Bøker utgitt av Finishing Line Press

Maintenance is the expense no one ever estimates correctly, and that margin of error, of uncertainty is the real cost, the one Matthew Burns assesses with such precision in Imagine the Glacier. None of the losses (a chicken named Ginger gone to a hawk's dinner, the absence at the heart of a John Prine song) are too small to record; none of the gains (a wife's new dress considered in light of what in the world it can't solve, the relief of a late matinee with The Royal Tenenbaums diminishing into dusk) sufficient to offset the atrophy of old towns, the calamity of wildfire, the darkness surrounding a train's headlight on a curve. But to see this all clearly (the perennially unsold vans in a used car lot, the bright slivers of metal left in a hand from sharpening a shovel) is to experience what these poems offer so generously and scrupulously, a world as immediately present as it is imperiled. -Jordan Smith, author of Little Black TrainSteeped in the everyday violence of the wild that is and is not human, Imagine the Glacier argues that even the devastations of our age can yield to intimacies with the lover and the other, including the non-human, such as animals and the elements, weather patterns and the seasons. In an age of rapid urbanization when one place seems interchangeable with another, Burns casts a compassionate, granular gaze on human-built and natural environments, capturing their interconnections and textures in gorgeous, vividly rendered poems. Embracing the warp and weft of deep time and personal memory, Imagine the Glacier teaches us how to live-"how to go home"- in the Anthropocene: "Look/ at the rivers in their swell; they have nothing/ against you; they do not care; not about the time/ in '89, in January, when you almost drowned,/ setting old tires on fire and sliding them/ across the ice like cheap comets..." -Sarah Giragosian, author of The Death SpiralAn expertly crafted first collection, Imagine the Glacier roves through landscapes domestic and natural to recover precisely what's there: "high pines and flowers, / the leg of an elk / some vulture left / dangling in a tree," or "a coyote running / from one culvert to another / in the black of a desert unlit / by streetlight or any moon." Contained within Burns's exacting language are expressions of profound generosity and praise, but also a grave and, at times, frightening quietude. The effect is a kind of gothic pastoral. As the poems breathe and carve their path, their relics start to twitch and knock against the cabinets. -James Capozzi, author of Country Album and Devious Sentiments

As a student of biology at the University of Puerto Rico in the 1970's, the author worked for the Department of Natural Resources. She was sent to survey the nesting sites of several species of birds at a lagoon in Culebra, a municipality of the island of Puerto Rico. During the two years she worked as a biologist on that island, she discovered a world that was previously unknown to her. The US Navy used the island as a bombing range. She learned to look for a red flag before swimming in the turquoise waters. The flag signaled bombings would occur that day. The signal failed on some occasions. While she swam in the coral reefs with a friend, she met on the island, the author saw the devastation of coral reefs and undetonated bombs. She watched and listened to horrifying stories of despair. But during that time, she also learned about the resilience of the people of Culebra. They stood like David against the Goliath of the US Navy to end the use of their home as a target range. In the end, it was a humble turtle that brought the attention of the outside world to their plight and the end of a horrifying practice.

In the compelling voice of a debut nurse-poet, Cardinal Marks explores how we navigate the turbulent waters of loss and pain, and the unexpected guideposts that chart a path towards clarity and solid ground."Cardinal," as an adjective, derives from the early 14th-century Latin cardinalis, "principal, chief, essential," literally "pertaining to a hinge," from cardo (genitive cardinis) "that on which something turns or depends; originally, "door hinge." As much as this chapbook is about maps, geography, borders, and compass points-the marks (including tattoos) by which we find our way-Virginia LeBaron's Cardinal Marks also attends to all manner of hinges, to whatever permits two separate entities or experiences to connect: to doorways, for example, that open and close-in the heart or in relationships. These poems explore the territory between guilt and forgiveness, childhood and adulthood, and perhaps especially between life to death: "the tender, liminal place," LeBaron writes in "Where I need my mother to stand," "that is neither light, nor dark / but the dusky in-between / the snow / before footsteps / fall." Heir to Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III, Cardinal Marks travels unflinchingly through the coordinates and connective tissue of loss and love, with a sensibility that is both bodily and mysterious. -Lisa Russ Spaar, Professor and Director of Creative Writing, University of Virginia, award-winning poet and author of 12 books including Orexia (Persea Books, 2017), Satin Cash (Persea Books, 2008) and Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999).It's hard to believe Cardinal Marks is a debut collection, its poems are so finely wrought, so mature and fully realized. It's all here-a sure command of form, of language and tone, a skillful blending of high lyric and harrowing truth-all here, and then some. These are real poems-adult life in all its complexity-beauty and loss met with a frank and deeply intelligent gaze, with insight grown from lived experience. Virginia LeBaron has been places and done things, and it's our great good fortune that her thoughtful, deeply moving poems are here to tell us the news from far flung lands, the house next door, and the frontier country between this life and the next. -Jon Loomis, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, award-winning writer and author of 3 books of poetry, including Vanitas Motel (Oberlin College Press, 1998), The Pleasure Principle (Oberlin College Press, 2001) and The Mansion of Happiness (Oberlin College Press, 2016).

