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In this follow-up to his earlier chapbook, Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father (FLP, 2015), Luther Jett confronts the ephemeral nature of our lives, the process of grief, and the endurance of memory. Jett draws upon recollections of family, as well as historical events and forces to weave a tapestry of image and reflection. Loss "... comes with the ticking of clocks ..." the author reminds us in his title poem, "... and that is why the ocean tastes of tears." Jett writes of ghostly grandfather clocks that walk in the night, of forgotten toys scattered in an unmown lawn, of the importance and the hidden dangers of holding on to memory. "What can I sing to tell your feast?" Jett asks in the poem "Seamus", adding in his later poem, "One by One", "I chant the names of things long after they have gone."Maryland's Poet Laureate, Grace Cavalieri says of Jett's work: "[N]ever have the dead been more alive .... Subtle and intelligent stories, realized through the power of Jett's voice, make life appear on every page." In this time of world-wide pandemic and upheaval, "Everyone Disappears" may take on additional resonance as we grope for understanding in the face of tragedy and uncertainty.

If you're looking for a short-yet-compelling book of poetry relevant to the current state of the world, look no further. Romantic Portrait of a Natural Disaster is a chapbook-length collection of poems in which up-and-coming poet Hannah Cajandig-Taylor navigates what it means to live in a world that seems to always be ending. From images of mountain glaciers to cosmic odes and everything in-between, her work implores the reader to consider what happens when we are honest and vulnerable about the way in which we destroy both the world and ourselves.Though many of these poems have been published in prominent literary journals, such as Pretty Owl Poetry, Sonora Review, and LandLocked Magazine, nearly two-thirds of these works are appearing in-print for the first time. This chapbook also contains Cajandig-Taylor's prose poem/hybrid piece "You as Apocalypse", which was nominated by Gordon Square Review for a Best Small Fictions award in 2019.However, all of the poems in this book have three things in common: a desire to look to the clouds and constellations for escape, a desire to understand how things fall apart, and a desire to find hope in a world that constantly breaks. Furthermore, the underlying threads of anxiety, weather, astronomy, and nostalgia stitch these poems together into a beautiful and chaotic mess, in which we are urged to find something lovely in the darkest of places.

All Our Fare-Thee-Wells will appeal to dyed-in-the-wool Deadheads, to anyone who ever sang or hummed along to the band's infectious tunes and lyrics, and to anyone who misses or thinks they miss the Sixties.

Mark Lilley's Lucky Boy is filled with hints of unsettledness: bus tickets, a storm front, a rootless father, any number of nervously-smoked cigarettes. In cars, vans, pickups, and big rigs, characters seem almost continually on the move. What remains in place, however, is the poet-his unwavering allegiance to memory and attention, as if the poems are a response to Lowell's question "Yet why not say what happened?" In a plain style that is deceptively simple, Lilley chooses just the right word or concrete detail, creates subtle sonic echoes, and leaps suddenly, briefly, into startling metaphors, so these clear-eyed poems are an expression, finally, of something deep and nearly unnameable-some sense that, whatever our afflictions and yearnings, it is still possible, and necessary, to love what we have been given. It is possible to consider ourselves lucky. We are lucky to have this beautiful, wise book. -Chris Forhan, author of My Father Before Me: A Memoir, Black Leapt In, The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, and Forgive Us Our HappinessMark Lilley's debut collection, Lucky Boy, is a graceful and devastating volume, offered through the voice of a survivor. These poems narrate the struggles, dysfunctions and failures of an American family through fearless disclosures, exquisite language, and gentle ironies. I am deeply struck by this poet's unwavering eye and ear and narrative balance-his aesthetic depth and steadiness in the thick of these disastrous, broken characters and settings. Lilley's tonal control is heroic, given the traumatized interior of these narrations. Lilley's poems remind us that the poem comes bravely, urgently out of the seizure of human despair. It is their artistic and humane victory to transport us to these realms with compassionate insights, empathy and hard-earned tenderness. These poems take us on the impossible yet inevitable journey to personal reckoning. Mark Lilley's lovely and relentless poems answer our human failures with a quiet embrace, acceptance, and a loving ferocity. This is a book always to keep within reach. -George Eklund, author of Altar, Wanting To Be an Element, The Island Blade, and Each Breath I Cannot HoldEnter the deeply emotional world of Mark Lilley's Lucky Boy and you will encounter people striving to escape the inescapable, whether their fates or their hearts. As these poems skillfully navigate the hard truths of poverty, alcoholism, and infidelity, they are punctuated by acts of kindness-from a trucker, a bereft mother, a river. Lilley's poetry itself is a profound act of unequivocal kindness. In its devotion and attentiveness to the broken family, each poem "hold[s] [a] match steady until the stub glows." These poems depict both the wronged and the wrongdoer with an abiding compassion. By the book's end, we are listening to a river, understanding that everyone's been wronged somehow. Lilley's beautifully understated images sing to us as we grieve "through patches of clover and foamflower, / and what they found downstream." I love these lyrical vignettes for their tenderness, for how they address losses often too deep to name. "Why men drift, where men linger, / what happens when a woman receives word." They speak with the hard-earned eloquence of a grief addressed and absorbed. This is a book the world needs, especially now. It is a reminder to be empathetic, humble, and forgiving. These poems will teach you to care. -Alessandra Lynch, author of Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment and It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight

Beth Oast Williams's debut chapbook, Riding Horses in the Harbor, explores the intersection of the human experience with our natural landscape. Raised on the Elizabeth River, Williams paints the waterways of Southeastern Virginia as a rich backdrop for both memory poems and for ones that look to the future. Here, floods and storms pair with parental loss and the realization that human beings have such little control over nature's force.The opening poem, "Elizabeth River Rising", invokes many of the chapbook's themes: the flooding river, the yearning for a lost mother, the author's search for spiritual answers in nature.We celebrate the exhilaration of sailing in "Mother Still Breathes in the Wind", where the speaker can "ride the back of wild/horses in the harbor", a reference to white caps kicked up by the wind. This joy is offset by and the sullen kayak journey in "How Shallow the Creek". Many poems pay tribute to her mother and father, including "Mother's Death is Hard to Swallow" and "Nor'easter's Path"."These Stars, Now Your Mother's Eyes" alludes to religious history and speaks to the sudden loss of a loved one, with the hope that they may be present with us, if only as stars.This collection includes "Drink In The Morning', which was the author's first published poem. It appeared in Lou Lit. Other poems in this collection were published in Crab Creek Review, Lou Lit, Red Earth Review, Soft Cartel, The Sunlight Press, and Willard and Maple.

Karen Jones' new chapbook, Seasons of Earth and Sky, is a beautiful lyric to nature in all its splendor, from its vast vistas ("John Day River Canyon") to the first dogwood flower in spring ("Narrow Trail in April"). -Doug Stone, author of The Season of Distress and Clarity and The Moon's Soul Shimmering on the Water

Through this tilted tumbler / glass, in a restaurant, / I view the moon, / see-through and magnified. These lines that open Terri McCord's poem "Through and Through" suggest her penchant for looking at the world from whatever quirky angle she can extemporize. How lucky we are that in this collection she shares with us her brilliant discoveries. Among her many skills, McCord is a master of startling transitions and stunning metaphors. These are poems that must be read again and again in order to fully appreciate all that lies beneath their initial charm. McCord's new collection is, indeed, A Beaut. -Cathy Smith BowersYes, / my leitmotif is beauty / beauty at every end, writes Terri Lee McCord, but she doesn't take us there by any of the usual routes, and what is revealed as beauty has little to do with what we might have expected it to be. Elliptical, quietly intelligent, and charged with surprising perceptions, this collection is a stunner. -Claire BatemanTerri McCord is a painter as well as a poet, and I continue to be surprised and delighted by her visual imagination. She sees both clearly and deeply-as her words sometimes glimmer, sometimes flare, always illuminate. Like the artist she praises in "Believing Design," She has learned /which strokes which hues // faithfully coax the eye / into believing believing // in permanence of a kind. This is a lovely book. -Gilbert Allen

"In Heirloom, Megan Krupa strums the hidden tendons that connect a body to its geography. Here, the smokestacks of Appalachia are inseparable from the corpses in the ground. Here, the trees are as silent as the people left to tend them. Simultaneously lush and limber, Megan's poems concoct one of the most merciful, striking depictions of rural loss in poetry today." -Jerrod Schwarz, author of No Name Atkins

Not-Yet Elegies is a speculative, probing conversation with history about our collective human future. Covey-Smith filters the contemporary world through a literary lens, drawing on philosophical and historical texts and journalism to ask questions that elicit an existential flux between hope and grief.

