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With brevity and sensitivity, these daily haiku carry us through an unfolding tragedy, all the more delicately for their economy of words, and all the more effectively for their precision of image and feeling. -Br. Paul Quenon, OCSO, author of Unquiet Vigil: New and Selected Poems and In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk's MemoirWith truly remarkable and arresting haiku, Waldrop leads us through the tumult of the early months of our global health crisis with sensitivity and insight. Her valuable and succinct introduction explains how the poems grew out of her Lenten discipline for the season. The work itself captures the foreboding of the siege of Covid-19, while effectively delineating the little details of a spring both natural and unnatural. A most unique daybook, it offers comfort and hope much as does the Christian ethos, never denying death but always averring new life and rebirth. Or, as one of the finest pieces in this collection says, she gives us "prayers for peace and a path / through new wilderness." We need such paths more than ever and for Waldrop's pointing a way we should all be grateful. -Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and author of Woman in Red Anorak, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, Lynx House PressThe world is still so/ beautiful writes Jayne Moore Waldrop in her enthralling new collection Pandemic Lent, A Season in Poems. Her petite entries, all but a few, offered as various forms of haiku, encapsulate the experiences and fears of so many of us during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and represent her promise of faith-to write daily. This collection will stand the test of time as a well-turned reminder of human resilience. -Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, Author of A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen

This book is the result of my meeting Virginia Brautigan Aste and sitting down and interviewing her over the course of six years. Our conversations continued as we built a friendship at our teaching jobs at a small school in Pahoa, Hawaii and by meeting for breakfast at the local cafe. What is in this book are essays, photographs, and Virginia's story. Her narrative highlights her years growing up in California and then her adventures before, during, and after being married to Richard Brautigan. Widowhood did not stop her from pursuing her own dreams and direction and we see how her survival became her life path in ways which added to the lives of others. I met Virginia in 2008 when I changed high schools and began teaching at Pahoa High, after five years at Keaau High, on Hawaii's Big Island. She was a substitute teacher at the school and I asked her to be my sub/got into a conversation with her and she loaned me her copy of her daughter, Ianthe's, book, You Can't Catch Death. She said she noticed that I had "some good books" in my classroom (they were donations I got from a free box at my last job--from New Directions). She also said that she had been married to Richard Brautigan. I was so shocked, I didn't believe her--that's why she loaned me her daughter's book and of course I was instantly humbled and ashamed that I was skeptical about what she said. (Pahoa is very rural, isolated, and poor). I asked her if I could interview her about Richard Brautigan. She agreed and after these interviews were finished (published in Arthur magazine online https://arthurmag.com/2009/12/25/virginia-aste/ and also in Beat Scene #62, 2010, "Oaxaca") I thought that her story was interesting and[SKA1] also another way to understand/appreciate his writing, so I continued the project of interviewing her and then writing up my notes and recordings. I read his books growing up and also heard him read from Tokyo Montana Express in Eugene when I was starting my undergrad studies there. We had lived in Missoula, Montana and Polson, Montana. Eugene was our second home, too, because of weekends spent at an artsy café building called Fifth Street Market. This became Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast. It contains photographs, linoleum cut prints I made, Virginia's narrative, my essays, and samples of Virginia's research papers she wrote in college when she returned to study at age 50. I taught in Pahoa until 2015 when we moved back to the mainland, to Eugene, Oregon. Virginia was my main substitute teacher and we stayed with her when we evacuated due to a hurricane in 2014--followed two weeks later by lava encroachment into town--so we missed the huge eruption in 2018 which overran our old neighborhood. I now live in Sutherlin and care for my parents. Virginia and I presented sections of Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast at the Oregon Poetry Society's Fall 2019 conference in Salem, Oregon. --Susan Kay Anderson