"Everything abandoned comes alive" Pamela Yenser writes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home, which becomes an invocation for resilience in a world filled with disaster at every turn: whether it's the wreckage of flying saucers in Roswell, or a brother and a mother who are irrevocably changed after a complicated birth, or an abusive father who is always in the driver's seat-whether it's by plane or car. Yenser does the difficult work of reckoning with trauma and the "family / history slamming the lid on truth." And though there's comfort in escape, and beauty to be found in the landscapes these poems traverse in a wide range of traditional and open poetic forms, Yenser reminds us "As long as you live / you won't forget," and there's danger everywhere. Lucky for us, we have a wonderful guide who knows her way around language and line, and is cunning enough to "have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem." -Gary JacksonPamela Yenser is a learned poet who knows the context, history, and texts of literature. Here she uses her supple and strict prosody to tell a family story about an abusive, daredevil father, a denying-praying mother, her "little retarded brother" ("She is her brother's keeper") and more. In airplanes and Airstream trailers "one catastrophe after another" happens to mark a childhood where "Visions of the devil / made you tithe, trade in the family silver." This astonishing chapbook delivers one revelation after another in poems exquisitely structured: "The past is a trap the Jaws of Life / can't break," she writes, "... but isn't this the work a poet is meant to do?" One poem in exact rhyming couplets is called "In the Garden of Demented Parents." Another, also in couplets, ends: "Look! I have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem." Read this brilliant and triumphant chapbook by a poet who limns the tragedy and triumph of her life. -Hilda RazPamela Yenser's brave and tender poems spin together family history, personal resilience, and imaginative perseverance "sharp as that wreckage/ strewn like tinsel on glitter-/fields of tumbled rock" (as she writes in the title poem). Encompassing everything from a "bad weather balloon made of Kryptonite" to "a pineapple/ ruffled doily," Yenser juxtaposes the images and dreams of the otherworldly and the day-to-day life while also writing deeply of love and survival, monsters and angels, magic tricks and memories. This is a captivating and sparkling collection. -Caryn Mirriam-GoldbergPamela Yenser's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS refers to, yes, the Roswell UFO, as well as family relationships that are a parallel encounter. The poems' narrator sees the flying saucer wreckage as a four-year-old. She writes about this iconic disruption of the skies as a way to reveal the workings of memory itself. This is an exciting personal fable that blends journalism, verse, and narration. -Denise Lowe

A debut book of poetry, Where I Live Some of the Time, is a collection of poems about friendship, nature, fantasy, love, travel, politics and the memories of youth and growing older written shortly after Barry Vitcov turned seventy. There are meditations from his home in Ashland, Oregon and summer vacations in Carmel, California, where he fell under the influence of poet Robinson Jeffers and the Pacific Coastline. The range of topics includes a fantasy about a talking guitar in "Takamine Guitar Love Song," the political commentaries of "Semicolons and Politicians" and "Counting Florets After an Election," and structured villanelles such as "Portraits of Angels in the Sky." Not to be ignored are poems inspired by his standard poodles. Barry Vitcov is a retired educator having spent 45 years as a middle school English teacher, school administrator, leadership coach, and adjunct university professor. He lives in Ashland, Oregon with his wife and two standard poodles. As a teenager, he fondly remembers his father carrying a small collection of his poems in his billfold and showing them off to friends and customers. Barry was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area where he was privileged to experience the 1960's energy, diversity and music as a high school and college student. While attending San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge), he was mentored by Newdigate Prize winning poet David Posner and professor and poet Benjamin Saltman. During his educational career, he wrote very little fiction and poetry, as he was immersed in his work. After retirement, he began writing again and continues to hone his literary voice. He has had fiction and poetry published in EAP: The Magazine, Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Vita Brevis, Finding the Birds, and The Drabble.

