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"John Findura's Useful Shrapnel is an amazing tour de force of language and sentiment. Moreover, his poetry demonstrates what it is to be a real human being."-Noelle Kocot"John Findura's strange and alluring Useful Shrapnel delights us and teaches us to listen ever more closely, ever more actively, to our various hopes and fears and performances. He writes: "I collect the broken / things and I reform / them into what I think / they should look like / which is often words / that amuse only me"-and in this dance there is a challenge and a process that can teach us what is necessary. "Draw a map of the rooms," he writes, "So we'll know where to hide"-self and other, self and self-in process, transformation-Findura teaches us what it is to feel and think. Useful Shrapnel is wonderful poetry."-Joseph Lease

In The Yellow Room, Amy Gordon has composed a unique poetic songbook about mortality, bravery, and time. The first line of the book-"Stare into the yellow room"-is both directive and guide to the self and the reader, given by a speaker navigating the rocky terrain of living with illness, death, and grief but writing about it with sure-footed grace. Gordon's poems are at once inviting and surprising; they take bold, associative leaps and unpack and remake language and myth. They assert that sometimes there is nothing to do but "invent joy" or "admire the beavers' gnawed sculptures" when faced with the end of a beloved season, or of life itself. In the ecopoem "Bequest," Gordon expresses the desire that the beauty of the natural will last; these poems make good on that impulse. The humor, pathos, and questions in these pages are memorable. The Yellow Room is a collection stunned by the world and its mysteries, aware that sometimes "there are no answers," and yet seeking all the same.-Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press)In The Yellow Room, Amy Gordon is frank and unafraid to grapple with serious subject matter, and what's more, the collection includes so much beauty. In many of her poems, Gordon paints images, images, images, and then slices in with thoughtful insights and surprising reflections. She trusts the reader, gives us just enough, leaves space for us to think, feel, and interpret. That said, I should mention that Gordon's unafraid of using the imperative, when it's called for, such as in the poem, "Sing to the Boys," in which she writes, "Sing to the boys / that they might step into spring: / see clusters of white crocuses; / fall to their knees and love their lives." I felt full when I finished reading The Yellow Room, full, grounded, moved, and hopeful. I'd been given a gift. And for that, especially now, I'm thankful.-Cindy Snow, author of the chapbook, Small Ceremonies (Slate Roof Press)It's no accident that The Yellow Room, which opens with the impending grief of the title poem, goes on to give us Van Gogh "trying to ride the wolf inside," "the boys who were never sung to" and the precariousness of our green world. Even in the throes of huge personal loss, this poet is outwardly attentive-and keenly aware of our need to be both clear-eyed enough to acknowledge whatever precipice looms and to be brave enough to "invent joy." This book is a deeply wise and heartening ride.-Ellen Doré Watson, author of pray me stay eager (Alice James Books)

To read or hear Suzanne Ondrus's word wizardry granted balladry is to confront a problem as old as Genesis: How does a woman claim her Liberty despite all the law books and their patriarchal, rule-of-thumb malarkey, all the biblical libel against her Sex, and all the he-man chest-thumping? And what is her peril if she does? After all, the most radical phrase in any language is, "I am a free woman." Death of an Unvirtuous Woman, narrating the saga of the rebel Mary Bach and her murderous hubby, Carl, though set in 1881 Ohio, is as relevant as today's headlines-around the world. Certainly, every woman who refuses to be a man's chattel is a pioneer of Liberty! And what can he do to try to stop her? His miserable Authority must get his hands round the throat of that "sadistic" mouth! He must grouch and crunch, mulch and munch, and grunt like thunder, his dander up, to take a white weapon to his wife, her inimitable throat. He cannot touch her as lightly as falling leaves. Suzanne Ondrus's accessible, plain-spoken, honest, and convincing poetry will horrify you with a story of murder and execution, but thrill you with the fact that even domestic spaces are not immune to American "revolution": "I can smell the air / enticing seeds to burst. / I can see the big sky / screaming opportunity and big yields. // I can feel the money / pushing up all around me / like a field of wheat ready to harvest." -George Elliott ClarkeIn Death of an Unvirtuous Woman, Ondrus achieves that which news accounts fail time and time to do: she captures the complexity and multiplicity of the lives cut short by violence, outside of a two-dimensional portrayal of victim and killer. Why else do we as a society cling to artifacts if not to remember, to be reminded, of the lives they represent? Ondrus has sat with the artifacts of Mary Elizabeth Bach's too-long forgotten case and listened. The result is a collage of voices, angles, and perspectives. -Abigail ChabitnoyIn the words of science writer Gerard Schroeder, "The probabilistic nature of nature, the spread in possible outcomes, means we cannot reconstruct the exact past from the present." And yet, with taunting songs, quips and quotes from newspapers, and poem after poem driving the stake in, Ondrus challenges that assertion with the exactness of the time's arrow of the poet: these poems fly straight back into the gruesome murder of Mary Bach (whose physical death at the hands of her husband was underscored by her spiritual murder by the members of her community), and startle us with a warning for the now-can we "see" the people we are killing with slander today, or will we have to wait another century to be exposed? Ondrus injects dignity into the murdered woman, and moral alarm into readers of this collection: three adjectives, and a life is depreciated-a woman, silenced into meat. -Larissa SzporlukMary Bach's three severed fingers were a grim display at the history museum in Wood County, Ohio. I always felt the woman seemed doubly betrayed - first slashed dead by her husband and then suffering the century-long indignity of having her body parts deemed an exhibition, Finally, in Suzanne Ondrus's Death of an Unvirtuous Woman, she is given representation that she lacked in life. Of the fingers, Ondrus writes, "They have worked beyond their years, / beyond their marrow," but she observes that they shout a message from their museum case to other women in danger: "Take your life and run," they say while pointing toward any exit. Ondrus breathes life back into Mary Bach with her loving attention and her well-honed poetic craft. -Karen Craigo