Szilvasy's aptly titled Witness Marks takes on the one wholly predictable reality in every human life, beginning with its visits to us at the family home, the smallest of the concentric circles we inhabit. What these poems witness to, and "sign" with their beautiful, straightforward, musical "marks," is no less than death, as encountered by fathers and mothers; widows who pass their mourning flowers to their neighbors; beloved pets, and the owners who bury them with "grave gifts," like pharaohs, even when we feel "sad and silly" doing so; survivors still longing for the words we all leave unsaid when we go; atheist friends too honest to offer, by way of consolation, anything more than "a drink." But gradually, these poems enlarge the circle until it finally includes the prehistoric ancestor who, after millenia buried in a glacier, "was rolled out of snow" to a kind of resurrection. "Death colors everything," says "Epistle," but the rest doesn't disappear: the stars remain, although they "will always have a melancholy tint." Without making promises they can't keep; without pretending the natural world can provide what only human love can give us; without denying the undeniable, or forgetting the threats and losses that devastate the living, the poem that closes the book claims that "the earth is beautiful beyond all change." The poet, now as the devil's advocate, disputes that claim, and challenges the poem with hard, painful questions. But the claim is there, a counterweight to what we know, and persuasive enough to endure, as only poetry this good can do. -Rhina P. EspaillatAndrew Szilvasy has chosen an ingenious title for his first publication. With these poems as witness marks, he pieces together a life and makes his way in the world, beginning from square one, his childhood home. One poem gives us a portrait of his parents, their faces lit by the television screen. Another brings incorrigible Uncle Billy into the already cramped and overheated living space. And "Epistle to Brett, on the Death of his Mother," the collection's defining poem, gives us a portrait of the young poet himself. Feeling inadequate to the task of consoling his friend, he ramps up his rhetoric. When he catches himself waxing poetic, distancing himself not only from his friend but from his own experience of loss, he starts over. It's "as if the sun / exploded in your mind," he blurts out. That is what it's like to lose your mom. Such vulnerability, and the desire to keep it hidden, give the poem its expressive charge. This debut collection marks the first steps of a wayfarer setting out. It is an auspicious beginning. -Alfred Nicol

"What is my life? What is in my life? Why now do I understand rest, and the connection between body and mind?" "Do I still believe I can find color and joy and openness daily? Can I make a declaration with awareness of ability, oh, and Where am I going?"In Iris Gersh's debut collection of poetry, A Thousand Questions, questions appear often without answers. Her book of poems describes a scattered life, a few attempts at fitting in, changes in lifestyle from a kid growing up in the Shawangunk country with a spirited, and almost always emotional Jewish family. Along her route, she writes about "Crazy Women" and "Fear in America" as well as navigating dental care in "Your Teeth". When the early seventies sounded the death knoll for a Liberal Art's Degree, and 150 resumes landed not one response for her, Gersh took a job at as a unit clerk in a heroin detoxification unit. She thought that further education in and of itself was probably a good idea for the future of someone else. In the summer of 1973, she accepted her brother's invitation to live up at Lama Mountain in northern New Mexico. Few details had been revealed either to her or her parents, and those six years of living in an intentional community, the years in her twenties, the seventies in Taos, are her happiness and the time that she gains survival skills, physical and spiritual.Many years later in her mid-forties, Gersh takes a chance on love when she moves to Greece. A Thousand Questions leaves us wondering why. The author feels that the most resonating pieces are of Greece where she spent eight years living with her boyfriend. Why had she stayed in the face of emotional abuse?Angelos Sikelianos is one of the author's favorite poets. In his poem "The Sacred Way", the narrator says, "But farther on, as if the world/had disappeared and nature alone was left/ unbroken stillness reigned. And the rock I found/rooted at the roadside seemed like a throne/long predestined for me." These words have led her to believe that she too has learned the skill of turning a "rock into a throne." Delusion or illusion?In the writer's mind, the Catskills were a blur of skedding down hills and staying indoors in the wintry weather. How could it be just that? In writing this book, Gersh discovers the makeup of her original family, different from her original narrative, and tells stories of her younger years in her poems, such as in "Grandma Rebecca" and "Mahogany Night Stick".When her "shell of her former self," as a niece described her upon her return to New Mexico, dropped down in Albuquerque, she was home. Whereas the commune days gave her the impression Albuquerque was just an airport, living here in the last fifteen years has made her feel part of a "place family" where she is involved in many local poetry readings and events. The high desert landscapes, the Sandias, the Rio Grande bosque-all have imbued her spirit during these challenging times.