Reading Lois Rosen's Diving and Rising, immediately I feel the warm presence of the person who has made the poetry. This poet has grown from a self-assertive child to a generous-spirited woman. She has ejected herself from the constricting environment of her parents' one-bedroom Yonkers apartment but, even from across the continent in Oregon, vividly evokes both its dreariness and the delights that burst open its walls. People whom the poet has admired, students she fondly remembers, friends dear to her, and her mother, whose resisted admonishments she now recalls with understanding-all come alive on the page. So, wonderfully, does the poet herself. She is a kindergarten ballerina wearing her tutu all day, a young diver with no need of a springboard, a South Bronx middle school teacher taking her class to a Park Avenue avian specialist to get care for an injured duck. She stays at the hospital for a friend's surgery and giggles with her afterward as they share a cherry popsicle treat. Stroking a Japanese anemone's velvety stems, she remembers that her mother's only garden was a sweet potato rooted in a glass. She thrills at the taste of fresh pizza in Rome. Cuddling with her husband on the couch as they watch "Dancing with the Stars," she "give[s] us a 9."She is full of spunk. She is all tenderness. -Eleanor Berry, Past President, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Author of No Constant Hues and Only So Far"Even the sweetest berries leave stains." Such is the feast of Lois Rosen's poetry. In a lifetime-spanning leap, this collection dives deep into heartbreaks, losses, and injustices and surfaces buoyant with grace. Diving and Rising will stain your fingers with the delicate complexity of witness and wonder. It will stoke your appetite for life. -Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic

Free Papers: poems. In this poem sequence Eliza, the enslaved, speaks to the poet Mary Moore Easter who answers her in the voices of her own ancestors, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, captives of the slave period. And often responses come from contemporary women. Sometimes the poet seems to channel Eliza's voice in love song or defiance. Easter was inspired by Eliza's archival court testimony to flesh out a whole woman and her fears, courage and determination to be free. This impassioned work does not only interrogate the past, but also leaps forward to offer a model for women of today. Mary Moore Easter, a Cave Canem Fellow, is a strong and flexible writer. She brings her tremendous powers of vision and of poetic technique to this book incorporating forms such as narrative, lyrical free verse, sonnet, pantoum, and dramatic dialogue.

Durable Goods, poem by poem, finds lasting value in ordinary daily acts and objects -- shaving with an inherited safety razor, packing a backpack for a wilderness trek, listening to Neal Young on a cassette worn to the brink of uselessness, answering a toddler daughter's questions about air. There are letter poems to writer friends composed along trails in the Rockies, appreciations of the crooked, eternally unraveling beauties of river rapids and of the canoes that cooperate with them. By turns boyish and battle-scarred -- "For forty years," one poems says, "I have been fifteen" -- the voice is this collection is that of a man listening to his life, leaning toward whatever durable good he can come across next.

In the new chapbook Scenes and Speculations, the poet declares "What a marvel is this allocated // life on earth," and the reader is captivated by the wondrous and the surreal. T.P. Bird's poems are grounded in rich language. Throughout, we glean wisdom from a life fully lived. -Leah Huete de Maines¿

