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Where Things Are, the debut collection of poems by Joan Gibb Engel, oscillates between the present and the remembered-in the poet's own words, "the beloved dead keep company with the living." 'Things' include objects quotidian and eternal-an accumulation of kitchen gadgets and the rich lives of former fishing families; plants, persons, and places that hold eternal meaning but are visible only in remembrance. With stereoscopic vision, the poet chronicles ageing, illness, separation, death, and social change while affirming "beauty, art, and truth among life's wonders." Engel ponders the ruin of ancient cultures: "stories told in moonlight told no more" and the changed nature of cities: "streetwalkers' beat: decanters now." She values the companionship of children as when she and a granddaughter pick blueberries and she celebrates "lifetime memberships" among persons no longer living. The past is both a confessional of "bloodied trap lines" and "the sacred music of our ancestors," while the present is both "dropping like flies" and hearing again "the clear whistle of birds." In the words of poet Randall R. Freisinger, Engel's poems "offer depth of vision at a time when we so badly need it."

A rich testament to the power of creativity and the human spirit, Marrall's debut collection is filled with stark, realistic poems that paint an intimate portrait of love, loss, identity, and the ever-present need for empathy. In these vibrant poems of nature and biography, Marrall showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Overflowing with vivid and accessible language, Relief, Have You A Name? is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, written with clear eyes and an open, curious heart.-John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes AnotherTo be alive is the greatest miracle of all. We are born to grow, to question, to create. And when, in the inevitable moments where life threatens to crush us, it's our relentless desire to breathe that leads us back into the light, alarmed at having been so cruelly surprised. Each piece in this collection from the quiet heart of Phoebe Marrall is like a bright red berry placed in the sun, oxygen that honors the miracle. I highly, highly recommend sitting down and having yourself some Phoebe Marrall red.-Graham Salisbury, author of Under the Blood-Red Sun

How does one navigate guilt, grief, and loss? The poems in Ghost-Mother explore how to remember and to honor a mother as she declines due to illness and eventually dies.

"These poems know a great deal about beauty and violence: 'twenty years / was about as much good as / circling / a black eye'. Kylie Gellatly shows us what vividness is, how it lives in our shapes, our pain, our imaginary (and real) selves: 'man taken / to be a trench / that might have been a cannon ball'. This poetry composes musics with silences. It is both a song and whisper, an erasure and exhalation. It is both a journey across us, and inward: 'the ship was the rib of reason / [...] the ship was beginning to be an alarm / the ship was right there on the floor while this book was written.' Herein history is envious of a dreamscape. And yet: the dream aspires to be dailiness, and fears it. Which is to say: this is a book of fevers the likes of which you feel most familiar with, yet have not seen before. Recognize yourself in them."-Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"Musical and deeply felt, these poems-untitled and running wild-chase down the heart. No tangible space is without the immaterial here. The Elements are resilient, and I feel pushed and pulled by them. Gellatly's debut book is beautiful, haunted and mystical. Her poems are like 'the strange contrast between death and dawn,' and 'the fool's divine spark / forever coming loose' in the reader's hands."-Bianca Stone, author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief"In Kylie Gellatly's The Fever Poems, water is silk that rubs against the night. Events are figments of the speaker's imagination and graves shape time. Extremely contemporary in their fixation on illness, isolation, and anxiety, these poems spill down and across the page like slate off a cliffside. There is an unwavering generosity to the introspection of this speaker: through her eyes, floating ash becomes 'hundreds of baled papers, bent up like two bears dancing.' This is a collection that understands and beautifully, painfully relays that what we have-with each other, with the land-is 'the last of the last.'"-Taneum Bambrick , author of Vantage"'I was sore at heart,' writes Kylie Gellatly in The Fever Poems, and the reader is invited into a sprawling, curious, visionary, deeply empathetic, epic debut. Her poems shine goldly in the space between elemental earth-salt, rock, wind, weather-and the human, conscious choice of living. With echoes of Jorie Graham and W. S. Merwin, Gellatly navigates the complexities of language, 'a pledge made / into paper / weathered / in our hands,' 'choked with the monsters of parentheses'. This is a collection for our time of pandemic, uncertainty, and an urgent need for a revision of our relationship with the natural world-Gellatly recognizes the swinging pendulum of power between the earth's force and human interference, and, without castigation, illuminates us."-Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal"Kylie Gellatly's The Fever works like a ship, navigating the tempests of our fragile moment. The poems enact a wandering/wondering through fire and fog, investigating meaning through a naturalist's lens, balancing an elemental pull with the fierce heat of being human. This collection is an invitation to a sensorial meditation, one where fever is less a symptom of sickness than a door to discovery."-Erin Adair-Hodges, author of Let's All Die Happy