In Walk on Air, Deirdre Cornell gracefully uses the haiku as a form of meditation as she ruminates on middle age, marriage, and her lifelong love-the Hudson River. Her haiku artfully echo her footsteps as they mirror the beauty of nature and sound. -Caledonia Kearns, author of A Daughter's Work is Heartless by NatureDeirdre Cornell astonishes in these haiku that reveal the beauty and paradoxes of the magnificent Hudson River Valley. She recalls the great poet Basho whose haiku for five centuries have been opening eyes and souls to the realities of peace, joy, suffering, harmony, love, and goodness that lie behind appearances. Deirdre's first book was a memoir of growing up in a town on the same river. Older now, but still seeing the world with fresh eyes, she gives us priceless views on every page. -Michael Leach, author of Soul SeeingDeirdre Cornell's small poems take us with them to a quiet attentive place where we can sense connections, marvel, and feel a sense of calm acceptance. -Hannah Mahoney, PoetThe Haiku poems are evocative and uplifting. I could feel myself out on the Walkway, experiencing its ever changing beauty. -Elizabeth Waldstein, Executive Director, Walkway Over the Hudson organization"Rain + sun = rainbow" / Few words, ponder much / For few words = thank you / / Grateful for small bites / Bathe in river's light- / Walk in Deirdre's air. -Trina Paulus, author of Hope for the Flowers

Dinosaur Hour, as a collection is concerned with the violence in nature, but also how articulating violence done to or by nature provided a relief from the strongest doubts of life, presenting a fresh, 21st century ars poetica response to the Romantic view of landscape holding all truths.Poem after poem, Roy presents imagery of a brutal (or brutalized) landscape against which humans are silent, ambivalent, and torn. His pastoral violence emerges as the most apt articulation in the speaker's interactions with others and with his own memories, anxieties around the passage of time, and concerns about what happens after this life ends.

Louisa Muniz's debut collection is a testament to the power of healing and reclamation that follow personal family loss & longing. With her artistry of words and beautiful images she pulls us into magical, surreal & sometimes strange landscapes that powerfully transfix and transform us. Among this selection of poems is Stone Turned Sand, the 2019 Spring Contest Winner for the Sheila-Na-Gig Journal along with the poem, Last Time I Buried My Body in Silence, nominated for Best of the Net.

Barbara de la Cuesta's novella, The Mists, is a fascinating read. The characters are pulled into the midst of conflict and self awareness in the misty mountains of Central America. The reader is whole-heartedly pulled into the minds and hearts of de la Cuesta's characters. -Leah Huete de Maines