*Winner of the Mark Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award*"I can barely remember / how we all used to touch each other," writes Chana Kraus-Friedberg in Grammars of Hope. These poems confront issues of isolation and connection heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, and they confront complications and inequities that preceded the pandemic. Here is a writer reckoning with what it meant to grow up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, and here is a writer addressing independence. Hope and lament are braided in this collection, as they are in life. These poems are real, fueled by longing, honesty, frustration, and celebration. They speak across many chasms, and they guide us over and through what divides us. They remind us that we can "grieve for / a life and a certainty / I'd never want back." As in the poem "First Step," Chana Kraus-Friedberg has found a language of hope in this first book "after years of playing God / like a slot machine." These poems matter. They address what we inherit, but they also address what we can build. -Cindy Hunter Morgan, Author of Harborless, 2018 Michigan Notable Book and Winner, 2017 Moveen Prize in PoetryIn Grammars of Hope, Chana Kraus-Friedberg poignantly charts an escape from the atomizing and constricting permissions of a Jewish background in Brooklyn toward an alternate New York City, one where Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovitz can love "not quite silently," where there are new tribes that talk about words, long-haired men and sweaty poets, tribes with "bright, spiky mohawks." She does not find this new city at first, but Kraus-Friedberg in poem after poem bristles with a lyric intensity and drive that achieves this fuller self, that "perfect sentence" as she says in one poem, "words strung together like small shining orbs." She is wise enough at book's end to know why the words are there and hopes that we, in this often polarizing pandemic "wild" world can hear them-and hear them we do-line by line-in this smart and award winning collection. -Dennis Hinrichsen, Poet Laureate Emeritus of the Greater Lansing Area and author of This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go

Set against the backdrop of the poet's new home in the Pacific Northwest, Suppose the room just got brighter provides a snapshot of the beginning and endings of two relationships, and how the meaning of these relationships cannot be disentangled from the unfamiliar landscape she inhabits.

The Second Perfect Number, a chapbook of twenty-eight poems (written one per day of a recent February), reads as a journal in couplet form. Solfrian, an award-winning poet who has authored two previous full-length collections, follows the mind of a woman as she goes through a month's worth of parenting, sex, menstruation, and even a death. The poems, loosely based on the ghazal form, explore how those demands intersect and fight each other for some sort of cohesion. It attempts this cohesion through acts of the intellect, while simultaneously criticizing that impulse for its failure in the face of commonplace divinity. The chapbook quests for some sort of "second perfection": not the original plan of controlling entropy with the intellect, but the second plan of succumbing to a more native, spiritual state of feeling.

Poems for the hopeless romantic to thumb through when their car breaks down in the rain on a lonely gravel road.****************Where else-but in Ryan Scariano's Not Your Happy Dance-might we find an irresistible love poem about a sweetheart canning dill pickles? Where else might another beguiling poem praise that same woman by feting her delight-dance, her "goofy little rumpus?" In the infectious music of Scariano's poems, a lilac has "loamy eyes"; sugar ants are "little seasonal keystrokes"; and vinegar can "inhale summer's glow / and exhale that long amber breath." Wending through this collection, each reader can be the lucky traveler who makes the claim that "Muse Road snuck up / out of the fog / and kissed me." -Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate EmeritaWhat I have always loved about Ryan Scariano's work is its direct engagement with joy. Despite what the title of this zing-ful collection suggests, these are poems that break, like a rainbow might, through a spectrum of emotion grounded in pleasure, in awe, in wonder. After I read this book I sat back and felt held by the nouns of the world, real and imagined, seen and unseen. This is a poet who knows how to live into language and by doing so, he invites us to experience the splendor of fully being. -Emily Kendal Frey, author of The Grief Performance and Sorrow ArrowRyan Scariano's poems are filled with the kind of deep attention that makes the reader long to be its object-to be a "starry green shard of sea glass," a "moth fluttering in the small white breeze," or "the wounded heart on blackbird's sleeve." It's entirely possible to be seduced by a voice on a page. That's what happened to me six years ago when I read Ryan's first book, Smithereens, and I've been waiting for this book ever since. -Henrietta Goodman, author of All That Held Us and Take What You Want

A Vietnam vet crafts a flute from bamboo to redeem the past. An executive drives his mother's ashes to the Gulf. A woman paddles away from her daughter's graduation party on Lake Martin. A musician finishes writing his song during a tornado. A psychiatrist is struck by lightning. Red Mountain Cut tells the stories of ordinary people making remarkable discoveries about themselves and the world around them.

