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With a steady, approachable voice, Ellen Gerneaux Woods' debut chapbook The Watchful Heart Recedes explores both the tenderness and the tension woven into the mother/daughter bond. She roots her poems in the natural world, beginning this graceful collection with primordial jellyfish and ending with a backyard's damp grass. As she meditates on the pleasures and paradoxes of single parenting she embraces walnuts, redwoods, racoons at dawn, crows, wild iris, weeping willows, a beloved dog leaving for a new home. In these quietly profound poems Ellen Gerneaux Woods engages with the beauty and wisdom of our earth and our hearts.-Kathleen McClung, author of A Juror Must Fold in on Herself and Temporary KinAnyone who has participated in raising/nurturing a child, and finding the way to continue to nurture even when that child has reached adulthood, will appreciate "The Watchful Heart Recedes" by Ellen Gerneaux Woods. In spare language that respects the intensity and reserve that will safeguard the mother/daughter bond, Ms. Woods guides us gently, movingly, through the stages of parenting through the mystery of Nature's great gift of life, to the recognition/adoration of one child's special gifts, to the urgent call to protect and hold close, then to release and wait. Finally, to welcome back the bond and all it may cost. And in the end, to return to her original family bond, which taught her how to be a good mother.-Grace Marie Grafton, Lens, Jester, Whimsey Reticence and Laud, Other CluesEllen Gerneaux Woods' The Watchful Heart Recedes explores the tension implicit in maternity, the mother keeping her gaze on her child while still holding awareness of her own "watchful heart." In these courageous poems we accompany the poet in exploring the connections motherhood brings, "a silver ribbon [that] pulls us to claim it," a ribbon stretching from herself to her daughter and looping around memories of her own mother, "this woman who loved me / in her own way." The poet claims and celebrates these relationships, of love mixed with pain "shooting upward / almost to my heart," of misunderstandings and struggles, and the ache of her child growing beyond her care. We share the poet's journey as she returns again and again to the solace of nature, claiming her true self "engaged with earth."-Lisa Rizzo, author of Always a Blue House and In the Poem an Ocean

"Circling what is and is not home," the girls and women in Anne Dyer Stuart's chapbook of poems, What Girls Learn, lead lives of damage, struggle, and self-formation. "There is a girl at the window of the burned house," says one poem. "Girls' ruin lies in others' hands" says another. This poet is not inclined to let it lie. She narrates a life in the body, "with its bright optimism and its slow decay"; she tells stories of pleasures and terrors, the indelicate paradox of "wanting to be wanted, to disappear, to blaze up/like a prom dress thrown on a campfire." Even the old metaphors sound new in Stuart's hands: a sixteen year old girl asked a trick question is "mute as cheese." Summer is described as "a slow dream turning/away, rotting on the sills . . . but you will take her anyway/all the bruises mush inside your mouth/all the sweet juice sticky on your chin." What Girls Learn is an accurate, painstaking, and tender exploration of girlhood and growing up into a woman who still holds the unspoiled girl she was: "Inside: sleek, unblemished./Inside: the same you God/ stitched together-hastily, in Heaven,/ then threw down like a stone."-Lisa Williams, winner of the Rome Prize in Literature and author of The Gazelle in the House, Woman Reading to the Sea (Barnard Women Poets Prize), and The Hammered Dulcimer (May Swenson Poetry Award)

Mike Wahl is a farmer-philosopher who takes on subjects as small as what kind of plant Japanese beetles like best (Smart-weed) and as large as the fall of the Roman empire. His true subject, however, is the human heart, and how often we fail in our relationships with others, our environment, and our society. Still, there are moments, in "the temporary camaraderie of exuberance," when we can envision a better world. In Wahl's poems, second chances abound, even in the sounds of our words, as when we move from "razing" to "raising."-Jennifer Horne is the Poet Laureate of Alabama and the author of three books of poetry, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, and Borrowed LightIn Harmony with Homophones represents a daunting undertaking of building bridges of meaning between words that sound alike. But for this clever poet managing the mating game of homophones such as I'll/aisle/isle seems to come naturally. Part of the joy of reading the poems is anticipating just how he is going to harmonize each set. And between the inaugural word of a poem such as "one" and the final word "won" come the observations and wisdom of a farmer, thinker, poet.-Jeanette Willert, it was never Eden & Appalachia, AmourMike Wahl's In Harmony with Homophones is a clever and entertaining scamper through some of the ironies and unexpected associations to be found in English. His well-controlled lines keep steady pace with the natural rhythm and music of the language as we relish its unexpected treasures and absurdities, all the while ranging over a broad panorama of subject matter and theme where Philosophy, Linguistics, Agriculture, and even some Theology come tied together by a durable strand of humor.-James Miller Robinson, author of The Caterpillars at Saint Bernard, Boca del Río in the Afternoon, and The Empty Chair¿