A lyric leap forward from Harry Bauld's playful and passionate debut, The Uncorrected Eye, How to Paint a Dead Man peers so intensely at art that the verse becomes somehow both hallucinatory and colloquial at the same time. The new collection leaves aside the formal dance of some of the earlier work but extends the vivid and often comic explorations of art and the American vernacular. With no-look pathos and sudden jazzy riffs, many of these poems vamp on artists from Renaissance how-to author Cennino Cennini through Canaletto, Rembrandt, Magritte, the German Expressionists, and Picasso, often through dramatic monologues; Bauld also pitches playfully through fellow writers Mark Strand and Joyce Carol Oates, among others, to tap into the turbulent spirit of the moment. "Always now / it seems we look at art and it looks back / at us on trial," as he writes in "The Eyes."One figure that looms large here belongs to 80's avatar Jean-Michel Basquiat, the former street graffiti artist who shot to world-wide fame and died of a drug overdose at twenty seven. Bauld, who spends part of the year in the Basque country and has written previously about that region's complex history, is oddly sensitive to the seemingly merely linguistic tie between Basque and Basquiat. It's the voice of a Basquiat angel in "Annunciation" who says, "You already/gave birth to this flame/you don't know the name of." The painted "dead man" of the title takes on many identities: not only the poet's father but Basquiat, Mark Strand, the victims of a mass shooting--and the shooter himself--as well as each of the artists evoked, having passed ironically under Bauld's gaze from observer to observed, painter to model, creator to subject. "Art is always saying hello and poetry is always saying goodbye," reads the Kenneth Koch inscription to the book's opening poem, the punning and satirical list, "Duals in the Old West." ("The sun is always saying shut up and the moon is always whispering tell me more....")But Bauld sets out not just to burlesque and blur but to erase these teasing but finally facile dualities. This a collection that displays, explores, and ultimately fuses all sorts of opposition: fame and obscurity, serenity and violence, inner and outer experience, what's real and what's imagined. One expects no less from a poet whose own name is an oxymoron.Still, floating above the undercurrent of death-haunted discontent and loss is also a delight-the hello of art, in Bauld's case verbal as well as visual, in the face of elegy's traditional goodbye: "It's what you do after you go down/that counts," he writes in "Self Portrait as Marco Polo as Miles Davis" about the floored boxer Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. And in "Cadillac Moon," with a sidelong swipe at our current political scene, the poet observes a Basquiat rendering of a car: a set of fantasy wheels that play like four-square in the hands of children who, like the seven artists who will save us, plow their fingers in paint furrows to change all the colors of today's sky, rub out the authoritarian moon and everything under it, making a holy mess and moving

Caught in the Light is an arresting and eloquent poetry collection that evokes the poet's experience during and after her father's dying and death. At the same time, it pays homage to the land she inhabits with the rest of us, "a place where dark means dark," where, after her father's death, eagles still "wheel across flat gray sky, as if nothing/had ever changed." What she reveres-people she loves, land that is continually altered by humans-is also what she cannot hold onto, except in such poems as these. Walker is aperceptive and articulate observer, and this is an exceptional first book.-Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky Erika Walker's Caught in the Light confronts a "fractured map I could not read." The chronicle of her father's decline, Walker's poems issue from this rupture with scrupulous care and tenderness, measuring death against life with honesty and lyrical acuity. Yes, the world of father and daughter reverberates with loss; it is also replete with wonder, affection, and the small miracles of memory. Walker's exquisite attention conjures a ghost: "the slow wander/of his hands as they tunneled down the sleeves" and "yellow leather driving gloves/curled in the shape of his hands." These poems offer reassurance that what is most precious cannot be destroyed and will never really be lost to us.-Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts To be caught in the light of Erika Walker's chapbook is to feel the simultaneous beauty and terror of life. The wounds of loss splinter the soul, and light becomes both the puncture and our balm. Here we move through the relational landscapes of self, place, and family, delving deep into singular images that root in contemplation and stillness. She shows us how to remain grounded in times of turmoil. "Here is a place where aspen trace deep water/and the scree scree of the hawk stops your blood."-Andrea Rexilius, author of Sister Urn

The poems in From the Depth of this Journey by Isabel Huston explore the subtle ways nature reveals our own essence. The reader is invited to the place where "The Harbor and the sky are a riot of clashing blues / Boats snugly rocking / Telling shushing secrets in the / Knock knock of their hulls." There is a profound emotional honesty in Huston's poems.-Leah Huete de Maines