"I am stunned by these poems. Joanne is fearless in carving out a place where, as a woman, she was told she didn't belong, where she worked building and maintaining substation equipment, climbing in towers, handling high voltage cable, and where she saw the spot a wireman had died when he went to work by mistake on a live breaker. A number of poets have tried to define what work is, but few have succeeded as well as Joanne Ward in not only creating a world that tastes of blood but in conquering it." -Thomas Brush, author of Last Night, winner of the 2011 Blue Lynx Prize, Open Heart, and God's Laughter, with Lynx House Press.In these poems, Joanne Ward documents her life as a "high-voltage" woman who spent a barrier-breaking career in the electrical trade at Seattle City Light. With humor and linguistic precision, she traces how she and other pioneering journey women gained their foothold, literally and figuratively, in this heretofore male and largely white electrical trade of Seattle's publicly owned utility. Ward vividly recounts her efforts to succeed, in the face of life-threatening sexism on the job, and to "prove I was good enough to do 'a man's job.'" We sense her satisfaction and even love of this work, as she and her sister electrical helpers "turn to callous and leather / and move like our well-oiled tools..." learn that "our muscles will hold." I wish I had known of Joanne Ward's work, both as high-voltage electrician and poet, when Raising Lilly Ledbetter was being put together-one of these poems would have been included! Brava to this poetic debut by a ground-breaking woman in a challenging workspace! -Carolyne Wright, author of This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems, and lead editor of Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace

This collection of poems is like a New York apartment across the air shaft that leaves its kitchen blinds open, and we observe a daily saga of survival and meals and meaningful comings and goings, the residents unaware of our avid attention. We'll never meet them, but out of the eight million, they're close personal friends. -Garrison Keillor, editor of The Writer's Almanac, creator of A Prairie Home Companion, poetry editor, and author of numerous books including the Lake Wobegon seriesIn the poems of Toast Anita S. Pulier reminds us again and again of what we are drawn to in this world-its idiosyncratic pleasures and deep loves. Her wry, smart poems celebrate the music of what happens in the critical now, her voice easily encompassing two coasts. At the same time, they show us, with a devastating clarity, sometimes forgiving, sometimes dryly funny, the cost of opening ourselves to all of life. Wide, wise, sly, sexy, quiet, heartbreaking- her poems give us wisdom without clichés or heavy handedness. Anita is a grounded writer, a sane poet, who "out of the corner of her eye keeps/ vigilant watch on the ravenous tiger circling/ everyone she has ever loved" (Mea Culpa). At this time especially, we need her words. -Mary Kay Rummel, former Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA, author of What's Left is the Singing, Love in the End,The Illuminations, Green Journey, Red Bird, The Long Journey into North, This Body She's Entered, The Lifeline Trembles, and Cypher GardenMaking sense of it all, especially in our time of crisis, is the theme of Anita S. Pulier's new book, Toast. The intimate vignettes presented are filled with humor, concern and love. She looks to redefine family and even tries to make a deal with the god she doesn't believe in. Ms. Pulier addresses the everyday with a keen eye and reflects back on family, teachers and friends who formed her. And, of course, she googles dementia and offers advice. In many ways this book brings us home and welcomes us all to our lives with a smile. -Phil Taggart, former Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA, author of Rick Sings, Opium Wars and Cowboy Collages. Co-editor of Spillway a Poetry Magazine