"To be becoming. Then to be." That is the dreamed-for passage of the poet-from "waiting for word" to delivering it, through the time and space of memory, into "unshadowed" light. In his cohesive collection of poems Waiting for Word, A. Jay Adler explores the terrain of creation, where age and loss and distance from "the wildness of [youthful] dreams" necessarily re-centers the poet's attention on the thing still to be done and what it means. Adler's is a terrain made rough with fear of repetition and blank-page silence yet till-able with the re-assertion of voice when least expected, when "some smith of hidden craft" dares "crack a word against an empty instant" and "word the world" so that his "great and meager / presents Shine". In beautifully sustained metaphors of a writing life, Adler shows us "not the thing, / but the making out of it"-the "inconceivable conception" of art. -Maureen Doallas, author, Neruda's MemoirsThe word yearning comes to mind when reading A. Jay Adler's delectable collection of poems, Waiting for Word. Whether it's the first poem that births the collection-"...so Hold me Hear / me not Cry in silence... With these great and meager presents Shine"-or the final stanza of the final poem's observation about "the slow sudden passage of things / that never were yours, nor time nor space," we are invited to at once check our yearning and revel in it. Hints of modernist liminality take us through the collection, with the simultaneously tragic and cosmically silly meditation of "If I Were You," on never fully being able to know what it is to be someone else, to the subjectivity of the poem "Infinite Nocturne," which journeys through familial connectedness and ends on a cliff: "... the stars: how they are the same stars: which lives: / in the night: in the deep: endless loop: music from: hearts of." This lover of words, epitomized in the Joycean wordplay in "The Words," reassures us that to live is to yearn. If desire is the root of human suffering, in Adler's hands we discover that our suffering is not in vain. -Carol Rial, writer and professor of EnglishJay Adler's Waiting for Word is a confident, sure-footed collection rooted deeply in the love of language, and where it can take us. Though its heart lies in New York-"the city, a time, our young lives on fire" ("Full Flush")-it ranges through Latin America, and upward into a planetary scope. At times Adler's poems move as a "mill-winding motion / foot-flapped propulsion / over the calm plane provide / sheer glide" ("Backstroke") and elsewhere "measuring the progress / of Venus against the millipede's march" ("Myth"). Adler spans the timeline of memory, an earned, wistful intimacy with the twentieth century's passing that also acknowledges its weights-of brutal colonialism, great philosophers, and the struggle of our fore-bearers. These poems gather up high and low thoughts, delivered richly with music, and ever conscious of their transience, for "we cannot know the end of what we do, / though what we do will end." ("Impolitic Manifesto") Here is a book to learn from, rich with subtle meaning, ready to challenge and impress. -Robert Peake, author, Cyclone, The Knowledge, and The Silence Teacher

still is a poetic memoir on becoming, a collection of prose poetry and ink illustration that accounts for the big things (canyons and heartbreak and identity) and small things (holding hands in a taxi, cobwebs, thumbnails) of growing up. at its heart, ruzicano's premiere full length collection is a study of love-requited and not, for self and for others, as the intangible unifier that links us all in its mystery-and what any of us do about it.

These poems invite us in to the spaces between things, into "...a pause of breath/ between the known/ and the next...between the lake/and the coral clouds/of morning..." They invite us to let go for a time of the words inside of us and to just make a space, to experience liminal places of possibilities without ever being pushed across any particular threshold. Cooper invites us to make a space, to let our bodies fill with a million stars, to linger the way "...green lingers/in the trees..." and to notice how "....the old poems/make a beautiful fire..." These are the kinds of poems that can keep a person warm and you might say human, "...you might say/shimmering..." -Ellie Schoenfeld, Author of The Dark Honey, Former Duluth Poet

In West of East, veteran journalist Stephen J. Lyons takes readers on a journey into America's western interior, a tableau chockfull of one-of-a-kind, rough-around-the-edges characters and scenes rarely experienced by the everyday traveler. Lyons himself is at the center of these landscapes, chronicling not only his own past as migrant worker, but also expertly and sensitively observing the men and women who inhabit these precious spaces.