Candice Louisa Daquin's collection is a mis-en-scene of beautiful dysfunction, erotic melancholy and an immigrant's dystopia. As a lesbian ageing in-sight, Daquin's wry observations of life are at times, piercing, painful and intensely telling a to human-nature and our endless foibles. Her occupations as writer, psychotherapist and activist, play against a myriad of backdrops from Southern France, Egypt and the wastelands of America. Daquin's co-editing work on two award-winning anthologies lends her the gravitas to produce a fine book of revelations about who we really are and why we're so often tainted by the same counterfeit.

The speaker's language is lyrical, private, devotional almost, at other times a code-switching irreverent and raucous melding of street slang and religious tropes, a distinct minority voice of urban immigrant resilience and creative potential. In turns both surreal and grounded in the particularities of Korean American experience, this debut collection explores the intersections of race, politics, and family dynamics from the onset and the continued health crisis of the pandemic. In one poem the speaker asks, "How many dogs ago / were we wolves? How bout we amble / the ask of the day down a hallway / of sunflowers?" As the title suggests, this is a book of transformations - of evolving or devolving - into the beasts we once were or must soon learn to be, to survive with dignity in an era of panic, seclusion, xenophobia, and political tribalism. A timely blend of family portrait, lyric poetry, and political call toward greater Asian American visibility and immigrant resistance in this country.

In Small Life, Karol Nielsen shares precise little snapshots of New York streetscapes and the people she meets there, always wondering if she truly belongs. The homeless, the street vendors, dog walkers, and more are each presented with compassion and just the right details, in all their unique humanity. Not till quarantine in a leafy Connecticut suburb does the author note that hers is a "small life." Her readers realize that despite any accident of birth, Nielsen is a New Yorker. She relishes life there in the before times, and looks forward to after.-Katherine Flannery Dering, author of the memoir Shot in the Head, A Sister's Memoir, a Brother's Struggle and the poetry chapbook AftermathA veteran observer of international events, the indomitable Karol Nielsen (whose memoir Black Elephants describes being newly engaged in a war zone) turns the current lockdown into an opportunity to deep dive into her present circumstances ("small" when compared with her pre-March 2020 situation), as well as to retrieve images of Manhattan. By chronicling chance encounters-and recognizing how special they are-this teacher and former journalist rediscovers the immediacy of poetry. Taking time to reflect on the hows and whys of what happens to everyone, Nielsen reminds us how precious life is. She does, indeed, seize the day.-Judith Mary Gee, author of the chapbook Edges of Wanting

All the Way to China is Maria Rouphail's third poetry collection, and her second full-length manuscript. The title references childhood play in the backyard soil and her mother's encouragement to "dig deep, dig all the way to China." Rouphail explores family memory, an intense mother-daughter relationship, childbirth, and issues of social and interpersonal justice. Born in the Bronx, NY in 1948, Rouphail is Latina, her father having been born in Guanabacoa, Cuba in 1910. Having lived in New York and New Jersey, came of age in Miami and the South in the last decade of "official" Jim Crow. She has lived in Chicago, and now resides in Raleigh, NC.