The Cathedral Is Burning, Betsy Orient Bernfeld's full-length poetry collection, is a lamentation for the loss of Mothers, Grandmothers and Mother Earth. The poems are illustrated with art and photos. From the burning of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris to the demise of Central American migrants in the Arizona desert, the poetry bounds through fire, drought, demolition and rebirth, viewed through the solace of stained glass. Bernfeld's work was supported through the 2020 Wyoming Arts Councils Creative Writing Fellowship for Poetry.

1. : In Harvest, a poetry chapbook, the speaker takes revenge on the circumstances of her life by being blunt, bare, and brave on the page. She contends with a male-dominated society and abusive childhood as she moves into adulthood and the supposed saving grace of a marriage. The speaker confesses traumatic memories, marital betrayals, and harmful coping mechanisms in a lyrical way, adding her voice to the abused poets of past and present who have also asked themselves - how can a raped daughter grow up to love a man? In an attempt to break the silence forced upon her by an abusive parent, the speaker examines the pattern of sexual failures in her life, as well as her roles as a female, daughter, sister, and wife through poetry. The speaker has excavated her inner child and bared her most intimate parts in poetry. By attempting to exorcize her stepfather to make room for her husband, she found the potential for fierce love in her sibling relationships. In reaching for them, the speaker reaches for herself instead of another man.

When you turn a kaleidoscope, the picture before your eye reinvents itself over and over. Reading these excellent stories by Amy Foster Myer is akin to that. Sadness, joy, bliss, pain, hope, dread, delight: with each turn of the page, Foster Myer reinvents the world.-Evan Morgan WilliamsAmy Foster-Myer's Where We are Going to Next is aptly titled: every story here lives on the edge, always on the fringes of the world, looking in, even in the most intimate relationships. And when each story ends, it ends just before you think it will, not showing us where characters have arrived but hinting at directions they might take. This is a book full of horizons, whales and dragons rimming the unknown edges of the map.-Samuel Snoek-BrownIn eleven concise, perfectly observed stories, Amy Foster-Myer offers intimate meditations on spouses and neighbors, parents and children, love and grief. Where Are We Going to Next gracefully explores the tension between our desire for connection and our fundamental solitude, and illuminates small, seemingly familiar moments of domestic life in all their grand mystery and strangeness.-Emily Chenoweth

My Wolf is a third chapbook, (June Bug 2014) and (Light to Light 2016) by Kate McNairy. "To read My Wolf is to enter the kind of dreamy world that only Kate McNairy can create" writes Jackie Craven, author of Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters ( Brick Road Poetry Press 2018 ). "Colors chatter, a pampered coat discovers it is going to the cleaner, a gem eyed wolf howls beneath the bed. Each poem brings a fresh surprise. Whimsical, mystical, and heartbreaking, My Wolf invites us to laugh at our own mortality.

These brief prose poems function as "meditations in an emergence," though what is coming forth-which is existence, being, all of it-remains ever unfixed, out of reach. The result is not disorientation but a kind of tenderness for the fragmented though often beautiful attempts at knowing, "the way words unvelop on the page." These poems feel right for our time. They evoke the uncertainty and enormity that seems to dwarf us, and the hope that humans are "something other than lost."-Allison Cobb, author of Plastic: An Autobiography These prose poems hopscotch and hover above a playground of swerving soundscapes like flash floods of murmurations over windswept wheat. "Ablaze in a barnstorm." "A television in reverse." "Agogged." Morse's discrete instants of disjunctive astonishment welcome us as friends with these mercurial passages through the whir of words. "Dear slipstream, I'll call you come what may." Dive into the current of onomatopoetic anomalies and you will swim with dolphins cresting, "dreamt afoot. Or afloat."-W. Scott Howard, editor of Denver Quarterly