In Feral Ornamentals, Charlie Green takes the particles and atoms that are our lives, reads them inside out and gives us beauty that says we are here and that every breath is art, whether we are grieving, loving, at war, or simply watching the snow fall and boiling eggs. "You can't live in the past, but still you can die there"-read this gift in the present so that we do not die in the past.-Mukoma Wa Ngugi Who knows what? What do they know? And do they know what they do not know? Charlie Green's Feral Ornamentals incites my epistemological curiosity. This new book offers dynamite lines, such as 'We had mixed feelings about discovering / new sins' and 'Regret the error, then forget it.' I love the company these poems keep: fragment, epigraph, epiphany.-Jillian Weise

Reading Debbie Collins' debut, he says i'm fierce, is like passing a car wreck; it's hard to turn away. Her characters are struggling, if not completely broken. It rings true with both autobiographical and speculative emotions, and readers are bound to find fragments of their own humanity within.

I, Menagerie, a debut collection of free and formal verse, takes readers on safari through the jungles of family and the Big Top of memory. Across twenty plus poems, author Garrett Ray Harriman releases animals of all stripes into reflections on those chimeras that define our lives: nature, nurture, and the inseverable bonds between them. "Snake in the Grass," a semi-finalist in Naugatuck River Review's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest (guest judged by Lauren K. Alleyne), begins this diverse animal-gamation. The proceeding zoo illuminates the author's family relationships and the lives and personalities of his parents and siblings. From heartwarming creatures (dogs, lambs, and deer), to those more exotic (elephants and wolverines), to those only seen in imagination (Nessie and Bigfoot), their metaphoric presence preserves his subjects' inconstant inner-natures. Complementing and corralling this varied circus is an array of formal forms, including the sonnet, rondeau, and pantoum. Nature herself is also celebrated through the distilled and subtle lines of the endangered Japanese tanka, while her fickleness, beauty, and cunning (ours, too) define the chapbook's tentpole piece "Vulnerable Species." The collection ends with a song of praise dedicated to an immortal, ever-evolving fixture at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science: a saber-toothed cat sculpture beloved by generations. Poignant, surprising, and utterly untamable, I, Menagerie offers poetry readers a unique exploration of all the wilds and comforts a family can provide.

Go Here, See Elsewhere is a collection of poems inspired by The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a compendium of imaginary places found in literature. The poems in this collection re-imagine these places and inhabit imaginary characters in order to re-envision our own contemporary struggles. Featured in the poems are a range of fantasy, science-fiction, and real-life characters from the beloved Babar the Elephant to the Brontë family.

To the 4 a.m. Light is a collection of poetry that revels in the gifts of language and sound. Beautifully descriptive, these poems honor the simple splendor in observing the present moment. Adrienne S. Wallner's poetry conveys the celebrations and challenges of daily life; joy and grief, pleasure and pain, light and dark, connection and solitude. Poems also explore themes of the self, independence, reclaiming empowerment, and connecting to nature. While some poems, are wildly imaginative, even surreal, others are rooted in reality and reveal the poet's fears and reflections on potential blind spots. Other poems bare intimate moments with the self and ruminate on struggles with doubt, technology, and metaphorical darkness. Poems exhibit a bold sensuality, a female force unafraid to explore and celebrate desire. A few ekphrastic explorations demonstrate inspiration gleaned from art and music, while others celebrate National Parks and love of and in the out-of-doors. Many of the poems in this collection reveal a deep connection to the natural world and a reverence for the lessons it can teach. There is spirituality between the poet and place, between the voice and the landscape it inhabits. The poet invites the reader to be witness of this intimate relationship, revealing a fierce devotion to the energy of the Earth and the solace of wilderness. To the 4 a.m. Light contains portraits from a Midwest life, particularly northern Wisconsin. The poet's voice speaks with a strength of conviction and commitment to each moment observed and each insight discovered within these pages. There is a notion of seeking - not just for the sake of understanding, but to fully appreciate the unique moments of beauty and curiosity that exist around us every day. Enter the wilderness that is Wallner's mind and emerge on a path of daring imagination, passionate honesty, devotion to the natural world.

