentimentality, allowing the reader to feel authentic emotions. I shed more than a few tears over these beautifully wrought, honest poems. This collection is for anyone who desires to, as Post puts it, "...make an origami out of / any shape of loss / and make it somehow / feel like gratitude".-Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of A New Red, Publisher of Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook SeriesIn compellingly candid and essential language evoking emotion or exhibiting experience, Connie Post's poetry supplies necessary words describing the relationship with her autistic and speechless son, engaging readers who accompany them on their journey down "the long curve of silence."-Edward Byrne, Editor, Valparaiso Poetry Review

Exploring the depths of family, love and loss with honesty, lyricism, and humor the poems in Wet Underbelly Wind travel the landscape of the heart in this debut chapbook by Nicole Farmer.

Lois Baer Barr's Tracks: Poems on the "L" announces an exciting new voice. Her poems are attentive to the electrical details of urban life, which she observes on her journeys across Chicago's "L." From these details, Barr constructs a portrait of Chicago as it is today: a city marred by violence and by grotesque wealth; a city whose beauty is urgent and extraordinary for those who care to look at it closely. This is a poetry written in the public square and for it-a poetry that proposes, through the precision of its attention, to help us see each other more clearly.-Toby Altman, Author of Discipline ParkThe movement of the train meets the movement of life in the poems of Lois Baer Barr's Poems on the "L", and we readers are Barr's fortunate passengers, carried through a range of Chicagoan experiences in fresh, thoughtful, and indeed poetic ways. These poems carry a sense of joy of the communal journey-and what it means to never stop being surprised by our time with others, as so beautifully summed up in words from the final poem of the collection "Fail Better II": I want to ride the "L" again- / share air space, delays, rattles / and hums. Sway with other riders. / A poetry petri dish, the "L" / is so full of people's stories, / you cannot fail to find one.-Andrea Witzke Slot, Author of The Ministry of Flowers (Valley Press) and To find a new beauty (Gold Wake Press)What a wonderful read!! Inventive, touching, funny, Tracks: Poems on the "L" is Lois Baer Barr's love letter to Chicago and to her life in late middle age. She takes us on a journey through physical and emotional landscapes with an empathy and expansiveness that leaves her readers changed, as she is changed by her encounters with the people she meets.-Ellen Birkett Morris, Author of LOST GIRLS

Torch the Empty Fields reveals the voices of mothers, daughters, friends, partners, and even the earth Herself. Examining personal and social loss and celebrating survival, these are wry and graceful poems of witness and new beginnings, a reflective collection inspired by Virgil's poem of nature and the land, The Georgics. When you torch the fields, the new growth is lush; the narrative poems in this deft work explore our burning struggles and the wonders of life.

"Snake and Eggs" was a finalist in Finishing Line Press's New Women's Voices Competition. The book teems with images from the natural world to describe a woman's interior, emotional landscape while exploring complex themes of motherhood, grief, mental health, and ancestry.

How could I resist a book titled Feather & Bone? In the wake of a horrific act of human violence, these poems meditate on daily violences in the natural world. Vultures circle, hungry birds plunge into windows, and an owl spends the night cutting up his victims. A stranger lurking in the shadows reminds the speaker that she is also prey to forces beyond her control. And yet, these are not poems of unrelenting despair, but a life-affirming celebration of the "thumping heart of it all." Braiding images of beauty and brutality, poet Kathleen Williamson finds music in the inevitable cruelties of survival.-Jackie Craven, author of Cyborg Sister, Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters, and others Part field guide, part confession, Kathleen Williamson's Feather & Bone studies human nature with the careful eye of an ornithologist. From brooding to migration, Williamson asks us to re-examine our relationship not only to the natural world but to the ties and traditions we dare call humanity. These poems are anything but hollow-boned, and yet, page after page, they take flight.-Stacey Balkun, author of Sweetbitter

