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Natalie Marino's chapbook Under Memories of Stars is a collection of lyric poems that use the symbolism of stars to represent what is unreachable but ever present. Involving California's natural landscape, these poems speak about grief and love, the evolution of memory, and the transience of experience.

My Burning City is the winner of the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition, and the poems in this chapbook are part of a full-length collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, that was selected as the inaugural title of the Immigrant Writing Series with Black Lawrence Press. The poems "Rain," and "Armenian Folk Dance, 1915" won the PS Strousse Award with Prairie Schooner. My Burning City is a book of poetry about a boy escaping the Islamic Republic of Iran in search of a new homeland. The book takes up loss, immigration, and war as central themes.

Questionable Views continues Ed Ahern's wry and sardonic outlooks on our humanity. His poems are crisp and approachable, with melancholy sometimes lurking in the shadows. His hope is that people who never read poetry can read and enjoy his.

The Dark Diary: in 27 refracted moments explores the creative impulse and the possibility of personal change. These 27 poems are like images in a montage, different yet connected by a consciousness in pursuit of a new becoming. Each poem stands by itself as a moment of realization, be it about the power of habit, or desire, or love. Yet, each moment resonates with the moments before and after it, creating a single dark diary.

Gary V. Powell's Permafrost is a rich and sensual meditation on aging, parenting, romantic love, and the inexorable passage of time. From the lawn's first cut in spring to its final cut in fall, the poet urges readers to take nothing for granted, "neither the greening of/my glowing embers maple/nor the thorn from old-world rose." In poems written for a son who has chosen a high-risk combat role in the military, Powell both admires the boy's courage while fearing for his safety, noting that: "Lean as blades forged in flame/Army Airborne Rangers/ prefer heat to cold/would rather burn than freeze." Love for a spouse is celebrated not with flowers and Hallmark cards but in the preparation of Tuesday tacos: "I work from scratch, kneading masa/ for tortillas like I needed your breasts/the first time we lay together/ flesh to flesh, tequila to margarita." In the eponymous poem. geologic time is compared to the forty years since a daughter's birth: "all those years between/no more than a/glint of sunlight/off a liquifying glacier." As Powell observes in the closing poem, "(B)ut nothing is without cost/not seed sewn in bare patches/fertilizer dearly applied, or/bad decisions made in spring." Here are poems from a seasoned author bursting with wisdom and humor and shining with light under the shadow of impending darkness.

In Magpie Mornings, Liegel's poems illuminate a natural world that crackles with hope and wonder. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, Liegel casts light on damp forests and rambling river edges hurriedly unfolding before us, where silt is born from stone. These poems show us what there is to see, touch, and taste, if we are willing to pay attention with keen curiosity and an open heart. Liegel takes us on a tactile journey of self-discovery that rises above sentimentality. The mysteries of family, motherhood, and loss unravel amidst blackberry brambles and drying sunflowers. These observations lead to wise awakenings. Liegel shows us that we are not separate from nature, but an expansive part of it. These poems encourage us to discover where the past collides with the present in the light of morning.

This Easy Falling uses the language of the seasons and every day experience to tell the story of birth, aging, change, loss, and joy. The poems often use natural imagery flavored with imagination without losing sight of its earthly roots. The poems take us on a journey from our celestial beginnings to our often humble endings in failure and footsteps in mud, never losing the book's overall music. In the end, the poems in this book offer a deeply spiritual experience.

The poems in The Tree of Partial Knowledge explore how we move between hope and fear, faith and doubt, awe and our daily lives, sometimes scurrying, sometimes stumbling, sometimes just looking sharp, trying to keep our dignity and balance. With small portraits and reflections, with scenes of lived experience-children eating dinner, a gracious woman observed in line at the cash register, a man blowing out candles - the poems show how we persevere, even as the built and the natural show us their gaps and threats, or, for some their small rewards. These poems recollect that once we had a tree of all knowledge in a garden, now we have only bits and facts and stories to guide us and reveal the quiet grace afforded us in the everyday.