"Memory lives on the cusp between life and dream, seeing and saying, falling to pieces and finding form. Sleam's Hidden is a brilliant constellation of fragments, flashes, and waves that collect emotion, memory, desire, love, animals, land, and identities. This work is nothing short of breathtaking to me. Defiant in form, tender of heart, I took it into my body without hesitation. A heart triumph." -Lidia Yuknavitch, (Verge, Misfit Manifesto, Chronology of Water)"Humorous, sensual, and vulnerable. Sleam's narrative poems whisper the intricacies of relationship, appealing to the voyeur in all of us." -Jasminum McMullen, (By the Hour)"Tess Gallagher once said that 'The best love poems confirm something we secretly felt but never said'. I think this is true about Sarah Leamy's Hidden though the poems in this collection go even further: not just confirming something we never said but giving that secret thing a language that can hold it. In this beautifully narrative collection we are blessed by a poet whose central power is love. What a gift. Especially in a world that seems less and less interested in something so radically powerful. Hidden should not be hidden at all. It should be shared with everyone." -Matthew Dickman (Wonderland, 2018)

The deeply personal poems of A Statistical Study of Randomness tell stories of quarter-life crises, nation-sized injustices, and worlds of feeling, all through the lens of "random" statistics. From the loss of a loved one to cancer, to exploration of cultural identity, slices of life in a pandemic, and addressing America's laundry list of issues, A Statistical Study of Randomness doesn't shy away from experiences that cry out to be shared.

The Winds of Home Have Names is a debut selection of poems that deftly, musically maps with words a complex system of grief, weather and climate change, love and memory. Poet Diana Elser pays tribute to a beloved father through poetry that draws a parallel between the earth's weather phenomena and the emotional phenomena of human behavior. Exploring fog, wind, drought, thunderstorm, water cycle and the cycle of grief-how we come to terms with loss over time, and "crowd against what would still take us". Both unsentimental and full of feeling, Elser's poems sprawl across the western USA, from El Paso in the south to Great Falls, Montana; Salt Lake City, Boise, Seattle, and San Francisco. With the opening poem titled "Memory Buckled for Take-Off," she invokes the spirit of her father, a meteorologist, describing a "spelunk into the family boneyard." She introduces us to "bots sorting prophecies" and "debacles" of what she calls "human weather" that "rage and buckle," referring to memory, and to herself, as "deep-sea diver, trickster-conniver." The poems that follow launch a weather balloon into a night-time snowstorm; recall driving her father's ashes home, and remember him taking pictures of an advancing Chihuahua Desert haboob from the roof of their house, then seeing those pictures reproduced in a professional journal-and in the Weekly Reader that came to her third-grade classroom.In "Hard Weather, Dimming Hearts," Elser details human sins against the earth, "what we killed and ate, what we bought and sold, burned and threw away"-and consequences: "bodies built to save us turn against us, sabotaged...we never meant to love money more." She notes the limits and ironies of forecasting accuracy whether for the course of a human life, or prediction of a hurricane's path. Other poems involve a failed science project, an encounter with ghouls at a rest stop, the weather-responsive wardrobes humans collect, and the power of an old newspaper clipping which inspires the chapbook's title. It triggers a "brain-locked dust devil" which spins Elser into a conversation with her father's ghost-in which she uses the names of local winds to introduce the grandchildren and great children he did not live long enough to meet.

Water Bearer's Song is a collection of poetry and prose that sings of days of quarantine, of threads of loneliness, isolation and nostalgia knitting the existence of human lives in all the ages and times, whether a pandemic or not. The song might appear to be of notes of grief, but in the meditative depths of the water of empty spaces, it transcends loss and emerges to be the echoing sound of human resilience and its beauty.