Imitation Crab examines the ever-blurring boundary between the genuine and the fake in the 21st century, where reality TV shows are scripted and memoirs sometimes turn out to be completely made up. This confusion bleeds beyond pop culture into our everyday lives, where it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate performance from authentic experience. Truth is a slippery concept; as the title poem suggests, "the truth is what we make/ from the mess we inherit" and might be as phony as Monopoly money or a cheap replica in a museum gift shop.In this virtuosic debut, Vagnino deftly crafts poems in a variety of traditional forms, but gives them a contemporary edge through her use of idiomatic language and wry humor. For example, "Junk Mail Ghazal" is a ghazal (a Persian form) comprised of spam email subject lines. Thematically, the book pays particular attention to the roles women play, and how the societal constructs of gender can be damaging. Vagnino focuses on the consequences women face when they transgress from the identities and labels they have been prescribed (i.e. mother, wife, daughter). These transgressions include sexual desire, aging ("Women at Forty" is a sly response to Donald Justice's "Men at Forty") and ambivalence toward marriage and motherhood.For a poet invested in witty interrogations of artifice, Vagnino surprises with observations on love and loss that are tender, sincere, and funny. "How to Explain Death to Your Daughter" imagines how a parent might explain the unexplainable to a child by telling her that "death is necessary, as natural/ as sugar dissolving in a glass of lemonade/ leaving its essence to linger." The poem was featured on public transit in the Twin Cities as one of the winning selections from the Saint Paul Almanac's Impressions contest in 2017. In "Vera vs. the Butterflies," Vladimir Nabokov's widow, Vera, struggles after his death to determine what to do with the butterflies they collected together. She ultimately decides to kill them, mercifully, so they can be reunited with her husband whom she thinks will be delighted "at the sudden flutter/ of company."Butterflies are just one of many small creatures ennobled in Vagnino's verse-oysters, weasels, fireflies, and countless other bugs and birds inhabit these poems. Vagnino grew up in Missouri, attended school on the East Coast, and now lives in Minnesota, and all three regions are colorfully brought to life in Imitation Crab, which takes the reader from the freak show at Coney Island, to the swamps of Oxford, Mississippi, to the Northwoods underbrush. Vagnino is not afraid to get a little weird; in some of these poems, banality shifts abruptly into absurdity and strangeness erupts unexpectedly, as in the realm of dreams. Dreams are the passageway between the real and the surreal, which she explores in poems like "Your Dreams Explained," where flying is "a sign of a lover's betrayal/ you are gravity, abandoned." Dreams and art imitate life, and likewise Imitation Crab considers how the stories we tell about ourselves often exist somewhere in between truth and fiction. In the refrain of "Imitation Crab," Vagnino ponders the futility of learning to "spot a fake," and in the final couplet, seems to suggest that it's a pointless endeavor: "With practice you can tell the real from the fake/ but unless you're the crab, what difference does it make?" However, by the end of the book, it's clear that it makes a tremendous difference-for the crab and for the rest of us striving to live as authentically as we can.

CATCH A GLOW, is both reverent and a reckoning. Iglesias moves through raw narratives with the strength, grace and focus of a dancer: combining moves, challenging rhythms, guiding each poem beyond routine and into the open bliss of abandon, the way truth-telling tends to feel. -Dasha Kelly, Wisconsin Poet LaureateKarl Michael Iglesias invents a new grammar in CATCH A GLOW. Finding the official language used to describe Hurricane Maria lacking, Iglesias has electrified the language in his book by stacking verbs, breaking lines in the middle of sentences, and using caesuras to alter logic. Iglesias has given us a book of poems up to the challenge of holding our grief and rage. -José Olivarez, CITIZEN ILLEGALCATCH A GLOW is a beautiful collage of fragments that create a new Boricua diaspora, in a post-Hurricane Maria world. With his use of staccato phrases and rhythmic language, Iglesias reenacts on the page, both the splintering and mending of a people and nation. This is an important and much-needed collection. -Mayda Del Valle, A SOUTH SIDE GIRL'S GUIDE TO LOVE & SEXAs if a storm blew through, the poems in CATCH A GLOW are left wind-sharpened and rain-beaten, fragments sometimes whittled into blades, other times the edges are smooth as music drifting from yard to window. These poems sing their jagged love songs for the people and land of Puerto Rico brilliantly, illuminating for me bright lessons on intimacy, justice, and survival. Karl Michael Iglesias takes up this book's broken, mosaic style and does his people right. Like money or parcel packed heavy with supplies to get the living done, these poems soar their way to the island and our hearts with their urgent, skillful care. -Danez Smith, HOMIEIf hurricane poetry was a genre, Karl Michael Iglesias would be at the vanguard of its practice. CATCH A GLOW is a book that comes at you from the outset. The fragmented diaspora is alive in Iglesias's concision. His witness is biting in its undecorated minimalism. We are literally left to deal with the white spaces between the wreckage depicted in these poems. CATCH A GLOW is made of items, memories, and people who survived the longest blackout in history to take jibaro baths and who were left to count the names after the destruction. You can find that which is spoken, whispered, and buried in Iglesias' book. No need to answer when they ask "Were you affected by Hurricane Maria?" Just give them this book." -Willie Perdomo, THE CRAZY BUNCH