At monthly open mic readings over the past few years, I've come to appreciate and look forward to LA Felleman's poems, their conversational whimsy, their confident understatedness. Now you too can encounter these poems that fade "to a fragile pale glint." In writing that spans the first eight months of the pandemic and quarantine, Felleman shares a generous range of interests, concerns, and sympathies-from Amazonian vampire bats to white privilege, from her landlord to Sei Sh¿nagon's The Pillow Book, from the derecho to sandhill cranes. You'll discover poems that have the crisp, chiseled feel of prayers addressing our faith, doubt, grace, and grief, that ponder how the world might be "if only I had more."-David DuerLA Felleman's The Length of a Clenched Fist lives in the only habitable places of the early pandemic: crowded grocery stores, bird cam livestreams, wetland trails, borrowed homes, and memories of the Before Times. Instead of trying to keep pace with a year of global health crises, social uprisings, and natural disasters, these poems fall into step with rhythms of the domestic and natural worlds, the grounding repetitive acts of sweeping floorboards and listening to the calls of sandhill cranes. Under Felleman's meditative gaze, poetry becomes a practice, too: she observes the seemingly circumscribed world so closely that it begins to shimmer and swell, spilling out over the edges of quarantined life.-Becca Klaver

Some traditions believe a grieving woman-given her vulnerability, given the boundless expanse of her sorrow-stands at the spirit world's threshold. Grief gives her a kind of holiness, a sacred compassion and perception. Dianne Stepp's voice possesses such a power. Her poems are finely crafted, deeply musical lamentations for her son who committed suicide. Her poems are grateful paeans to the natural world's bounty and grace. A poet-mother trying to fathom her son's final, devastating actions, she's "craning to see, twisting / to search the shape / of his death." The Nest's Dark Eye offers us sorrow's keen insight, its fraught and luminous beauty.-Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate EmeritaIn these eighteen arrestingly beautiful poems, Dianne Stepp takes a hard look at our fleeting world, upturning its soil, hunting its truths. Whether hiking or camping, fussing through goods at an estate sale, digging garlic from the backyard garden, or lying in bed alongside her husband, Stepp refuses easy answers to perplexing questions, especially the harrowing one about her absent son. Hard truths, she discovers, are often "hidden in plain sight." "Is this what love is? / Each corm a knot of oily fire," she asks. Yes, each of these terse and penetrating poems answers.-Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for SkyIn these beautifully crafted, moving poems Dianne Stepp remembers what has been lost through the ravages of time, finding solace in memory itself and in the pulsing life of the natural world.-Marilyn Sewell, author of In Time's Shadow: Stories About Impermanence.

In this award-winning, debut poetry collection, K.E. Ogden turns our gaze to mapping grief as a transformative journey of resilience. Five poems in the collection have been honored, including "Mapping the Route," a winner of the 2022 Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Prize and featured on the Academy of American Poets website. This first poem in the book explores the tension between our past nostalgia and longings and our present homes. In the midst of a father's love for his daughter, there are directions given. These poems are songs of devotion to "all the chaos and misery and hope that simmers . . . in the minds of people," as poet Jimmy Baca shared. There is mud and bird shit, there are bones and dead bodies, there are hot biscuits and a cat's torn ear, and shovels, and sawdust. These poems do offer comfort during tough times, a map for transcending grief and turning tragedy into gateways for metamorphosis. Ogden's poems invite you to make new worlds in changed landscapes, to see beauty in dark, shark-infested waters, and to find elation and joy in being alive.

"There must be ice in a person's life," Frank William Finney writes in "Hitchhiking in the 70s." "A Cold Eye" ends:your neck's on the railand the train's on time.Finney's darkly gnomic poems-disturbing and haunting-are compellingly readable. I couldn't put them down and then immediately wanted to read them all again. These are poems I want to keep and live with.-Lloyd Schwartz, author of Who's on First? New and Selected Poems and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic.

"The taqueria around the corner, the compost bin, and the garden's milkweed, hosta, and honeysuckle make up the limited but luscious landscape of Sara Triana's Spread Thick. At once a record of life in the midst of a global pandemic as well as a meditation on what it means to live in a world that is newly uncertain in other ways, Triana's rich poems invite readers into questions of motherhood, identity, and the places we look to for salvation when the world is on fire. There is a boldness in these poems, an assertiveness, the compelling voice of a speaker who has started embrace her own wrestling, her own wanting. A voice that shows us that there may be a way to make it through the kind of world we'd hoped to never experience: not a contrived, silver-lining optimism, but a refusal to look away from tragedy while holding one's arms open to anything lush, abundant, or spread thick."-Cherie Nelson, Editor of The Waking and essayist"In Spread Thick, Sara Triana elegantly navigates the domestic and the numinous, her terror and joy, giving readers a narrator who finds beauty in the mundane while maintaining an almost invisible rage that lingers just below the surface. Her poems pulse with life-indelible, messy, beautiful."-Cameron Dezen Hammon, author of THIS IS MY BODY, winner of the Writers' League of Texas 2019 Discovery Prize in Nonfiction

In the award-winning poem "It's Okay," the speaker appeases both a dying mother and a startled deer, and this collection does the same for all of us. Despite the distances between us, and no matter what ghosts inhabit those spaces, there is common ground in our being here, imperfect and miraculous.

