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Dorie LaRue's title alludes to a line from Othello: "O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains." In this searingly honest collection, the enemy is drugs, and the brains being stolen are those of our children. Much has been written about the drug epidemic, but only LaRue understands the all-consuming hunger that drives it: "the idea that being drugged/is better than being alive." The ghost of Anne Sexton, who was also driven by such hungers, presides over these poems, as rich with imagery as hers.-Julie Kane, Professor Emeritus, Northwestern State University, and Poet Laureate 2011-2013

This stunning collection of lyric poems celebrates the fierce beauty of what it means to be fully alive in these challenging times and the unique role that art and art-making play in that. How and why do we make art? How does it make us?Swimming through both grief and praise, these finely-honed poems navigate a journey of creation and self-creation, seeking acceptance and wholeness in the midst of life's trials.Crafted in the form of a three-part aria, the poems explore and interrogate the extraordinary aspects of language, art and music and their reflections in the natural world and in our lived experiences. Juxtaposing wonder and horror, mystery and rapture, the poems pay homage equally to the physical world and the realms of the imagination and the spirit.With probing keenness, the poet asks questions that are left ringing in the reader, calling us to greater aliveness and participation. Maxima Kahn gives voice to the unsayable and vision to the invisible, bringing a vivid intensity to the page and casting a spell with words that lingers.

In his debut collection Lookaftering, Ray Holmes writes about the many relationships we form as young people that shape us into the adults we eventually become. His poems take readers through landscapes both familiar and metaphorical in order to revisit those family dynamics, friendships, and loves that have such strong bearing on the way a person sees their world.

This is a story told with poems about sons and fathers, how the one gradually becomes the other, starting with a dream, growing up and growing old together. It's a journey that's as long as a memory, and a cycle that never ends.

In 2018, Cooper Young received the Alex Adam Award at Princeton University to travel through Japan and write poetry. He traced the path of Matsuo Bash¿, the famous Japanese poet, who was renowned for his haiku and travel sketches. Following the tradition of the wandering poet, Cooper wrote about the people and places he encountered as he stopped at shrines, temples, rivers, and onsens, many of which were described in Bash¿'s famous book of haiku and prose (haibun), The Narrow Road to the Deep North.Sacred Grounds is a sketch of modern Japan: the people, culture, religion, and history. It explores the many ways the journey has changed since Bash¿'s time, and the ways in which it has stayed the same. The reader is invited to participate in the natural beauty of the landscapes and the moments of enlightenment available in everyday life.

The poems in Choosing a Stone, Richard Hedderman's first full-length poetry collection, masterfully explore the intersection of physical landscape and human consciousness. In sharply imagistic and muscular language, these visceral poems revel in the sensory delights that reinforce our shared humanity: praising hot black coffee, savoring a rustic Basque dinner, lazing in a hammock, or watching "the sky-map of cloud drift over the trees." He is archeologist and alchemist, quarrying an historical mythos to shape his powerful, deeply-realized vision. Hedderman's work intrepidly-and wryly-excavates and shapes an authentic understanding of our place in this world, and the one we've come from.

Rare Earth is a chapbook of poems that explore ideas of time, property, and boundary through an investigation of the poet's family's immigrant ranching history in South Dakota.

Francine E. Walls journeyed into the remote deserts of Death Valley, Anza-Borrego and Mojave, as well as the Kalahari in Botswana. Her poems mirror the beauty and danger of these wild places.

How the Dog Helps, written by Revey Hertzler, is a collection of poems which details an uncommon bond formed between the narrator and their dog as they both go through life with anxiety. The poems are told in a gender neutral voice in order to highlight the raw characteristics of an anxiety disorder, and to force that disorder to contend with itself in each interaction with an overly anxious pet.

Martin Lammon's long-awaited second collection, The Long Road Home, offers poems that tell stories about a son's affection for his mother and father, and a husband's abiding love. His poems tell stories about back roads that crisscross Ohio's heartland, the Deep South, and beyond his homeland's borders, stories sometimes sad, sometimes funny, but always surprisingly familiar. Whether searching for Emus near the Oconee River, feeding pigs on his grandfather's farm, dancing with his beloved, or climbing up Blood Mountain and singing just for fun to the birds, Lammon reminds us how poems preserve best those moments that we long to hold on to, rewind and replay again and again. Like the poet Robert Frost, Lammon chooses the road less traveled, but rather than go alone down that solitary road, he invites the reader to join him on the journey.

Benjamin Mueller's debut poetry collection, To Where Are We Bound, examines coming-of-age in a dying steel town, the desire for escape, and the power of place to shape our lives. The collection uses images to tell the story life in a small, rural Pennsylvania town. From Friday night football, to the shuttered steel factory, to the closed Main Street store fronts, Mueller's poems echo the voices of a past that is very much still present.

As a five-year-old, the author experienced WWII in the snug embrace of her grandparents' home, with only minor disruptions. Memories - confusing, humorous, always vivid -- led to these poems.