In poems both brutal and beautiful, Karen Poppy traces the interconnectedness-symbiotic, antagonistic, and metaphorical-of the endangered antelope and human worlds. All the grace and violence of both worlds is here in poems that are moving, necessary, and ultimately life-affirming. I could not put down this powerful book. -Steve Bellin-Oka, author of Instructions for Seeing a GhostPoppy is a poet of the 21st Century. Her pen is compelling, pointing out the crucial need for human, animal, and environmental rights and respect. Her poems inspire transformation. -Lynne Cox, American long-distance open-water swimmer, New York Times best-selling author, and speakerThis glowing collection of Karen Poppy's verses reads at once as spare and abundant, elegant and generous. Her lines stretch and shrink, experimenting with a wide range of forms, and her best rhymes read like plot twists. our own beautiful brutality asks what all readers and writers ask each other across the resonance of words: "how in sudden shift did I become you?" -Betsy Cornwell, New York Times best-selling author and founder of The Old Knitting Factory: making space for single moms to make art in a 1906 knitting school in Connemara

Judith's poems are close to the bone, earthy, organic. As they acknowledge grief, loss, suffering, they elevate and transform it. From coal, comes the diamond. From loss comes the light. -Jan Phillips, Author, Speaker, Artist and Activis"In the Geography of Loss, Judith Prest reminds us "Sometimes it takes /a dark day/ for me to find/ my own light", as she maps those departures folks both must endure and overcome as best they can. Great aunts, both parents, a beloved dead grandmother whose spatula goes missing and creates an absence memory fills. Despite death's "discordant notes," we go on these poems say, it is what we do as human beings, until even "Beneath the now, outlines of ghost trees stand sentinel, bear witness." -Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of SorrowJudith's poems speak elegantly yet simply about loss and life and love. Her poignant words about her personal experiences tap into the universal experience of what it is to be human, to connect, to love, to lose and to carry on. Held in her words, one can feel deeply, perhaps cry, maybe laugh, and most certainly be changed. -Trish Ford, Hospice Medical Doctor

Readers of Speech in an Age of Certainty by J. Khan might want seatbelts for the high-speed chase of his intense poems. He writes sometimes about life as a Midwesterner of South Asian descent, which is a complicated diaspora that includes London and rural Missouri. His poems are stories and songs of resistance-and not to be missed.-Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09 Colliding voices animate the parallel worlds of those who feel oppression and those who oppress in this urgent collection of verse by J. Khan. The backdrop is a damaged, devasted earth. While exposing the limits of witness, "I scarcely fathom the howl," the poet compels our attention (and hopefully our action) in these vivid, reflective poems.-Catherine Anderson, author of Everyone I Love Immortal Speech in an Age of Certainty is a colorful collection of timely pieces by J. Khan that tackles police brutality, identity, history of our sins and finding balance. Khan offers reflective, lyrical poems that question one's place in the world. A lovely collection that captures the voices of many who are silenced-Rosalyn Spencer, editor Rigorous Magazine

Acclaimed author and music critic Sean Murphy's new poetry collection is a searing and timely take on American culture that finds perspective on the present by interrogating our past. The Blackened Blues offers a powerful glimpse into the human psyche, exploring the minds of artists and visionaries, addicts and trauma survivors, searching (as we all are) for "some way to live." We leave this book with a heavy dose of truth, but also of the kind of beauty that makes such truth bearable.

In her debut collection, poet R.B. Simon paints a compelling canvas of identity one poem at a time. With evocative, lyrical language, these poems of loss, identity, and ultimately recovery, show that the complex fabric of our lives often weaves together something more beautiful than we could foresee. The Good Truth offers an accessible and poignant look at the forging of a woman through hardship and alienation, and her quiet, forceful return to the home of herself. The Good Truth is that each one of can join her on the journey.

A collection of prize winning poetry, The Moon Over My Mother's House, explores family, aging, enduring and bittersweet love, loss, and connections. The poet ponders how the natural world reflects human nature. The poet muses on her original axiom that every poem is a journey, every journey, a poem. Poems such as Waving Not Drowning (featured on LKMNDS Podcast), Infinite Tenderness (Featured in Roanoke Review's 50th Year Anthology), Self Portrait (Nominated for Best of the Net), and Darnella's Duty (Selected for Black Lives Matter Anthology) depict various types of self awareness journeys.The titular poem, The Moon Over My Mother's House has been selected by Moment Poetry to be produced as a broadside. The story behind this poem is a reflection on every woman's journey:"The Moon Over My Mother's House is based on an early childhood memory. I must have been five or six, and I was in the kitchen watching my mother take clothes out of the washing machine and hanging them on the clothesline. The clothesline seemed to touch the sky, and I thought I saw God watching us. When I told my mother that I saw God, she replied that one can never see God. I thought her answer was so sad. This poem attempts to recognize the many women, who because of societal restrictions, live with no hope of seeing their inner god."