At times somber, but brutally honest, Nomads on a Barren Plain: Poems on Life and Loss examines dying and grief through the lens of individual moments, both illusory and real. In this collection, Michelle Spaw draws on historical events and personal experience to ponder what happens after we die, and the journey taken by both the soul and those left behind after the passing of a loved one.Vivid descriptions include otherworldly imagery: a Viking ship set ablaze, the cave of a shaman, hieroglyphs in a pharaoh's tomb. Selections such as "History" and "Tending Grief" discuss memories and mourning in the more down to earth settings of a garden and a field of playing children.An artist and designer by trade, Kansas City native Spaw never intended to write a collection of poetry. Shortly after the sudden death of her husband, she turned to painting as therapy to work through her loss, but when a friend suggested she try writing poetry in addition to her artwork, she discovered an unexpected creative outlet and a new expression for her grief emerged.During what she calls a session of "meditative mark making," a type of channeling occurred; thoughts and phrases came forward in unforeseen ways, an alternative emotional vocabulary, as if the layering of paint prompted the layering of words and with it, an understanding that grief (while new to her) is as ancient as time itself. Consider "Pompeii," where two lovers share a final glance, and "The Mariner's Widow," written from the perspective of a woman standing on the deck of a ship, trying to comfort the ghosts of sailors, men who perished in a naval disaster.Other offerings are more personal in nature, as in "Forget Me Not," a bittersweet homage in remembrance of her husband, with a subtle nod to his fondness for novels, and "Reunion," where she imagines the spirits of her parents meeting again on the other side after many years apart.However dark some of the subject matter appears, Spaw recognizes a certain light within the pain, as in "Forgiveness," where she shares her belief that no event, however traumatic, is completely one-sided. Strength can come from suffering, an almost-magical power lurking beneath the surface, waiting to be discovered and used like a talisman. "Transition" and "Hourglass" provide the reader with Spaw's reflections on her own passing and eventual resting place, where she conveys acceptance of life's journey and the natural course of events.Influenced by a variety of writing styles, including Daniel Ladinsky's translations of the works by 14th century Persian poet Hafiz, Spaw employs a minimalist approach with storytelling, using short verses and contained language that often reveals a spiritual and impressionistic tone.Ultimately, Nomads on a Barren Plain: Poems on Life and Loss encompasses more than observations about loss. It is about letting go of the past, not only of those we have loved, but those who have hurt us, and finding a way to honor and appreciate the lessons we have learned, the paths we have walked, and the things that make us who we are.

This nurse bears witness to tremendous suffering, yet she shares how wilderness and the innocent trust of children renew her spirit. Her poem: "Re-designing the practice of medicine" was read to the graduates of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

These clever and thoughtful poems weave science, history, and personal narrative into a rich and lyrical fabric. There's humor to be found, too, as Stephan plays with the found names of these little co-inhabitants of our world. What's most remarkable is how many of these fungal poems set up a resonance with our own patterns of living and dying, a resonance that has me re-seeing everyday life as if I were an alien in a new world. Such accomplishment is worthy of the highest praise. -Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia, author of Woman in Red Anorak, winner of the Lynx House Prize for PoetryThe first collection of its kind, Mycopoetry: A Synthesis of Mycology and Poetry is a vibrant celebration of mushrooms, molds, lichens, yeasts and the wide-ranging places where these unique organisms live and thrive, in natural settings but also fully amongst us all. Stephan is a poet-scientist with a deep passion and a truly artful ability to dramatize how the realm of mycology "is boundless." As such, he guides us to see, for instance, how mycelium spread as delicate networks under forest floors. But his vision also widens out in expanding arcs, where mushrooms and lichens connect human experiences across vast landscapes, from the Alaskan prairies to Brooklyn, from the backwoods to every person's body. For Stephan, science and poetry coexist in richly overlapping worlds whose bonds are best expressed as revelations about how we make life meaningful. An accomplished poet and natural storyteller, Stephan brings into focus a dynamic world of wonder in this vital and unique collection of poems. -Donald J. McNutt, Editor, Blueline MagazineMycopoetry: A Synthesis of Mycology and Poetry is an example of how mushrooms can inspire not just scientists and mycophagists, but artists as well. -Eugenia Bone, author of six books, including the critically acclaimed MycophiliaStephan has taken me into the heart of a living thing that I had no heart. -Christine Woodside, Editor, Appalachia¿