The title of Esther Lim Palmer's second chapbook, Stellar, is a fitting one, as these poems call out brightly from the darkness that surrounds us and guide us like navigational stars. In a voice that is always urgent and intimate, Palmer writes beautifully of longing and mystery, be it the longing for migratory birds to return to a beloved body of water, or the mystery of our relationship to our own childhoods. In this disorienting time, it is so wonderful to read a poet who helps us understand better where we stand. Palmer never shies away from the truth, but nor does she leave us alone. "Yes," she writes, "there is sand here. But water too." It is in this nexus, between challenge and consolation, that the poems in Stellar do their vital work.-Austin SmithThere is a dreamlike quality in the way the poems of Stellar summon reverie from the natural world. Esther Lim Palmer's language is rhythmic and reverential, engaging the reader with a quiet but profound sense of wonder. We witness "egret wings forging through the fog-languid, lowering, lifting" and "the hum of bees in the hive of bliss." Each work is a portal to discovery, self-declaration, and renewal. The familiar is animated through desire and longing: "broken streetlights flicker/with quivering lips" for an orange moon; an innocent pleasure allows her "[t]o let the sea [s]well/up and up, and bluff a lullaby." Hovering between the real and imagined landscape, Palmer's skill is like a sleight-of-hand, her poetry a subtle and lyrical vehicle for unexpected rewards. Her magic comes in as "the wind leaves words outside the window/cracked open; words like invisible gifts."-Mindy Kronenberg

From start to finish, this first book of poems shines with brilliance, poignancy, and the power of visceral memory. Part elegy, and part recollection, Lia Patricia James's poems ring with strength, cleareyed vision, and the joy of language. The collection takes the readers on a healing journey from the depths of loss to the embrace of the comfort words can bring. In this first chapbook, the writer demonstrates her versatility with language. She brings her readers right to where she is with the sharpness and clarity of her images. As she "grasp [s] at ginger-flavored memory," she draws us all into a universe she creates, a universe filled with sorrow, beauty, and the extraordinary gifts her words can bring.-Heather Corbally Bryant, PhD Lecturer, Writing Program, Wellesley College

Once Read as Ruin is centered on the domestic, aesthetics, intimacies between humans and human and animal, and union's faltering. The speakers in these poems probe expectation and dream, deconstruct and construct intimacy through relationships with humans and animals, like horses, rabbits, dogs, mice, and more. The titular poem was a finalist for Rabbit Catastrophe's Real Good Poem Prize.

Is the egg obvious? Witek's visual text candles language in this volume of discovery, overjoyed and overwhelmed by the maps that link body and vocabulary through egg and ova. Behind this text is a poet with two mother tongues, playing between Portuguese and English with skill and beauty-yoking words. These poems know that hatchlings imprint on their caretaker, but the tether is mutual. Just as the ovum, and the fetus it later becomes, leaves behind its trace in the body as dna not the parent's own. We are thus connected to our little eggs much like the thread with a needle on each end in Witek's text: pierced and sutured in perpetual equipoise. With beauty and humor, bravery and brio, this book illuminates hidden connections. Bravo!-Amaranth BorsukIn The Rattle Egg, Terri Witek addresses the egg of Clarice Lispector's story "The Egg and the Chicken" as a gender/genre of primal oddity. As a "terrain of foundational impressions, "the geometry of eggness" is both intimate and comically vast: the suspended egg, the performative egg, the baby rattle. What of the consumable egg-in-a-carton, cushioned in a cardboard grid, or the egghead with her sheets of graph paper seeking formulas for brokenness? With multiple visual and verbal recombinations, Witek wonders if the egg writes back. Herein the delight! What does it mean to be responsible and tender to the absurd worlds outside you and also in you, "the smeared gold apostrophe"?-Vidhu Aggarwal¿

