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Jenica Lodde's debut collection of poems is a contemplative ode to sorrow. If night had a song it would be low and quiet, soft enough to let you dream, touched by just enough light to remind you of the morning. If night had a voice it would speak like these poems, gentle reminders that there is beauty in the shadows. Written as a rebellion against the stigma that tries to silence the voices of internal suffering, these meditations on the inner landscape cut right to the core of what it means to struggle and survive, to "rise up from the center, a dome of mist."

In her third chapbook, poet Roberta Schultz examines those people, places, and experiences we reach for in darkness. Filtered through the lens of loss, these touchstones rub indelible gold into our outstretched hands, refusing to lose their shine with time.

Consider Some Flowers presents several dualities: writer and glass artisan, death and life, reality and make-believe. This collection focuses on the narrator's grief after the death of her beloved and finding various ways to mourn. As the narrative continues, the narrator finds comfort in creating assorted plant species out of glass. The concept of preserving life in intricate detail through glass flowers fascinates the narrator and allows her to explore the degrees of loss by questioning the objectives of art.Just as the narrator experiences the five stages of grief, each flower goes through stages to be completed-from studying the anatomy of each living plant to admiring the finished piece. Reliving the events before death and the artistic process become intertwined as time goes on. These glass plants are able to live forever unlike their real counterparts. Sustaining a life, even one as simple as a plant, allows the narrator to feel a sense of control. As the roots of her glass flowers sometimes end abruptly so does life. But life can't exist without death and as the narrator exclaims, surrounded by her glass garden, she misses the beauty in wilting. In the fragility of glass, the narrator comes to understand the fragility of life and her own grief.This collection recounts Boling's own experience with grief while drawing inspiration from the famed "Glass Flowers," officially the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, on permanent exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and their creators, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.

Through engagement with myths old and new, Smiling with Teeth tells of mothers & witches, lost men & the creatures they become. Poems explore the dark places that exist unspoken within families and the delicate balance kept by this restraint. Oftentimes a maze with false ends, the narration aches of love, loss, and longing, while staying sharp in its point, which is returned to time and time again: we owe a debt to the mothers before us-beauty, pain, loyalty, in equal share.

Hiromi Yoshida's debut poetry chapbook, Icarus Burning, offers a tantalizing glimpse into the post-9/11 world of fallen icons, failed hook-ups, and burning pianos. Out of this ash heap, Icarus is resurrected as the signifier of fluctuating desire-"waxing toward the boiling point on the Hudson horizon." The American psyche's Ground Zero museum scintillates, bursting open to showcase Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Gregory Corso, Patty Hearst, Norman Bates, Rosa Parks, and the Virgin Mary. They are the iconographic phantasmagoria presiding over the "nymphomaniacal caravan" of New York City's subway commuters. Hiromi Yoshida's radical lyricism gives them all poetic justice, and more.

Dust to Dust is a reflection upon the changes that come with time and the complexity of nostalgia. Bridget Dolan explores her relationship with nature and the connection it has with her mental illness. She remembers planting tomatoes in the backyard with her mother and the way life seemed to be easier before she became an adult, before she got sick and had to learn a new way to live.

Another Troy features the recently discovered poetry of an American teenager, Joan Wehlen Morrison. We witness how she matures as a poet and historian from 1938-1944. Joan's poetry tells a unique - and true - story as she loses her innocence due to the impending war and its violent arrival. Along the way she dates a number of boys, reflects on politics and art, and ends up falling in love with the man who would become her husband. Offering us more than mere historical color, in her verse Joan muses on literature, nature, God, the meaning of life, romance, history, and World War II. This vivid account of a real American girl's lived experiences during the Great Depression and the start of World War II provides vital access to how poetry becomes a conduit for understanding historical events as they happen. In her papers found after her death-diaries, notebooks, and the jewels of the collection, her poetry-Joan's perspective demonstrates how, despite an underprivileged background financially, she managed to thrive surrounded by books, socialist political leanings, and artistic talk. Inspired by the literature she read, the young Joan writes verse in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling. Later her favorite poets are A. E. Housman, John Donne, and Shakespeare. The title of this volume comes from Joan's passion for classical literature and the connections she makes between her present moment and those of antiquity. She remains a girl, able to make fun of herself, despite an ability to see deeply into things. Classical literature gives her sustenance in the darkest days of World War II. And Joan never loses her ability to feel compassion, even for the so-called enemy. These poems, sent as it were, in a time capsule to our moment today, remind us how the written word remains a means for hope for those in emotional extremity-from passionate love to dire political circumstances-both in terms of what one can read and what one can write.

Earth, My Witness is a collection that chronicles one woman's journey to reconcile her dysfunctional childhood. Poems take readers through stages of grief, awareness, acceptance and ultimately redemption through the poet's close relationship with Nature, her marriage, motherhood through adoption and poetry itself.