Skaidrite Stelzer's chapbook, Digging a Moose from the Snow is an engaging collection of poems that explores our natural environment in a compelling way. All of nature teaches us lessons if we are observant enough. Some lessons are startling, such as when Stelzer takes us to the Copenhagen Zoo where Marius the giraffe is "shot through his head" and "the children's faces, expressionless, watch the autopsy...." Some lessons are insightful as "Buzzing is the sound of pleasure and dreams," after the poet points out that "there are no king bees, and we never wonder why." Then there are Stelzer's explorations of human nature mixed in with all other animals: "He tells me I walk like an elephant in the rain. Later he will cook tandoori chicken in my grandmother's oven..." and then we discover later in the poem her poetic meditation, "I've always been a seeker of warm rains...." These poems are meant to be "an implanted memory." In a feat that reminds me of Mary Oliver mixed with Annie Dillard, Stelzer's chapbook is a vibrant, deep dive into nature revealing all its beauty and blemishes. -Lylanne Musselman, author of Weathering Under the Cat and It's Not Love UnfortunatelyThese wondrous poems present a bestiary of dream animals: startling, haunting, heartbreaking poems. The poet mediates between human and creaturely realms, conjuring the complexities of "white bone" sea coral, the "opposite world" of bats, a lonely dolphin who swims "from room to room." The collection is grounded in real-life wildlife and environmental concerns, while at the same time an essential strangeness permeates these poems, which verge on allegory. Stelzer has created a unique and necessary breed of nature poem, one which opens into an enchanted, liminal space between the world of dream bears and "this office life we flicker into." -Barbara Sabol, author of Imagine a Town"The stars are just used-up light. / Believe in something new." With one foot firmly in the natural world and the other treading more philosophical waters, Skaidrite Stelzer gifts us poems sticky with bee pollen and shiny with seafoam, a deft mix of sting and affirmation. Digging a Moose from the Snow offers "a world that will kill us" but also reveals "...starfish glitter there, / growing new limbs." -Dianne Borsenik, author of Raga for What Comes Next (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019)

In her debut poetry collection, spare change, Irene Cooper speaks to the dead and the living through sideways sonnets and fragmented form. This is a book, says TC Tolbert, "...that holds at its center the multiplicities of grief ("permission to speak/to the open wound" of a dead brother, a family fractured by alcoholism, abuses of power, even the routine wonder of raising children) inside language that refuses sentimentality and is, instead, experiential. In a world where honesty is surprising (and figuratively, and sometimes literally, death-defying), here is a writer who insists on the truth, demanding that we attend to the turns, the edges, the possible slippages of individual words. It is work and it is worth it. Take heart in this daring. When I read these poems I feel I am in the presence of presence ("to believe/to loiter") - which is to say the muck of it: love." Boyer Rickel adds, "Fearless in their desire to arrive at difficult truths, these poems are bracing, generous-and beautiful. You will not forget them."

Because he is an exceptionally alive human being, David Allan Cates is a one-of-a-kind poet. The pieces of his Valentine's Day in the Mummy Museum are smart, witty, wise, candid, original, brave, affectionate, imaginative, bold, knowledgeable about the world, and utterly unpretentious. The best love poems I've read in years are in this book-"On a Cliff with You" and "The Purpose of Kissing." -David Huddle, author of My Surly Heart, Dream Sender, and Blacksnake at the Family ReunionEven at his most smart-allecky, Tony Hoagland always held the world open to the messy certitude of his love. David Allan Cates, with VALENTINE'S DAY IN THE MUMMY MUSEUM, is the new bearer of that deeply American affection. Cates' rough and aching poems are sometimes funny, never smug, and always capable of breaking your heart. Whether bright missives constructed in the beautiful unease of Latin America, or raised in view of the back door of his home in Montana, Cates' understated poems want so dearly to connect to the ineffable, even when they know it's impossible, yet go on singing anyway. "Have you written/the lives you love?" Cates asks. Thankfully for us, the answer is yes. -Christopher Locke, author of WAITING FOR GRACE & OTHER POEMS and TRESPASSERSThe poems in David Cates' book are valentines, in truth, to the liminal state of being alive. "We invent so we don't fall off the lobe of now," he writes. And "There's a moment when it could go either way." Every single poem in this collection lives in that dream-like place where the heart must go when it's grappling with loss, sorrow, and the complexities of love. Every poem remains poised in that iridescent moment. These are rich and sometimes funny poems from a skillful writer who refuses to be embittered, whose mind is forever climbing the ladder of the imagination, never knowing what might happen next. -Fleda Brown, author of FLYING THROUGH A HOLE IN THE STORM and THE WOODS ARE ON FIRE