"It is time the stone took the trouble to bloom" Paul Celan once wrote, and in Lacy Snapp's visionary poems just about everything does. This is a world of trees, brick, flowers, seed pods, but also ghosts from her past and her family history, and the two define and redefine each other in a way that instill in her-and us-a "cosmic affirmation." Snapp must be considered one of our important new ecological poets who have redefined the scope of ecology as a more encompassing and complex vision of the world, one seen as an "Intricate being made of fire and flight." In lush, flowing lines, she carries us on that flight. I can't think of a more timely poetry for our depleted environment, or for our souls.-Richard Jackson, author of Where The Wind Comes From and Broken HorizonsBeyond the elements that bind us to our earthly lives is the ethereal element of time. Whether a reminder of its passing in 15-minute increments from a wormy chestnut clock or in the heartpine measured and dovetailed in the basement for her great-grandmother's coffin, Lacy Snapp's narrative of carpentry shines in her debut chapbook, Shadows on Wood. Each board, each family legend, whorls its own universe: "a cosmic affirmation that I will also continue / to change, evolve as I pull, pull from what's around me... wondering / what future story a two-inch slice of my soul will tell." Snapp gazes into time's grain and rings to see herself more clearly-and invites us to do the same.-Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky EarthThe images in Lacy Snapp's indelible Shadows on Wood immerse readers into the grains and textures of various woods and the memories and associations they invoke. Such poems as "Heartpine" and "Wormy Chestnut" guide us through the deep lineage of labor as we get to know a young woman who learns woodworking as a centerpiece of her family's legacy. In other poems, like "Becoming a Ghost," we are drawn into the contemporary life of a speaker who moves through the world with her own unseen companions. Lacy Snapp knows shadows and wood the way painters know the delicacy or coarseness of their brush tips. She conveys her perceptions through exquisite detail and piercing emotion- beauty and heartbreak walk hand-in-hand here and their impact will linger long after this book has been read, set aside, and then read again.-Jesse Graves, Author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Merciful Days

In this collection, poems mirror and oppose each other-ancient Jewish texts and tradition coexist alongside the hubbub of modern family life; tenderness and longing alongside foreshadowed regret and loss; the horrors of terrorism beside the making of bread. That wit and humor exist with yearning for relief from, and deep commitment to, the quotidian is this poet's enviable gift. There is a long matriarchal line of which Aviva Siegel is a part but there is no voice of motherhood like hers. She is descended from the grit and wisdom of the Old Testament's Sarah and Hagar, and she is determined, in beautifully crafted and original narratives, to be certain the lineage of strong and gentle women, exhausted and devoted mothers, female speakers of truth and resilience, is not forgotten-that it is, in fact, ignited and redefined in this welcoming debut.-Barbara Rockman, author of Sting and Nest, winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and "to cleave," winner of the National Press Women Book Prize and Finalist for the International Book Award

I believe it is possible-in fact, it is highly likely-that the reader will lose herself in these rare and exquisite poems, where we are seduced by hue and honey...stars flung, comets crashing...where morning is waiting just outside the door. For Judy Hood's debut poetry collection, to live in this world, glows brilliant with hope and the sustenance of guava, mango, tamarind, and Florida Florida Florida in all its inland glut and glory, its frangipani gardens, baby palms, and avocado groves, the way everything springs abundant even now, in this pandemic time when we need it most. I've read Hood's words over and over, on the way to, coming from, and I've felt the honesty in them along with their lush and lyrical beauty and the comfort they so generously give. They engage me on a cellular level. I feel heard.-Maureen Seaton, author of UnderseaJudy Hood crafts these marvelous poems with a gardener's patience and loving attention. Teeming with frangipani, poinciana and tamarind, the lush landscape of these poems renews my belief that it is indeed a miracle to live in this world.-Mia Leonin, Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child. Lovely, lyrical, and graceful, these pieces lift from the page like songs from a pure soul.-Diana Abu-Jaber, Life Without a Recipe

All of us, from bumpkins to artists, are always picking up and carrying on. Intimacies, skepticism, transformation, scars: these are things that also happen to be common to, and woven into, the fabric of lyric poems. In Natalia Prusinska's Hard Jolts of Hope, we encounter a poet whose preoccupations take us to a place where Emerson's remark that the mission of American poetry is to show us the power of surprise comes to mind. Here the "jolt" of the title lands us squarely in the ambit of this aesthetic, passionate and stunning in its immediacy and frankness. The language is terse and sharp, bristling with intelligence and precision. Think of a mashup of Creeley, Olds, and Lockwood. And feelingly memorable. That's the thing that every poet wants and Prusinska can claim.-David Rigsbee, author of This Much I Can Tell You and Not Alone in My Dancing: Essays and Reviews

I save very good poems to read late at night-it's late at night."-Bob Arnold author of Once In Vermont, Gnomon Press

What Kind of Seed Made You is a collection of desert inspired poems, uprooting what blooms and burns within us. Featuring Best of the Net nominated work 'on visiting Joshua Tree while two simultaneous brush fires burn in Thermal, CA,' Rachael Inciarte writes Southern California and the Mojave Desert in the tone of the landscape-beautiful, bracing, and brutal.

