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Things feel on the verge of coming undone in many of the poems of Starting Again. The poems express an impulse to move beyond that, to start again or to want to stitch together rifts in ordinary moments like the aftermath of a hospital stay, getting stuck on a sandy road in a desert, childlessness, loss of political conviction, depression, and other everyday threats to a sense of hope. The poems ask whether we know what we have and if we can see experience as whole when we feel small disconnects-tugs "at a loose thread."

Robert Dreesen's debut chapbook titled 20th Century Tool Shed constructs a narrative that simmers as he chisels a penetrating commentary on the modern world. With dexterity, Dreesen creates precise poems that matter to us, where "The Shovel is willful, / God of the Old Testament / before he 'got religion.' " These poems are full and contain sharp insights into ourselves and our histories.-Michael Catherwood, author of Projector

Intelligence and musicality entwine in 34 short poems that leave the reader "braced with stunned relief" -- a grand round trip through history, music and art which brings us back each time to more of what we didn't know we needed, until we find it here.

Janus, the debut poetry collection from emerging Bay Area writer Esther Lim Palmer, is an evocative exploration into the ever-evolving, and often incongruous, realms of daughterhood, marriage, and motherhood.

Crow Mind is a wide-ranging poetic meditation on the delights and curiosities of relations between our kind and corvids-two smart but very different creatures eyeing each other. It's a backyard conversation, a research project, a warning, a choral offering, a lovesong to the wild world we find right up against our doorsteps.

In Open The Fist, the poet navigates the primal impulses of sexuality, violation and reclamation. She shines a light into the dark corners of her family dynamics, grappling with what it means to be born a girl, to survive into womanhood and to look back. These poems bear witness to the healing power of truth-telling. Childhood trauma may cast its long shadow, but through the alchemy of poetry, Braden transforms her past into a path to forgiveness. In the end, the reader celebrates with the poet as she exclaims: "Risk the ricochet of fate/taunt the gods/with your raucous joy!"

The fact that the title of this book is taken from the great jazz piece written by Paul Desmond for the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out might suggest something about the structure. Gathered from a couple of years work, we would agree on a rubric-place, travel, philosophical ideas that we would respond to from our own experiences but also keeping in mind the others to create a kind of loose dialogue. "Jazz is about freedom within discipline," Dave Brubeck once said. The book is organized to keep in mind the eclectic mix of rhythms and musical themes in Brubeck's Time Out and to echo the three part jazz concerto, So, the first section contains poems that tend to address who we are, the kinds of things we tend to notice (as for example, Laura Baird's "Surface of Things." Some of these poems are political as in Barbara Carlson's "After Threats of Nuclear War," while some others deal with social or ethical issues. The book has an improv feeling, like the exchanges between Milosz and Merton, Stafford and Bell, in a tradition that harks back to Dante and Cavalcanti.Collectively, the five poets have published about 35 books (winners of James Agee, Ashland, Concho Rio, Cleveland State, and Juniper Prize and Maxine Kumin Awards) and have won numerous awards including Guggenheim, Fulbright, Witter-Bynner, NEA, NEH Fellowships, to several Pushcart awards to awards from being Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and Translation Workshop Awards from Slovenia. The authors also range from New England to Tennessee to Alabama, and teach at universities such as the University of New Hampshire and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, are editors of a couple of journals (Solstice and Poetry Miscellany), and include a tutor and counselor. They have traveled around the world, writing these exchanges as dispatches from Europe and various places in the United States.Laura (Behr) Baird's poems appear in numerous magazines and in Paddleshots: Selected and Bottled by River Pretty, and The Heart's Many Doors. • Deborah Brown is the author of 2 poetry books, co-edited a book on poetics, and co-translated Last Voyage with Richard Jackson and Susan Thomas. • Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of 2 poetry collections, co-translator of 2 books of poems by Sre¿ko Kosovel and co-editor of A Bridge of Voices. • Richard Jackson is the author of 15 books of poems, 10 of criticism, and winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA , and Slovene Order of Freedom. • Susan Thomas has published 3 poetry collections, and a collection of short stories.