A Chair Keeps the Floor Down, celebrates and honors the art of teaching through image-filled love songs to her students, who often spin rather than speak. Through her poetry, Susan chronicles her rich career as a special education teacher, where she engaged in shared fields of discovery with children and families. Her craft of teaching began in adolescence when she tutored a young neighbor with a developmental disability, and grew from there. Susan poemsare grounded in detail and rhythm, giving language to the memory of her students, many of whom could not speak for themselves. The collection is divided into two sections. In the first, Lately, Susan takes the reader on a journey into the classroom, where the children come alive in vivid details :"Nathan/ who loves the sound of milk cartons," Sebastian /who finds the shape of a lamp in everything." Throughout this section she weaves in images from her dreams: "In a dream/my father is alive with open arms/ mute little Henry/ suddenly has the word for run". In her poem "Lockdown", shebrings the reader into the very real day to day world of a teacher: "two teachers/ huddled in a closet", and in "Without Regrets" she poignantly describes the difficult job of trying to keep herstudents safe after a rash of school shootings: "I want to make promises /I can't keep/about saving these tiny children/who after the miraculous downpour /jump into puddles/ and watch their footprints /follow behind them." In the second section, Tell Me More, delves into Susan's passage into retirement.In "Imprint of Small Hands, she explores the way the rhythm of her life has changed:"I move/from the staccato routines/ of a job to do/to a cat body/ fluidly rounding/into all the layers/yet to bloom." In "At the Public Swimming Pool," she reflects on joining a new community of peers, "We are writers and pagans/ lawyers and carpenters/ secretaries and healers...we are teachers/ who still teach/ and retired ones /who remember/ the beat of the classroom/with its adrenaline magic/and fatigue. As she discovers new routines, she finds herself on buses and on streets still noticing the children," girl with an eager mouth/puckering around/the sweet globe/ of a lollipop." A Chair Keeps the Floor Down, is a poignant and crafted collection of poetry, which not only honors children and teachers, but also gives tribute to the unfolding process of aging: "I am 65/ still whirling/through air/and water/bare feet/curving around rocks/ to praise the ground."

Narrative poems about working class life in a small prairie town. A protest book about the damages and sorrow poverty causes on humans interweaved with tragedy and personal loss.**********************In Railman's Son, LeRoy Sorenson returns to some of his driving obsessions: the brutal worlds of the rail yards and meat plants, the bars, the legacy of addiction and poverty, and the struggles of those caught up in the generational trauma of family silences and violence. This is a moving and insightful collection that follows a tormented, compassionate speaker as he seeks to understand the world he has inherited, who refuses to make excuses or find easy redemption; a speaker who can reach the end of his journey through these poems and claim, with heartbreaking honesty and longing: "How I, now,/listen to the silence that has never/left me, aching for a life/other than the one I had.//How little there was." -Jude Nutter, author of I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman, Dead Reckoning, and two other collections.These poems made of hard prairie light keep faith with the past by refusing to look away. In spare, lean lyrics, Sorenson's work scours the meat plants, rotgut bars and railroad yards of small Dakota towns. Fearless, precise, missing nothing, Mr. Sorenson insists on saying what happened, however difficult that might be. In looking so clearly at ourselves, Railman's Son illuminates the lives we lead, which in itself is a kind of revelation. -Mark ConwayLeRoy Sorenson's gritty, visceral poems in The Railman's Son are deeply informed by the wounding of class. In this, Sorenson is brother to poets like Philip Levine and James Wright, daring to break the silence on an "ism" kept by many otherwise progressive peers. Rarely in recent poetry do we encounter so many vivid details of the traditional working class life. "There is nothing so pure as work," Sorenson says without apparent irony, yet work is also what chews up and spits out so many lives. Thus this book becomes a kind of ambivalent elegy to an older way of being in the world. In harnessing such tensions, Sorenson frighteningly reads "the shorthand of American rage," of which we should all take heed. -Thomas R. Smith, author of Storm Island