These deceptively laconic poems combine the cool diagnostic eye of a veteran nurse-practitioner with unexpected connections to the mysterious pulse of an enveloping natural world and the grief, loss, and risks that smolder beneath each day's surfaces. In the title poem, for example, the speaker watches her mother brush out her beautiful hair, "sparks flying," before coiling it back in a monochromatic bun because "it takes time for a girl to learn/ . . .colors can alert suspicious eyes." In "What We Didn't Know," perhaps this collection's strongest poem, the aftermath of a suicide is casually captured: "What we didn't see/was the suitcase . . .of empty vodka bottles/. . .under a bed/or [practice] holes in the ceiling/made by the rusty revolver/stashed under a pillow/biding its time until/we kissed her goodbye . . ." All in all, a suite whose echoes keep unfolding.-Michael H. LevinMary Sesso's work packs a punch of both wisdom and emotion. She has lived life well enough to evaluate her memories with intelligence, but she is anything but passionless. In her adept short poems, she gives the reader a satisfying mix of wit and feeling; her past life as a nurse shows in these works-the precision of a skilled practitioner. I cannot recommend her poetry highly enough.-Donald Illich

The poems of Allison deFreese are kaleidoscopic, prismatic: all that is familiar or ordinary is spun through new tubes of perception and what is humdrum becomes as unforeseen and lovely as slivers of loose, colored glass in light. In these poems guitars are filled with helium, a song is "a whole note floating / like a U.F.O.", and [in her forthcoming book of flash fiction] the poet herself reincarnates as a cake at a catfish wedding. Of course they are. And of course she does. And if the genius of these poems originates in invention, it culminates in a painstakingly fine-grained artistry. These poems dazzle and blaze.-Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Hausfrau and Would-Land"And an upthrust of feathers / before the downpour" begins Allison deFreese in her book Nurdles and Other Poems. The "downpour" keeps coming in the 21st century, and also the consolation of essential elements. Rivers, swallows, grass-all these twist among the losses, and the poet finds new ways to understand how language can heal. Don't miss this book of innovative language and wisdom.-Denise Low, winner, Red Mountain Press Editor's Choice Poetry PrizeAllison deFreese's poems arrive like visionary letters from the pandemic lockdown. Alternately lush, keen-eyed, and exacting, she takes everything in: floods, forest fires, even the "mosquito larvae / twitching / with the moon." Over and over, she returns us to the natural world with all its questions and consolations. "The sunflower," she writes, "is already the sun." Allison deFreese is a singular talent-in her hands, anything is possible.-Bruce Snider, author of Fruit and The Year We Studied Women

This chapbook renders the loss of mothers through haunting sweeps of images rooted in childhood and hospital rooms, churches and birds. The poets' voices, augmented by those of two siblings, are amplified by the poems' musical invocations-ode, hymn, recitative. As this chorus intones "the gap in space where you should be," a refrain that echoes through each poem, Malone and Suzanne deliver a collection that blends aria and elegy.-Annette Sisson, author of A Casting Off (2019, Finishing Line Press) and Small Fish in High Branches (2022, Glass Lyre Press)The etymological root of the word ghost is the Old English gast, which in part means breath. And while we might now think of ghosts as the absence of breath, the mothers in these poems very much pulse and breathe through and in between the language and specific moments Dana Malone and Lauren Suzanne exquisitely offer us. Sometimes the poems sing Gospel tunes. They hush at times, and sometimes they speak in the language of childhood query and adult unknowing. They rest between earth and the veil, between night and sunrise, between tears and not being able to cry, between shoulder blades. Which is to say, this work-like breath-pulls and releases and leaves the reader in the tension of reaching toward the moon of our longing and digging into the wet soil of our own griefs and loss. Malone and Suzanne invite us into intimate last moments and lasting memories, leaving us more aware of our breath and being. You will unfold with these poems as they allow the often unspeakable to find its way to language, and you will return to their compelling explorations of grief again the way you might return to visit a grave. These poems are a necessary reverence, a pouring out of language libations, a kneeling at the tombstone of lament in awe of every memory that keeps the breath of those who have left us somehow nearer.-Ciona Rouse, author of VantablackMother, Grave, Ghost is a beautiful and emotional collection of poems by Dana Malone and Lauren Suzanne. I have been moved more than once by these poems because they are from a daughter's point of view about losing her mother. There are the precious childhood memories, the pain of the loss and life afterward. My mother has been gone a year-and-a-half now and I really connected with these poems. I miss my mother so much-every single day-and losing her has been the hardest part of my life. It never gets easier for any of us who have experienced this loss. But love never dies. Our mothers are still with us. Mother. Grave. Ghost. is a reminder of that. Thank you, Dana and Lauren.-Donna Frost, Touring singer/songwriter/recording artist, www.donnafrost.com