Home is a relative term, especially if you have grown up overseas. In HOMESCAPES, Lee Woodman takes us from an Indian village to the edge of Tibet to a small town in New Hampshire. An audience with the Dalai Lama touches her spirit; questions from an American high school homeroom teacher challenge her wit. Lee never stops searching for what it means to be American, digs deep to understand her New England roots, and ponders intimate relationships, persistently asking, "Where-and what-is home?"

This flash fiction novella, The Grief Manuscript, illustrates the dream-like, annihilating, and repetitive gestures of a dying marriage. The story recasts the emotional range of grief using metaphorical images and remarkable characters in brief, poetic scenes. The recently separated narrator inhabits a series of temporary houses as she faces the devastating and radical identity changes that come with divorce. Grief activates the narrator's demon, who appears in the form of a small monster, the Burden Animal, who torments her with her previous humiliations and belief that she is a burden to those who love her. Magical realism offers images of personal torment, where the narrator's head falls off, spiders crawl up her throat, her tongue escapes, and the fields of her psyche burn. It isn't until the narrator accepts the full expanse of her grief that she can see a way to move forward to what is "next."

A Series of Moments is a meditation on places in the world and on our place in the world. Taken together, these poems reveal the deep connections we have to the places where we are and have been. As the opening poem suggests, though, the work is "a series of moments" that ring their own notes without the imposition of a larger narrative framework.

With layered attention to sound, image, rhythm, metaphor, Where Space Bends' carefully hewn poems bring alive the story of a woman who lives by herself in an enchanting, rural mountain hamlet. Bookended and woven throughout is the shadow of Lyme Disease. The book invites us into her inner reflections, how she uncovers wonder in daily rituals. She yanks out creeper vines, overwinters roots in the basement just before the equinox, crisps sunflower seeds and shovels new snow, hoisting mounds onto frozen banks higher than her shoulders. She considers the patience of the hundred-year-old Victorian, and asks whether those that had owned it had loved it enough. Alone by choice through an uncharacteristically cold winter, she sees she is aging in the feathering whiteness of her hair. The book unfolds into discoveries of how Lyme Disease may have developed into something so virulent and what could be resulting ramifications. Realizations about other worlds that exist within us lead the reader into the excited joy of the Lyme Disease spirochetes, into their ecstasy, how they revel in our tissues. This happens as the woman explores natural forms of healing in her conversations with the daunting heat of the sauna, her prayers to the poison of wormwood. Interspersed with existential depression, a desire for escape from paralyzing snows, temperatures hovering near zero for weeks, she questions the complicated surfaces of difficult emotions as if they were an alternate kind of being. In her yearning to woo the universe, she searches for transformation in the smallest things. In the bagfuls of grimy pennies a roommate has left, in the pale masks of new born raccoons, in the razor spikes and velvet pockets of chestnut hulls. She marvels at mayflies who live for just one day, their mouths with no moving parts, their only reason for existence to reproduce. She bravely crosses out the legal birth name and pencils her beloved friend's vital name into the soft wood, as the conveyer belt rolls the coffin into the crematory furnace. There is even mindfulness, devotion to detail and poetic justice within her loss.With an overriding sensitivity, she understands her strange reality is based on a compendium of possibilities of thought, minute bodily sensations and swirling energies that take place for her simultaneously. Even in simple times.This is a book about a searcher, even in the face of changing illnesses, a believer in the gift of meaning, who is always hopeful for a way through. Vibrant in the mist and wind of mountain seasons, she is always aware that she is at a crossroads.

My Pet Sounds Off "translates" 35 popular Beach Boys songs from English to English, updating, editorializing, and fooling around with the poppy lyrics of the world's favorite surf band. Put on your sunscreen. Pull out the deck chair. Prepare to revisit - with 21st century eyes and ears - the soundtrack to your adolescent romantic fantasies, crushing break-ups, and endless summers spent at the beach awash in ocean waves, pheromones, and tight harmonies.

The poem, Welsh Mare Corralled, was named a finalist for the Orlando Poetry Prize.

Part poetry, part lyric essay, Sundial is about friendship turning into infatuation, and the desperation that accompanies unrequited love. Written with lush language and playful breaks of the fourth wall, the collection meditates on time, youth, and art's role in shaping reality.