North Window is the second book of poems by Cambridge, MA poet Emily H. Axelrod. Her first book of poems, Passerby, was published by Antrim House Press in 2015. Ms. Axelrod writes about fleeting moments embedded in memory, about family life, the natural world, and life on a small island in Maine. Her poems are informed by her childhood in California, and by her strong visual orientation. Ms. Axelrod's work has been published in the Galway Review, the Muddy River Review, and she was Poet of the Month in the online Goodreads poetry contest, and a winner of the Cambridge Sidewalk Poetry Contest in 2019.

Shakira Croce's debut poetry book, Leave It Raw, is grounded in the elemental forces while observing the otherworldly possibilities of human creativity. The poems explore the nuances of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, the arts, and ambition, speaking to relationships' potential to hurt and heal. As one poem reads: "We weave the most incredible plait,/ and leave it raw,/ unsewn straw running across tile." Each story offers bits of experience that provide an intimate glimpse of the intricacies of life. Croce is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. A Georgia native, after studying writing at Sarah Lawrence College and completing a Master's at Pace University, she currently works as Assistant Director of Communications and Public Relations at New York's largest Medicaid Special Needs Health Plan, Amida Care. Croce's poetry translations have appeared in Babel magazine, and her poetry has been featured in several literary magazines and journals, including the New Ohio Review, Pilgrimage Press, Permafrost Magazine, HIV Here & Now, Transactions, Ducts, pioneertown, and Shark Reef. She was a featured reader in the Boundless Tales Reading Series, and she was a finalist in the Linda Flowers Literary Award competition.

Juanita Kirton's poetry collection is compelling, delivering a story of opposing forces of love and betrayal. The poems are brave and courageous and are found in tight spaces of kitchens, a church and a child's heart. Kirton breaks the barriers of silence and holds her own, turning the silence of despair into the found voice of a female spiritual warrior. She uses language so close to the bone, you feel as if you are on a motorcycle with her in the poem titled, "Back Seat". This collection is magnificent, a must read.

Her Landscape, Poems Based on the Life of Mileva Mari¿ Einstein is what Albert's first wife has to say. Read it to discover Mileva's beauty, passion, and resilience in a marriage and a world that failed her.

Set along lonely highways, the voices within When the Body is a Guardrail are restless and searching-these poems are seeking new ways of seeing, of being, of interpreting what it means to be human. Too often we treat life like a highway, like an 80s rock ballad, as both distance and a bridge, speeding towards some vast unknown, donning knee and shoulder pads, shin-guards and helmets, learning "to pull on flak jackets" and "to tread with stealth" that jewelry "jangles like an aftermath of traps." We want to be close, create intimacy without risk, but fail. And when we fail, we cannot forgive each other, or ourselves. The truth is, we drive into the morning light forgetting that experience will change us by the time we drive home through the evening sun. Each time we change, we become a new person, versions of ourselves that are never fully erased. When the Body is a Guardrail doesn't hide from disappointment or failure, that "soft-wet empty snow already understands." This collection begs us to pay attention: to the isolation of routine and small towns; to our allegiance to beginnings and endings but not to the journey itself; to the addict inside all of us. With eyes on the horizon, we are always looking for that bliss, that Eden, that perfection, and we are always failing. However, these poems are testaments to our resiliency, because despite all our flaws, we keep trying, we keep trucking along with windows rolled down and radios blaring.

This book is a kaleidoscope and travelogue of my life on the stony road towards art (lower case "a", always, for me, in the word art) - art as a form of learning and survival. One poem in this book, a poem about the part of my life I spent in Newport, Rhode Island, called To be somewhere, to say things about that place, expresses the sense of suspension between two worlds that I was trying to capture in the book's title (which is a line from another poem in the book, a poem about a dream I had about forgiveness). To be somewhere is just the highest swing of a pendulum, and to able to say anything about that place, about being there at that moment, comes in when the movement of the pendulum is suspended in air, right before it tries to swing back down and through equilibrium. The poems in this book have that sort of kinetic energy in them in different ways. Other parts of the traveling ideas in this work, metaphorical or literal, also come from my having grown up in a military family, the child of parents (including a father who served in combat in Vietnam) who each had a Dad in WWII-that family history infuses some of the work in this book, if not always directly via the subject matter. The cover of the book is a photograph I took of a doorway at the Georg Trakl House in Salzburg, Austria, in 2018. He was a lyric poet who died after being wounded in spirit by his experience in WWI, and when I saw the open doorway, it felt like an invitation. I snapped the picture, and forgot about it for a while, and then found it again at the right time.

Persistence of Perception is a strange, powerful poetry collection with the heart and soul of a live spoken word album, where the records skips the record skips through underground mansions and scat-man phrases, where faerie tales curl like kittens on windowsills and drifters mend their blues. Reid's poems are memory meals for the happy and heartbroken alike. He knits tight storytelling and sticky truths with threads of magic realism, hints of Eastern philosophy. Nathan J. Reid finds a way to catch us all between the canvas and the paint with poems about dying loves, traveling character actors, Batman underwear, and film reels joined start to finish. You enter into bizarrely beautiful planes of reality by reading this book, by swallowing its thoughts and reciting the sounds. Reid brings you from adult to embryo to child to adult again, offering a hand when needed, and always moving with a sweet and forward light.