Elizabeth McCarthy's chapbook, Winter Vole is a charming collection of poems that makes one long for a comforting trip to the countryside. It was no surprise to find out that she makes her home in beautiful Vermont. With lines like "The heart of the house, smelling of history and time," "It would be ours to live in...after we evicted the racoons," or "The old woodstove smiles and snaps/Embers glow in smoldering memories," her poems reflect a deep relationship with country and nature. Whether you're "Walking into Fall" or "Zooming with Thoreau," you will find joy in McCarthy's scenic journey. -Lylanne MusselmanWhat a master of metaphor, as she compares dust, clutter a dog's sense of smell and a poem. What a master of imagery with a woodstove, a bog, a turtle, wildflowers, egret, worms and deer. Not only are these poems masterful,; they are imaginative and skillfully crafted.-George LongeneckerDelightful. These poems walk through New England's seasonal fauna and flora (squirrels, worms, dogs, birds, mice, lobsters...) and knock on the door of a farmhouse. They find their home there, where the leaves give up their green in the fall and frozen ivy makes its desolate climb through winter. Come spring, you will wonder how life would be if we could "raise children like wildflowers" and believe that, yes, a dog can be a Buddhist.-Elizabeth Boquet

Like the best songs, Julie Choffel's The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love is a poem fueled by desire. To have "so many / ways to say I want" is dangerous and selfish, we've heard: we should be content; we should be grateful. But "women are never / not hungry," Choffel's mother-speaker insists, aware that her life plays out as two tracks in the same song-the material world of meals and routines as well as the imaginative realm. Poetry is this "parallel universe," these "other zones," this "floor / under the garbage," these subterranean places where we meet to tend to different hungers. In Choffel's hands, these spaces bloom with deep seeing and wry humor: "there I go / again trying to liberate us from what we don't know." The poem becomes a vehicle for satisfying its own longings, a gift then passed along to us as readers-so that we, too, might dance to such a soundtrack in our kitchens and in the otherworlds that envelop the everyday. If you're willing to risk being brought back to your own desires, enter The Inevitable Return.-Becca Klaver

These lyrical poems mark waypoints on a life-long journey. The poet struggles to find reason in a chaotic world where senseless cruelty is sometimes met with selfless kindness. She sees miracles in flocks of migrating cranes, reads life's secrets in a child's eyes. In love with the beauty and power of language, she uses it to reflect what she sees, to give stifled feelings a voice, to illustrate meaning with metaphor. In love with the world's physical beauty, she finds joy in wild places, solace in recurring seasons. In love with the diverse community around her, she embraces other peoples' stories and shares her own. Born in one country, raised in another, yet belonging in neither, the young poet searches for her identity; the aging poet strives to make peace with her past and welcome her future. "Waypoints" celebrates the ties that bind the human family together across generations, across barriers of culture and language, across national boundaries.

In the spirit of Kierkegaard and his adherents, these poems emphasize the power and opportunity of solitude and the virtue of living alone without being flagrantly antisocial. There is virtue in partners keeping distance so as to avoid envelopment--and to spur creativity and contemplation. "Too much of a good thing" characterizes the plight of many marriages; keeping the desirable, provocative tension between people may be a coextension of less, not more, nearness.