Storyknife is a tool used by Yup'ik girls to carve the stories of their village in the earth. Related to Loon: a first year teacher in Tuluksak is Jackie McManus' storyknife. A true adventure of a white teacher in a remote village in Alaska carved through the medium of poetry that covers culture and climate with both humor and pathos.

The Shomer explores the role of the watchman and guardian in the context of daily routines and significant life events. In Jewish tradition, the Shomer serves in the role of watchman. Among his/her responsibilities, the Shomer is charged with safeguarding the body of the deceased against desecration before burial. According to biblical commentaries, the human soul is somewhat lost and confused between death and burial, and it hovers over the body for several days until interment. While watching the body, the Shomer comforts the spirit of the departed by reading, meditating, and praying. More generally, the term Shomer has been used to describe an individual who acts as a guardian in the context of both daily routines and significant life events. The goal of the Shomer is to witness, to attend, and to protect those who can no longer protect themselves. Under the best of circumstances, the Shomer gains a glimpse into the liminal, into what happens in the space between love and loss, hunger and fulfillment, forgetting and remembering. The Shomer's poems seek to illuminate the vigil we all keep as witnesses to our own lives and the lives of others and to expand upon the stories we share to safeguard love, hope, history, and a belief in art's power to heal.

Ocean Currents follows the tumultuous ebbs and flows of Rousselot's struggles and triumphs living with mental illness. Rousselot doesn't pull any punches; her writing is raw, vulnerable, and leaves the reader rattled. Rousselot uses vivid imagery and unexpected parallels to imbue Ocean Currents with a relatable voice while tackling deeply personal topics. Ocean Currents invites the reader into Rousselot's inner world, but it also invites the reader to examine their own relationship with the self. From Samantha Fain, author of Coughing Up Planets: "(Rousselot) tackles mental illness incisively, showing how vulnerability can be both a triumph and an act of violence." Ocean Currents draws the reader in, and then leaves them on the shore soaked and sun kissed.

In Margaret Vann's You Can't Get There from Here, the writer takes the reader on a journey, both literal and metaphorical. Vann's road trips take place in the 39 Ford sedan named "Betsy" that took her from her childhood home in rural Georgia all the way to relatives' homes in Ohio and Colorado. The poet remembers carsickness, the magic of a moon "slipping through the slash pines," and once, picking up "a hitchhiking priest" who rode the tailgate to Amarillo, Texas. There are bathroom breaks-too few, and falling rocks-too many. There were rules of the road ("Don't sit on the edge of the seat, you may fly off and be killed"), and rules of the heart (Savor the chocolate Daddy sent home from the war, one square at a time). Vann's interior journey explores passionate love relationships, strong family connections, and that which sustains this poet's soul: the natural world of native hydrangea, nodding trillium, and fluttering butterflies which instruct the reader to "Go out! Hit the road again, Enjoy the show!" Readers will do just that, savoring the poems like chocolate melting on the tongue. -Beth Thames, Free-lance writer and columnist for al.comAre we there yet? Thus begins a kinesthetic journey through childhood road trips, matriarchal advice that can't be ignored, aging, loss, both natural and cultural landscapes, passion, love grown cold-the pleasures and perils of being human. Witty, wise, fond of wordplay, Margaret J. Vann's immediately recognizable voice is sure and formally astute. Tones shift from humorous to deeply ironic; from conversational storytelling toward ritual and incantation: these poems invite reflection and remembrance, repetition and savoring. To read this collection straight through is like embarking on a long, cross-country trip with a trusted fellow traveler, reminiscing and sharing histories, philosophies, considerations small and large along the way. It is also to participate in the author's travels through her memory and life to arrive where she belongs. You can't get there from here, these poems suggest, in the sense that "there" is elusive, always changing (as "here" changes), somewhere on the horizon; and a goal reached may or may not resemble what it looked like from a distance. At the same time, reading, writing, and exploring are exemplary forms of "getting there." This engaging and thoughtful gathering stands as proof. -Susan Luther, Breathing in the Dark: PoemsThe well crafted poems of You Can't Get There from Here richly demonstrate that life is a journey to a place we can never reach. Moving freely between the literal and metaphoric, we pleasure-ride in Valdosta, take road trips to Ohio and Colorado, globe-hop from Cuba to China. A recurring theme is love, both physical-"a rising heat within"-and something more expansive, including family, friends, "woods set afire with . . . blooming forsythia." The obstacles are many-cliffs, car wrecks, sexism, racism at a Southern swimming pool, war, a train carrying soldiers to their death. The journey-joyful if challenging-moves with grace and confidence through memory, myth, art, music, all the seasons of nature. The greatest challenge is absence, emptiness after loss-family members disappearing from old photos; more specifically, "my presence without you"-the haunting possibility that there is "nothing to discern." In the end, getting "there" is not the point. "Here"-in the heart, where all roads begin, where we live and love and grieve and hope and relish every mile-is finally enough. "It is here," the poet concludes, "I belong." -Harry Moore, author of Bearing the Farm Away and Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden

In the best pastoral tradition, Orchard Days reveals its deceptively simple pastoral landscape-apple orchards, barns, and mill ponds-to be a place for pondering life's greatest complexities. In this world that is "almost Eden," where marriage, childbirth, and filial relationships are typically romanticized, the poet explores domestic violence ("The most dangerous time for a woman is the time when her Abuser realizes she might leave"); the mortality rate of labor and delivery ("the most dangerous thing a woman can do in America is give birth" ); and paternity uncertainty. As with Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill," apple boughs and green grass momentarily mask the truth that time holds us "green and dying." The beauty that Heather Corbally Bryant locates in the landscape, over which a harvest moon "close to tangerine" shines, makes that particular truth easier to bear. -Donna L. Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Washington State University, Pullman WAHeather Corbally Bryant is an incredible wordsmith. The poems in Orchard Days, her tenth collection, are artfully crafted, deeply thoughtful, and keenly observant. Whether showing appreciation for the smaller things in life or delving into larger issues, her poems brim over with crisp imagery. Further, Bryant challenges readers to embrace both the positive and the negative of life with outstretched arms. For example, there is a strong sense of radical self-acceptance in the following lines from the poem Last Summer: "As I slip into the ordinary, I am struck by the fact I will only / Be here a short while-" These lines, as well as many others exemplify how Heather Corbally Bryant needs only a few words to achieve the maximum effect. The poems in Orchard Days and Beyond are stunning and heartfelt. The book is a must-read. -Dr. Michael Anthony Ingram, Host, Quintessential Listening: Poetry Online Radio, www.blogtalkradio.com/ql_pOrchard Days conjures the natural world and, as suddenly as real nature itself, the sense of foreboding overtakes you, and the human reality of her story turns savage and cold, but at times also comical, absurd. The effortless yet measured breath of Bryant's lyric voice belies a fractured universe of intimate violence. You read this collection as you do a Gothic novel of suspense; the speaker leaves myriad small clues to an abusive and cloistered marital life for the reader to find. Does the speaker need to be rescued? No, because she has already escaped, through the redemptive power of her own perception, and the wonder of motherhood, recollected in a globetrotting travelogue rendered in the watercolor of Bryant's lines. But a menacing, distorted shadow looms over this pastel canvas, this Gothic novel in verse, even if the monster has already been vanquished. The twilight portrait of his darkened will oppressing hers-and here the biblical Eve is often invoked-blurs the glimmer of redemption promised by the "humbling" beauty of children and prelapsarian Eden. Through the blur of tears, a gifted poet has found her voice. Bryant's voice is at times Plath-like, other times reminiscent of Mary Oliver, Marie Ponsot, even modernist masters Eliot, Frost and Williams. For, the plenitude of modern American poetry fills the sails of her verse, as the seashell echoes the sound of the sea, her speaker reclaims herself by listening to the quiet rhythms of her experience, cloistered and cosmopolitan as it is. Bryant's Orchard Days is a crepuscular canvas of pastoral trauma, humble motherhood, self-recovery, and ultimately self-liberation. -Octavio R. González, author of The Book of Ours (2009) and Misfit Modernism (2020), Associate Professor, English & Creative Writing, Wellesley College

No Place I Would Rather Be is a collection of free-verse poems and prose poems on the importance of place in the human psyche. Here are places where people come together and places where people can't be found, places that don't stay still, where mountains fit inside rooms in houses and husbands hide behind the knees of their wives. Here are places of environmental degradation, war and peace. These poems deal with our coming together and drifting apart in a variety of settings. Despite its moments of anxiety and regret, No Place I Would Rather Be is a celebration of being human in a human environment.Some of these poems previously appeared in publications such as Meat for Tea and The Bicycle Review.