Harris' poetic landscape is apocalypse, imagined and real. Full of hydroponic lettuce, empty cul-de-sacs, unrequited raptures, our own resilient bodies, and the intimacy of isolation-this is a dystopian collection to relish.-Amalie Flynn, author of Wife and War: The Memoirjust a stranger in a strange strange place-Kevin MorbyJan Harris's Isolating One's Priorities in a Time of Crisis reads like a mystic whispering danger where "the sounds of our own voices unimaginable" howl from a phantom of recycled mornings. Harris uses the ouroboros to circle around you as she guides you toward meaning in this chaotic time-Harris knows you are afraid, she doesn't take that away from you, she just joins you in empathy, almost as if "[o]ur lives ran parallel until we met in the knot." Isolating One's Priorities in a Time of Crisis contains palpable, surreal moments where the reader must confront the typhonic mind of the virtual human hollow-gram we have been hiding behind. She guides the reader through this human terror of monotony in time, yet still she guides your eyes to the living stars, "declaring that the stars / are not dead but are hidden / from one another like us." Harris's work is one you read again and again because her love for lavishing language cannot be denied. I will never stop learning from Jan Harris-you are safe with Harris as she shows you the darkness, but softly reminds you that the "wildflowers crowd [the] meadows and in the shadows / green things begin to grow." Harris's writing is gritty, surreal, and intrepid.-Robyn Leigh Lear, Poetry Editor for WAXING & WANING: A LITERARY JOURNAL and Creative Director for April Gloaming Publishing-and forever a student of Dr. Jan from long ago

The Inviolable Hours, by Amber Rose Crowtree, is a chapbook of poems that follows a poet from childhood into adulthood in New England. Her poem, "A 1987 Photo of Female Destinies," won award through The Center for the Arts, Lake Sunapee Region, for contest "Snapshots in Time," final judge, Alexandrea Peary 2020, New Hampshire Poet Laureate.

In this collection of poetry, Megeen R. Mulholland presents a fascinating arrangement of text and image in which family photos set parallel to the text engender poems and in turn forge a relation to her photographer father who died in the poet's infancy. Kodachrome slides like the train cars they depict convey the past into the present, while the selected camera angles shoot beyond the frames into a future that remains to be sorted and formed. Mulholland invites readers to build an unbroken whole from pieces of the past, demonstrating how to look and reconstruct from life's scattered moments. Through her father's artistry, his exploration in images of trains and travel-metaphors for mechanical innovation and psychic expansion (the stuff of poetry!)-Megeen crosses the divide, both literally in photographs of the continental divide and figuratively, as she traverses spaces of material absence to form a constant, her father's presence in her life. The provocative images left by her father of lone and separated train cars seem to yearn for the elusive promises of new destinations; but the gathered mementos, like her image of spokes that surround and diagram a train's engine, lead to family and its archeology of shared genes and philosophy. A steamer trunk in "Passages," and the poems "Proof" and "Encircled by the Engraved Band" show how objects displaced and uncoupled from their first purpose but preserved in poetry continue to carry and transmit the past. Mulholland is a poet who deserves recognition and a wide readership.-Mary Evans, Professor, Hudson Valley Community CollegeWhat Megeen R. Mulholland achieves in Crossing the Divide is something altogether impossible: the ability to take us on a quick but profound journey through grief over lost parents and transmute it into a conversation of all the things that make life worth living. Using the convention of old pictures and slides inherited after their passing, the author penetrates into the surface of each photographic stop along the way to find the truth of character underneath, and her discoveries come to resonate very quickly as our own. So much more than just a personal journey into the generations of her Irish immigrant family, Crossing the Divide is the sort of work that you not only enjoy reading once, but want to allow to sit, brew, and then consume again, savoring the piquancy that mellows richer and deeper with each reading.-Gram Slaton, Author of Spider LakeThese poems, tender, family stories, shaped in narrow lines like train tracks or the shape of rail cars, are compelling because they are built of images of things, like images in photographs are in the language of cameras-"no idea but in things" as WC Williams said. The poet starts with trying to find the image of a father she never knew except in family stories and the photographs he left behind. But that inevitably takes the poet to her mother with the children and the mother's loss, and strength, the story of a couple, of the remnants of what makes memory that becomes the story.-Dan Wilcox, Albany Poets

How to chronicle a lifetime? If it can be done at all, it must be in poems like this, written straight from the heart and spanning a decade, plainspoken, and lyrical with authentic and earned emotion. Here, the author's life is written in life-affirming odes like "Dancing with the Stars" and in aching elegies like "Cue the Bagpipes," often with a rapier wit ("Bifocals"). Powerful feelings and memories from a long life, richly lived.-Rebecca Foust, 2017-19 Marin County Poet LaureateLes Bernstein's poetry is poignant, sacred, stinging in its truthfulness while somehow still comforting. She touches deep roots of feeling.-Lilly Tartikoff Karatz, Philanthropist and Co-founder of Revlon UCLA Women's Cancer Research ProgramWhen I immersed myself in Loose Magic, assimilating these poems one after another,an inner alchemy began. Soon, seemingly unbidden, a deep voice arose from within and said."Oh... this is about Me." Sit down, Loose Magic is precious food for the soul.-Raz Ingrasci, Chairman Hoffman Institue InternationalIn Loose Magic, Les Bernstein has masterfully woven a moving tapestry of sublime language and visual imagery rooted in the ordinary, everyday experiences that make our hearts both soar and break-all at the same time.-Karen Tiber Leland, best selling author The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build and Accelerate Your Brand

There is a music in these poems that works magic with the particularity of the images to create a whole body experience out of which willows, swans and bison rise as if from within our own being, untamed and untameable. In Measureless Silence, Christine Mulvey has composed a symphony of words that sings the wonder and devastation that is our world. Each poem is a summons, whether through the "wrap of forest" or the harsh light of "glitz and bling", to discover ourselves as the wild itself: pristine, ravaged, and innocent as snow, as wings, as wind.-Kim Rosen, author of Saved by a Poem: the Transformative Power of WordsCris Mulvey's Measureless Silence is an ode to the vast, wild open spaces of Montana and the Western United States, and also to the wildness within. In gorgeous, lyrical language and sensuous imagery, she celebrates "everything uncaptured,/ undefiled/...all that cannot be,/ that still refuses/ to be/ tamed." Mountains, prairies, bison, rivers "and this sky,/ unfathomable,/ thundering/with magnificent/indifference"-these are the true protagonists of these poems, while the self becomes vulnerable and insignificant, yet also finds itself at home in this stark wilderness, seen in winter. By contrast, the poems set in cityscapes show a tawdry poverty of soul there, in which the narrator feels "hollow-boned with longing" to return to the wild. "Come with me out to where the soft round shapes/ of the fallen snow lie draped across the bushes like the thighs/ and hips of a sleeping god curled up on the open bedspread of the land," Mulvey invites, and we are eager to follow her through this beautiful collection of poems.-Maxima Kahn, author of Fierce AriaThis poet knows the wild. In this collection she invites us to trust our senses and our longing, to enter a sacristy of sensuality and song, to remember what is holy in the untamed within and without. Even in the few poems where the soulless isolation of the city or human intervention reminds us of our own separation, the poet returns us over and over to the sacred and the sensuous, to mystery, lifting our eyes from our lowly state to something more, to our connection with everything uncaptured, to the wild, to the "feral silence" of heaven on earth.-Mary Jo Amani, MFA, Pacific University

I am doing everything wrong. From this first line of the first poem in Sit Wild, Mo Fowler's words rush headlong at the frustrations of modern life; her persona searches for meaning in the gulf between self-doubt and confidence. These are poems of the gig economy, told by a character who's fighting to put it all together. Even as the speaker bemoans a litany of overbearing male customers in the hardware store where she works, she's trying so hard, trying to be "better": Don't they know / I am trying to write a poem about how I / am so strong. Fowler's poems critique a world we don't want to live in but probably already inhabit. I am taken by the urgency and the energy of Sit Wild. This is a remarkable first collection.-Bob Stanley, Poet Laureate of Sacramento, 2009-2012Sit Wild is a testament to having a dream, trying to chase it, and keeping yourself alive in the meantime.-Andrea Busch