Covering an array of translucent, highly cogent, playful registers, the intensely evocative electric poems from Sara Youngblood Gregory's RUN. are raw, peregrinated, biblical, socially and sexually sharp. Youngblood Gregory is bold and brave in both form and content, addressing disability and tragedy and heartache with extraordinary depth of psychological clarity and lexical humor. Their chapbook is witty, chromatically stimulating, and has a subliminal bite of both esoteric eroticism and life-torn melancholy that makes the readers feel profoundly attached to the un-binary lovers of pain and language. Reading this pithy collection in one sitting will make you feel like you have been personally and timelessly electrocuted by the intensity and high voltage of their queer brilliance, beauty, and their life's inevitable pathos.-VI KHI NAO, author of Sheep Machine & Fish in ExileSara Youngblood Gregory's poems smolder, simmer, and burn. This collection demonstrates passion and intensity; it fires up clarity and justice and illuminates queer lives.-Julie R. Enszer, author of Avowed and editor of Sinister Wisdom

Honoring the Light in You offers gratitude for all who have been working to keep our collective community afloat, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. The story-poems in this collection are simultaneously realistic and imaginative, depicting relatable characters facing diverse internal and external challenges in their daily work and in life as a whole. Their authentic embrace of the present moment is nothing short of heroic. With deep awareness of the resilient light within each individual, the story-poems integrate yoga poses and practical techniques from the eight limbs of yoga as pathways for relieving stress and bringing renewed balance of body, mind, and spirit. In essence, Honoring the Light in You illuminates the timeless truth that we are not alone. At the heart of this collection by Julie Dunlop is a compassionate and uplifting remembrance of our shared humanity and ever-evolving journey of wellbeing.

The poems in Eating Pears on the Rooftop by David Estringel explore tender heartbreak where "nights are hardest to bear, / alone, atop these unwashed sheets / that smell of you and me, still, / crinkled and heavy with ghosts." The reader discovers beauty and strength in these powerful poems. -Leah Huete de Maines, Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Northern Kentucky University

Each of these poems touches down and merges so completely with a love for the "perfect geometry" of the imperfect world. Long before picking up the pen, Grenier must be leaning, resolutely, devotedly, "nosing like pigs in the golden dust" toward the conscious streaming of a poetry beyond any single poet. I want a nose like that. I want to learn to lean like that.-Farid MatukIn Our Now plunges its readers into urgent and musical currents as poet and visual artist Valyntina Grenier rewires and rewilds the language of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. These poems command us to "lounge in queerness," "call the flower sex-worker" and "hear the bees leeward/ nosing like pigs through golden dust." Grenier invents a new form that distills the language of love, science, and nature to produce a necessary elixir for our contemporary moment. These poems give us hope in the improvisations of the natural world and the ways that language can bend towards its representation. "Trashed lilies lean in," Grenier tells us. "Accept the invitation/ into their throats of nectar."-Susan Briante"[O]rdinary vision/is a hinge/crowded with flowers." So begins my (our!) lucky chance to experience the world through Valyntina Grenier's capacious (and beyond ordinary) vision - a vision that is brilliant in its ability to help us know the world and ourselves through all of our senses (read these lines aloud, feel them slip and clap in your mouth), enlarging the often simplified statement that "People are nature" to include all of the grandeur and violence and banality such a statement can, and must, mean. Grenier has both witnessed and provoked the "trashed lilies" (of my body and the earth) to "punch the air" and I could not be more grateful to be in this company.-TC Tolbert

"Womanhood is whispering and roaring from the pages of these poems. No matter the volume or tone; it is free! These words are truly shattering the glass, every poem, a piercing shard laid on the ground. You cannot step or stomp around them. They are sharp, and your so(u)les may bleed."-Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson, San Antonio Poet Laureate"With bold vulnerability Kelsi Folsom creates poetry that personifies the struggle of growing into a woman in conservative, evangelical Christianity. 'It's interesting the way a woman's body can sin without her even knowing' echoed the teachings of my childhood in a profound way."-Meghan Tschanz, host of the Faith and Feminism podcast and author of Women Rising: Learning to Listen, Reclaiming our Voice"This book of poetry is a gift; a breathtaking collection every woman wants to have in her library."-Dr. Christy Bauman, author of Theology of the Womb and co-host of the Womaneering podcast