Bialer's poem Maze takes the reader on a circuitous expedition exploring memories, reflections and shifting time and place. Compelling lines and phrases resurface over and again serving as a drumbeat egging the reader deeper into Bialer's journey of love for and loss of his wife. Facts and memories link "bandits and burial grounds' in Tombstone, Arizona to the Siege of Sarajevo, illuminating how painful the mere act of remembering can be. "Memories are like snipers". With the knowledge that life is fleeting, Maze keenly succeeds at reminding the reader of the sacredness of living in the present moment. -LORETTA OLECK, author of PAPER CHAINSIn his beautiful and poignant elegy Maze poet Matt Bialer summons loving memories of his late wife Lenora to conjure the strain of Covid and politics, turning angst and sorrow into a song of life. -SEB DOUBINSKY, author of THE INVISIBLE and MISSING SIGNAL

Elia Hohauser-Thatcher's debut chapbook, The Prophet's Toothbrush, explores and deconstructs masculinity, coming of age in Detroit, and familial inheritance through the sacred and mundane. These intense, tough-minded poems offer as many bleak truths as they do opportunities for vulnerability. From this text, a speaker emerges who seeks to do the painstaking work of exploring and rejecting the violent expectations our world places on manhood.

A sacrament is the visible sign of inward grace. In Intermittent Sacraments, Mary Hills Kuck presents poems that lead us to recognize these signs in the objects and events of every day: bread, raspberries, plum tree blossoms, a train ride, a cell phone that inspires "glory, glory, glory." Intermittent suggests that sacraments are not always visible. Several poems express the wish for a sign that does not come: in an exorcism at a distant seminary, in the deaths of the author's sister and her parents. Together, the poems suggest that the expectation of grace enhances and makes rich our mundane experiences.Mary Hills Kuck was born and raised in the American Midwest, and spent most of her adult life on the East Coast until she moved to Jamaica, West Indies, to teach English. She lived there with her family for 23 years. If you listen carefully, you will hear echoes of those years in her poetry, especially in "The Luck of Pigs," yet she remains rooted in Illinois and Missouri. The unreliable spring in "Deception," the moonlight in "A Poem," the succulent raspberries in "Advice from a Housewife" betray her Midwestern roots that still define her work.

A richly engaging collection, Poems for the End of the World explores climate change, heartbreak, a pandemic, grief, race, and growth all woven together. In these poems, Suzi Q. Smith meditates on trees, fires, her best friends, her grandmother, and the love of it all. Smith offers us humor and warmth in the midst of grief, courage in the face of fear, and celebrations of small beauties. Poems like "How to Make Love" remind us how to care for ourselves and our loved ones, while "Ocotillo" and "the found women" feel like an encouraging conversation with a best friend.

Nan Ottenritter's poems have guts. They dare to confront the evils of our time, to insist on history too many of us have forgotten, to face our mortality, and to fly as lyrically as Baryshnikov without fear of falling. -James Penha, editor of TheNewVerse.NewsThrough a prism of artistes, heroines, and mother figures, Nan Ottenritter peers behind the drapes of history, grief, age, and survival itself. Familiar figures Agatha and Eleanor come to life from dusty pages, and we find new humility and understanding from Florence and Camille. Little Lincoln's mother catches us at our core, and the author's own battle with cancer catches at our breath. It is a book that celebrates the female, that alchemical mix of perseverance and grace with the potential to "raise a daughter full of sparks dying // on their way to the heavens." A book that will make you want to call your mom. -Joanna Lee, author of Dissections and founder of River City PoetsEleanor, Speak celebrates women, among other things-from Camille Claudel to a greasy-spoon waitress, from an oncology nurse in Boston to Notre-Dame de Paris herself. Nan Ottenritter roams history and observes life with equal parts intelligence, compassion, and restless curiosity. In her acknowledgments she thanks "the written and spoken word," noting "what an excellent puzzle it is to translate life into symbol and sound." Indeed-and how exciting it is to watch this poet emerge from her chrysalis, stretch her new wings, and take dazzling flight. -Douglas Jones, author of Songs from Bedlam