A Forest in His Pocket by Ray Cicetti is a brilliant debut book from an outstanding poet. Through the poems in this collection, Cicetti invites readers to join him as he shares a narrative of spiritual discernment and growth. Informed by Zen teachings, filled with love, and focused on ultimate happiness, these poems are verified by personal experience and passed from poet to reader just as Zen teachings are passed from master to disciple. These are poems of people, place, and self-realization, powered by elegance and touches of humor. Each poem is rich in imagery, skillfully compressed, and superbly crafted. Buddha is quoted as saying," It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It can not be taken from you." In these poems, the victory belongs to Ray Cicetti, but victory is not only his. It is a shared gift that the poet offers to anyone who joins him in seeing deeply. -Adele Kenny, Founding Director, Carriage House Poetry SeriesRay Cicetti's poetry is a revelation that will smack you in the head. It takes me back to talking with him in New Jersey diners nearly forty years ago, except that the paisan Catholic schoolboy from North Newark now tells the truth with even more blunt power, and his Zen teaching has grown from an instruction into a habitation. These poems integrate Cicetti's twin personae with style and grace, frequently peppered with hilarity. Read him! -Daniel Born, author of The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel, and former vice president at the Great Books FoundationThe poems in A Forest in His Pocket offer what I need to keep moving forward: the comfort of intimacy, the dexterity of grace, and that special light of unknowing that gives us all both pause and courage. Cicetti's narratives encompass what is both deeply rooted in the physical world and in our shimmering percepts of unknowing-and it's the brilliant flickering between those two that give these poems their humor, their gravitas, their delicious tensions and resonance. Cicetti's prose poem, "How the Universe Began," is the creation story I choose to believe above all others: "It did not begin with the Big Bang or random molecules connecting in primordial ooze, but with six Italian men playing bocce ball in a park on a cool summer evening." Ray Cicetti does, indeed, have "a forest in his pocket"-a forest of marvel and recognition. He's shown it to us so that we can share in its fresh, animated place of sustenance, community, and the possibility of recalling "our own original shining." -Renée Ashley, Author of Ruined Traveler, a book of prose poems, and Creative Writing teacher at Farleigh Dickinson University

Carey Link's most recent poetry sequence, I Walk a Frayed Tightrope Without a Safety Net, a finalist in the 2019 Blue Light Press chapbook contest, is a personal, introspective exploration of the experience of living and coping with metastatic cancer. In the book, Link reflects themes of love, perseverance, and coping with mortality. In these poems Link expresses an appreciation for life, communicating to readers that they are not alone in facing adversity.The epigraph for "My Time," final piece in I Walk a Frayed Tightrope without a Safety Net pays tribute to Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Poems from this collection have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Hospital Drive, and Poets Speaking to Poets: Echoes and Tributes.

Blake pays attention. He brings a sense of exploration into the natural world and you see the beaches, the landscapes, the oceans, and especially the stars in the sky. There is tension and weight but, as you proceed through this collection, you can feel it lift. Blake shows us something behind the veil by quietly assessing his physical environment, whatever it may be. In the tales of constellations and fog and flying across the Equator and the streets of Haiti he gives us this, as in his poem "Balloon": Beauty not searched for but floated to and found. -Eric Chandler, Author of Hugging This Rock: Poems of Earth and Sky, Love and War (Middle West Press, 2017) and 3-time winner of the Colonel Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Award for PoetryF.S. Blake says, "beauty is all around, or wherever you look for it" and the subjects in his poems explore the cosmos, economics, and agriculture to fulfill their desire to understand it; while the speaker in Blake's work "float[s] in the silence known only to angels / Above cell phones and sales reports" to find that our "one dimensional mission" is replaced with "stars we'll never plot." His search leaves him and all of us finding amazement in the world that pulls us in every direction toward the splendor of being alive even if we stand in, as the epigraph to the collections states, the "ocean of the unknown." -Robert Evory, managing editor of The Poet's Billow

The fourth full-length poetry collection from award-winning poet and novelist Diane Wald. Poet Sandra Doller says "This book is fantastic and just what I needed-rich and full and a reminder of everything important," and poet John Gallaher calls it a "marvelous new collection" where "we're presented with the most trustworthy of voices, one simmering a long time in its experience. I'm reading this book wanting to underline every word, answering, yes, yes, it's just like this..."