I've never seen a bird that hasn't made me want to live. When the first humans were born of clay, what bird did they become? Some of the most beloved origin stories are rooted in the realm of clay and birds. What Bird Are You? is a murmuration of bird song mapping Ohlone lands of the Pajaro Valley, famous birds of New York's Central and Prospect Parks, the Acoma Reservation, and daily life in Colorado's first "Bird City" through the ancient and modern arts of pottery and birdwatching. This collection of essays and poems explores what it means to live as a writer caught between the world of potters and the world of birds. Through mythology, memory, late-capitalism, and history this collection sculpts a poet's life out of a lump of clay and feathers.

Under the dual skies of Italy and Western Pennsylvania, these poems take us on the journey of two Mafaldas and the push and pull of their seemingly diametrically opposed lives. But what we find are the very human commonalities of suffering, joy, and, in particular, the small and large moments in every life, onto which reckoning seems to hinge. Miller is a keen and astute student of history, both the personal and the public, and shows us a glimpse into a world pulsating with the delights of arias, princesses, love, sun-warmed figs, grapevines, and Puccini as well as the trials small town struggles, desperation, the quotidian and royalty under siege. Fact and fable mingle with the careless hopes and desperate dreams that provide a portrait of lives' worth knowing-and for our own betterment, taking to heart and learning a lesson or two from along the way.-Michelle Reale, Author of Blood Memory: Prose Poems, and Confini: Poems of Refugees in SicilyFalling Into the Diaspora is more than a poetry collection, it's a book of poems-a long story plotted into poetry. What a brilliant idea, taking Princess Mafalda of Savoy and collating her with a mother "... a vindictive raven, flying out of a coal mine in Western Pennsylvania." Mafalda met a bitter end in Buchenwald, and Miller takes us back and forth across time, mixing the elegant with the colloquial, to mesh history with present time. It's rare to find a conceit so arresting and managed so flawlessly. This writer knows that structure is the way to grip us tight. Yes, Miller's breath is on every page-witty, painful, original. She has written a masterwork.-Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet LaureateDon't be fooled by its title, MaryAnn L. Miller's book is about tyranny and rebellion braided by the powers of fate, mystery and a deep abiding respect for personal history that leaves readers captivated. Small miracles are elevated to milestones in the story of immigration and assimilation with characters like Miss Reed who "... kept my mother's name on a slip of silk paper inside her maiden bra." The Midwife's Tambourine morphs into a mandala with "... a history in blood and water that will not change." Miller is deeply engaged with the world of our mothers and conveys her pursuit with brilliant and precise lyricism that leaves an indelible impression.-Maria Lisella, Author of Thieves in the Family, Academy of American Poets

Triple Twelve is a strobogrammatic tour of future lives, from manta rays to triple goddess to plain suicide, a lurid music of crossed numbers. In these poems meaning is wherever you find it, the boundaries are tenuous and granular and ecstatic, the radiant fool is tyrannical and meticulous. We find here the phantasmagoria of the mundane, the glassy harmony of the blood spheres, and the resonant paradise of changing forms: a holographic respite among the levitating stones of the total field.

With language that cuts to the bone, the poems in Jennifer Burd's Fringe offer portraits of those on the ragged edges of modern society. Among these poems, readers will find a homeless man's story of being mugged; an immigrant woman's quest for her GED so she can leave the stifling confines of her husband's house; the plea of a developmentally disabled man for someone to teach him to read; and prison inmates' longings for acceptance. Letting images and stories speak for themselves, this collection brings into full view the desperation, resilience, and creativity of those who are routinely overlooked or actively brushed aside by mainstream culture. The lyric poems, framed with dictionary fragments, quotes on social inequalities, and haiku by Burd, put the reader in the spaces - inner and outer - of the marginalized.