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The poems in Heather Sullivan's Method Acting for the Afterlife bring me to a world of Donny and Marie songs, of hollowed out oak trees, to a world of "unseen demons and/long dead ghosts pushing addiction and/melancholy." As only a master poet can, Sullivan blurs that line between the seen and the unseen, the living and the dead. As the "toll keeper of existence," the poet connects us with "everything that I've lost forever." Loss is ever-present, but tempered with humor, with such real imagery - the popular girl's table, Deadheads, and Limoncello - that my heart is allowed to "break again and again." I trust Sullivan's "deliberate, direct" voice - the voice of a "Sabbath child made wise." Method Acting for the Afterlife is an important book, full of urgency and truth.- Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella

In her impressive first collection, Liljegren retells the Lucy stories from the iconic tv show, revealing depths and a darker side behind the slapstick. With great skill and exquisite language, Liljegren takes us through a series of episodes and imagined therapy sessions, complete with dream analysis, a Rorshach test, role reversal, and free association - associations that lead always to Ethel, and the endurance of women's friendship. Liljegren reveals the courage behind the humor, the power dynamics of marriage, the conflict between the good wife and the professional woman, of how we become the roles we play. We love Lucy, these poems say, because we know she is us. Cheryl Savageau, author of Dirtroad Home and Mother/Land

Poetry and Fiction from: Hussam Jefee-Bahloul · Gene Barry · Robert Beveridge · Matt Borczon · Pris Campbell · Alan Catlin · Linda M. Crate · Lori Desrosiers · Mari Deweese · Susan Mann Dolce · James Duncan · Karen Friedland · Roberta Gould · Mitchell Grabois · Doug Holder · Richard D. Houff · Tim Kahl · Mignon Ariel King · Kay Kinghammer · Susanna Lang · Jennifer Martelli · Gary Metras · David P. Miller · Suchoon Mo · Phil Montenegro · Polly Richardson Munnelly · Edward Mycue · Philip Nikolayev · Carl Nelson · Renuka Raghavan · Melissa Rendlen · Tree Riesener · C. C. Russell · Margarita Serafimova · Scott Silsbe · Meg Tuite · Bill Yarrow · Donald Zirilli · ryki zuckerman

"I have to keep looking; try to see more, speak more, turn away less," says Lisa DeSiro in her fine first book, Labor. And this is what her poems do: they keep their eyes peeled, their ears open, and their hearts receptive. (Boston street bustle comes vividly alive in many of these poems.) But receptivity demands a tolerance for paradox, and DeSiro's poems--in disarmingly simple, idiomatic language--plumb the secrets of the world's contradictions. "Go ahead, enjoy this day" begins a poem titled "9/11 Anniversary, Public Garden." At home with the prose poem as well as the tightly rhymed lyric, DeSiro distills memorable music from the most colloquial moments--"We were all thumbs on our dumb phones"--and offers readers a vibrant panoply of sights and sounds, captured and conveyed in her impressively taut writing. -- Steven Cramer, author of Clangings and Goodbye to the Orchard

Temptation of Wood exists in three worlds at once: a fabled yesteryear, an aching present, and a tarnished tomorrow, with poems that roam endless highways between myth and history, human nature and the natural world, where shadowy neon lit cafés offer the house special: the twin delicacies of hope and desperation.

Anne Elezabeth Pluto's Lubbock Electric is a gushing exploration of life in which she gives you, the reader her world to make your own. You can dive into poem after poem and swim with familiarity, frequently learning new strokes. Einstein maintained that the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple, and this is precisely what Pluto has achieved in this stimulating collection.The skeleton of this book is cast swiftly with the introduction of the resplendent Peregrine. A poem constructed using admirable craft that pulls you into the poet's emotional, mental and physical world. Pluto's verve and acute awareness delivering the reader to a wealth of love and compassion. Annie Pluto has an inbuilt ability to poetically emote a specific feeling, situation or scene with admirable craft.Between the lines of the poem, Love Letter to Lubbock, the poet has placed a seat for every reader. This heartfelt and warm, cleverly woven tapestry delivers wishes, regrets, celebrations, acknowledgments and love with extraordinary economy.The subtlety Pluto masters in delivering a history lesson in The Home Borough, rides in tandem with the poet's utilitarian ability to ground the reader. The poems in Lubbock Elecctric ride on a conveyor of poetic pleasures that underlie the current of seriousness that will ground each reader. Gene Barry - Poet and Psychotherapist; author of Stones in their Shoes, Unfinished Business and Working Days; Founder of the Blackwater Poetry Festival; publisher and editor at Rebel Poetry.

In her new book of poems I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me Gloria Mindock continues her examination of brutality and its toll on humanity. Here, her resurrected Francisco Franco leaps from her imagination to ridicule and condemn all dictators who believe they have the right to control and murder at will. Her poem "The Fruit Fly" reminds one of Osip Mandelstam's famous takedown of Stalin. Satirical, powerful, lush and even at times displaying a certain beauty history can still carry, I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me will leave you thinking and changed.-- Tim Suermondt, author of The World Doesn't Know You

Nixes Mate is a navigational hazard in Boston Harbor where, during the Colonial period, pirates and mutineers were gibbeted. Thirty years later out of the ashes of the 1980s Allston zine scene Philip Borenstein, Michael McInnis and Annie Pluto started new journal of hand-crafted artisanal literature. As they edited this anthology, a theme emerged that surprised them ... Death & Rebirth, those twin-barreled human indulgences. It was if an estranged microburst, a love sick hurricane came through shuttling tree branches, pedestrians, small animals, unhinged children along with various signs, portents, carriages, bicycles and small cars, enmeshed in a chiaroscuro of words and light, sifted thorugh the ecliptic sluice of the Charles River.

In an ambitious first book Lee Okan draws a daring parallel between the life of the universe and our own lives and loves. Here is a remarkable weaving of metaphysics and physics, in dreamlike writing as much poetry as prose. Here is a fiction aware of its construction - and willing to let us witness its sequences and discoveries. -- Danielle Legros Georges, Poet Laureate, City of Boston

Mark Borczon's He Was A Good Father is a hard-earned devotion to the facts. In these poems you sense a man's life being redeemed before your eyes. With every word you can feel the effort of a wise man rising from bed. His pean to John Henry, working-class hero, will make you bust a gut laughing and, in the same breath, gasp in pain. And don't miss "Bottom Shelf Vodka...", a love poem so piercing in its purity it will stop you from reading. Spread the word, this book is a long-awaited celebration. -- Geoff Peterson, author of 3:30: Nocturnes and Etudes

This collection of poetry by Devon Balwit takes a beautiful look at intimate moments, secret dreams and confessions. Her language and rhythm are as lovely as they are startling. The poems in this book pull you deep into their story and leave you changed. She writes at the end of the poem "Down There," I could do this forever. I feel the same way about reading these miraculous, powerful and honest poems. This book will leave you breathless, and I often found myself so moved that I actually spoke out loud my enthusiastic response of yes!! This collection is a powerhouse. -- Matthew Borczon, author of A Clock of Human Bones

Rusty Barnes is a rugged and honest poet. He is a student of Frank Stanford and Larry Brown. His language is pure Americana, deeply entrenched in the everyday, in family and in place. The poems in Jesus in the Ghost Room, pay homage to memory, and are an ode to his late father, but with lines such as "Oh Father / I wish I could invoke your smell, / the way your cigarette ashed onto / the sick-filled carpet on the edge / of what we could readily say," it is clear, that this collection is about salvation, an epic prayer for the human spirit and for an increasingly tumultuous world. Even when the poem is about pissing out a fire, Barnes raises his voice to what could only be a Higher Power: "Long live the resin- / filled pine and the twigs I used for tinder." Rusty's poems are like the man himself, large and gentle. He's a man who loves his family, especially his wife and four children. He's the type of man who, within his own quietness shakes his head and wonders how he ever became so lucky, and a man who doesn't take his luck for granted, but within poems gives thanks and praise. Joshua Michael Stewart, author of Break Every String

Paul Brookes takes us through five stories, pictures of the great and small ironies of life drawn as we observe the daily routines, rituals and reactions in lives where birds have jam sessions on rooftops, mausoleums live on fridge doors, the memory of a touch stays with the skin; lives where hands are telling and people hunger, give what's not wanted and take what's not given. - Jamie Dedes, editor of The BeZine

From the trapdoors and "spy/code" that once enchanted her while reading Nancy Drew, to bumblebees struck by frost "still sucking from the cups/ of blossoms," Jessica Purdy feels the pulse of mystery underlying ordinary life. Purdy negotiates the bumpy terrain of responsibility, loneliness, dreams, and estrangement in poems that often begin in the natural world and end with meditations on her place in the family landscape. Cover to cover, STARLAND is a complex, deeply felt, and finely written book. -- Joyce Peseroff, author of Know Thyself

Living is a chaotic system that rips the Poet's guts and splatters the entrails across the page, every mischievous side-slam and frantic headkick is an image, texts are snapping synapses, sparks from a grinding wheel. For Jeff Weddle it's a broken world shortchanged by truth, a sensorium of failure where chaos kicks your ass, yet although we're defeated, still these tender sparks, these true moments of grace, are the things that matter. -- Andrew Darlington, author of The Poet's Deliberation on the State of the Nation

There is pain, the pain of life, of death, of war, of childbirth. And then there is the pain of a migraine. An ocular nightmare with a surfeit of auras and screaming and monsters clawing inside a sufferers' head. Through the noir pinhole of a beleaguered gangster the migraine is filtered in a stuttering, cartwheeling ghost ship full of death and night and blood. Through war, assassinations, Catholic apostasy, and crime, Smokey of the Migraines has gone to the edge of the world where sea monsters hunt a migraine is a fall from grace.

An undeniably human exploration without romanticizing the past, or turning it into a spectacle, My Southern Childhood is whittled in pure Americana, "the" universal southern memoir for the post-millennium. A master poet, Pris Campbell achieves that universality through carefully chosen details of a child's life in a small southern town during the 40s and 50s.