I love the fluidity of memory and identity in Still Looking for Neuzil because both are pungent with terror and love. Time is against the speaker because he is against himself as movingly as the speakers in the best dark Coleridge poems. The veteran de-creates the world and the self in an attempt, however desperate, to make peace with "Being Back in the World." In Fredson's poems this hopeful and disheartening mantra burns far into the 21st Century. Still Looking for Neuzil should receive the fanfare of a book like Catch 22 if "Americans in the 21st Century still have the capacity to feel. I consider the terse, obsessive quality of this book, and, though it is not fashionable to quote Arthur Rimbaud, I will: Fredson's book fulfills Rimbaud's exhortation that a visionary must sustain "a long, boundless, systematized disorganization of the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness." -Rich Lyons , Author of Un Poco LocoThis is a book about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Mike offers us a powerful voice that at once becomes poetry as therapy. He takes us into the horrors of the Vietnam War and its lifelong psychological cost to him through a direct and deeply personal exploration of war trauma. He doesn't speak about his PTSD; he speaks from it. This book is a gift to all soldiers who live in the dissonance between war and civilian life, as well as the psychotherapists who work with them. -Angelina Renes, PsychotherapistIf war poetry, or, more specifically, the poetry of soldiering, has focused on experiences within war-its moments of no return, of being at peak intensity or in the contrasting troughs of waiting, of intgrospection-then Fredson's poems aim at something else: the life sentence of veteran-ship. Still Looking for Neuzil is a longitudinal reckoning with the fifty years since Fredson's service in the Vietnam-American War. The war continues to kill well beyond any theater of combat. Ghosts crowd out family. The instinct to disguise oneself as human, day in and day out, after such utter de-humanization, is obscene. The war wears through, always, eventually. The speaker's life is overwhelmed by his service timed and by the war, even as the war is forgotten or revised in our national and popular memory. Still Looking for Neuzil is crucial reading in a country now permanently at war. -Sarah Vap, author of Winter: Effulgences and Devotions

Burntwater is a book with an emotional core, grounded in craft. It doesn't need pyrotechnics of circumstance or political provocation. The collection speaks directly from Diné experience, addressing, among other subjects, the legacies of Spanish colonialism-a complex topic often overlooked, as dominant culture tends to reduce all Others, including indigenous people, to "People of Color." Additionally, the collection speaks to issues of indigenous masculinity in a way that is more accessible, and more confessional, than we as readers tend to encounter. This is necessary, as so much of this perspective has been relegated to prose forms. In many ways, Brossy re-appropriates one of indigenous people's most long-lived means of communication (the song, the poem) in a way that is vital and compelling. This poet serves his poems, not the self, and not at the expense of the reader. "Every person's pain is their own," after all, and this collection moves pain into a legible register, without spectacle, and without a dependence on an imaginary, white readership. -Joan Naviyuk Kane, author of Milk Black CarbonChee Brossy's Burntwater inhabits a present that is sometimes haunted, sometimes uplifted, and always informed by the past. In the title poem, Brossy presents an intensely personal account of the pain and uncertainty of the Navajo Long Walk, a history sounded here from deep inside the people and the language. And Burntwater is a book concerned with language: "Shilíí' hazlíí'-my horse has appeared, has come into being," he writes, trying to bring across the nuances of Diné Bizaad. Other times he challenges English to be more responsive to experience: "mountains bursting highway heaving up neighbors waving in the sun." Or in these beautiful lines in which tenses and seasons crack open to give us a glimpse of how time can surprise and change us: "but for us it was empty and January then, the last snowfall not yet melted when we drove through on our way, though we didn't know it yet, to the house at Long Cornfield." With Burntwater, Chee Brossy enters and enriches the great tradition of Diné poets. -Jon Davis, author of An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat

In The Empty Chair, James Miller Robinson writes a poetry of character and of place, and, without seeming to try, he achieves a wisdom poetry. Whether he is focused on the ruin of a textile mill in Alabama, the young Everette Maddox, or a café in Mexico, his gift is to take exacting measure with a language that is at once alert to the present and ghosted by history, and he does without pretension. Robinson does not cheat, and he does not dodge the ugly or the beautiful. These are poems that matter.-Rodney Jones