Patrice Melnick's latest collection is a Dear John letter to her "old lover," New Orleans. Amidst brown scum waterlines and refrigerators taped shut like rancid clams, her post-Katrina speaker recalls the good times of the broken relationship. Many writers have conveyed the sights or tastes of the city, but Melnick excels at capturing its smells, sounds, and sweaty skin-feels. The City of Hey Baby is also the City of Can't Forget You, Baby, this collection makes wonderfully clear. -Julie KaneIn City of Hey Baby, Patrice Melnick captures and celebrates the heart and soul of post-Katrina New Orleans, from the trials, endurance, and rebirth of human spirit to the music and cuisine that flood waters could not destroy. With nuance and detail that only a lover of the city can see, Melnick patiently and artfully stitches patches of images, feelings, and reflections into a patchwork that is uniquely New Orleans and worth cuddling with. -John Warner Smith, State Poet Laureate of Louisiana

A gimlet-eyed catalogue of the natural world, and, contained within it, the world within ourselves. Irresistible language makes it a classic. Andrew Sean Greer, author of the novel LESS, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winnerThe prose poem, "Hose. Ants. Plants. Expressway." alone makes this delightful chapbook worthy of our close consideration-and is emblematic, too, of this glorious, serious, humorous, loving paean to the natural world and us in it, in this, to quote another poem, "personal myth of the garden. Claire Ortalda, Georgia State University Fiction Prize WinnerIn Judith Cody's gorgeous collection of poems, Garden on an Alien Star, a fistful of soil is a place of endless wonder, where the poet sings praises to decay, and a window box is a magical crossroads where the human and natural worlds interact. The gardener's many relationships with her flowers and weeds are full of metaphors for personal and spiritual relationships. Everyday experiences take on mythical stature, in one poem it's a line of ants along a garden hose, in another poem it's "a descending cascade of petals" distracting a brown towhee from an earwig. The poems in this collection offer the poet's vision of a backyard Eden where today's creation legends continue to be forever born and reborn. John Curl, author of novels, The Outlaws of Maroon, The Co-op Conspiracy and the history, Indigenous Peoples Day

Postcards from the Lilac City knows more than a thing or ten about hometowns and the tithing memory exacts. Mary Ellen Talley, its scribe, knows how memory takes form-repetitively, insistently, in uncontestable numbers, unshakable voices and resonant sensations-and she knows how to give dim shades indelible shape and also when to bide her time, letting the ghosts of the past do their work. She knows the iceberg theory of place, how much of lives spent in quiet places is underground, whispered, half-heard, half-hidden. But, when life does erupt in the Lilac City, it's anything but sedate. It's a spiffed-up antique carousel connecting the living and the dead: "The cemeteries are full / of riders."; it's a lust-ridden stone man sharing a lilac float with the annual crop of Lilac Queen contenders; it's the sputtering butterfly wheel of the narrator's first car; it's a plucky traveler who measures the exotic against home in a series of wry postcards: "This place is 400 years old. I was given a white silk scarf / of respect and I even tried yak butter. I am still so Spokane." This is a fine debut, and the Lilac City couldn't ask for a better bard. -Deborah Woodard, author of Borrowed Tales

"Arresting. This is the word that comes to mind after finishing Sarah Levine's, Take Me Home. From the first lines this collection grabbed my ear the way a good piece of music does, drawing me into its world of intimate utterance and melody. Throughout, Levine masterfully controls line, rhythm and language, building the music to crescendo before easing the tension in final, satisfying resolution. As I said, these poems are simply arresting." -Justen Ahren, author of A Machine For Remembering, and A Strange Catechism"Sarah Levine's poems beat like a heart. Familiar myths twist with each line. Primal, dreamy, and forlorn, like Andrew Wyeth paintings." -Rachel B. Glaser, author of Paulina & Fran"The poems in Take Me Home are filled with startling images that enrich their observations, creating a world that is uniquely new yet entirely familiar. Sarah Levine is an extremely gifted poet who understands the complexity and passion at the heart of the human condition. These finely tuned poems can only enhance the lives of those who read them." -Kevin Pilkington, author of The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree