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The poems in Northern Swim grieve a beloved sister's death during other losses of the pandemic, framed against havoc in the human and more-than-human worlds. But among poems of American malaise and climate change you'll also find Florence Griswold, godmother of American impressionists; the fashion designer Alexander McQueen; Eve's secret daughter; Elgar's chamber music and the Do Rights lead guitar. Though the poems are often elegiac they celebrate pleasures-"Snowshoeing at Seventy," a newborn grandson, museum-going, desserts with family and friends, an exhilarating swim in an icy lake-what offers resilience and lures us ahead: "I won't let the bear get all the berries."

Ragged Sky Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ilene Millman's second book of poetry, A Jar of Moths. In this collection, Ilene Millman seizes the opportunity to explore the inside, the outside, and the upside down of living. The poems reflect Millman's life as a Brooklyn girl, a wife, mother and grandmother, a speech/language therapist and a citizen. They find her immersed in activities from walking in a rose garden or shopping for shoes to conversing with God. Her insatiable curiosity carries us along whether she probes the history of lipstick, the meaning of motherhood, or art, politics and the challenges and absurdities of aging. Millman's poems speak a life-long belief in the power of memory and the power of words to awaken us, with connection and compassion to ourselves and to our world as it is, both brutal and beautiful.

Daniel Weeks's book of poetry, We No More Sang for the Bird, named for the final enigmatic phrase poet Edward Thomas inscribed in his journal before his death, tells the harrowing story of five British poets of different backgrounds-Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Owen, Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg-all of whom volunteered to serve their country during World War I and died in that service. The long opening poem, a lyrically rendered modern epic, and its six attendant hymns on the process of reading about these five poets' short lives provide a meditation on the nature of tragedy, the brutality of modern war, our own place in history's sweep, and the redemptive value of poetry. Homer has risen from the Underworld to write this epic paean to the poets of World War I. But wait! It's Daniel Weeks who has revived Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Owens, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg. The immediacy, imagery, and music of We No More Sang for the Bird is so searing, we become these soldiers, intimately sharing their passions, fears, and desires. This is a 4-D travelogue through time and space. With its vast embrace of history and literature, it supersedes dry texts on the war to end all wars. This is a jazz musician's masterpiece, syncopating political and personal notes. World War I poets were silenced. In this tour de force, Daniel Weeks takes up their song.-Susanna Rich, author of SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage Like Siegfried Sassoon reading the younger Wilfred Owen's poems, "taking / words seriously even in war's wake, / noting the music they made," Dan Weeks too has read Owen's poems, as well as those of Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg, deeply and passionately, toward the making of his own poem, an epic of WWI focused on those poets caught up in its blood and "mothering mud." This ambitious, biographical, scholarly and wondrously wrought poem views the Great War from their perspectives: "We / were the little gods, [Brooke] mused, / his nose tucked in Webster or Donne / before turning to the soft abrasions / of an English sun." We No More Sang for the Bird is a major accomplishment.-Michael Waters, author of Caw What made some of the most gifted poets and thinkers of the early twentieth century offer themselves to the "calamitous war," "search out art /in grit and rawness," choose trenches over sentences, blood over ink? Was it love, pride, duty, the need to protect the mother tongue, the pull of immortality and the awareness that "the war needed its Homer, / its Whitman, someone to make sense/of senseless things"? In We No More Sang for the Bird, Dan Weeks awakens us to the impossibility of a single answer and, on rhythms of exquisite verve and elegance, he gifts us a tour de force. Carefully researched and bold in its empathic reach, the collection reads as ode, hymn, and dazzling historical retelling. -Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Cemetery Ink

Luray Gross's With This Body has through lines: early life on a farm, body connections, reactions to current events and traumas, the refuge of words. Dedicated to "all who have lost a child," that child could be a younger self, as well as one lost to illness or tragic circumstance. Often in these poems the adult watches the young self, times and lives overlapping. The effect is delicate; our empathy is cajoled. Many poems are reactions to poets, almost letters, among them to Jane Hirshfield, Richard Hugo, Samira Negrouche, and many more. Gross's impulse to communicate with other writers is expansive yet personal. And as readers, we are always welcome in the conversation. In the center of this book, "What the Poem Carries" spells out some of the magic of these poems:This poem wants to blend in a chorus,sounding any note of the chord.andThis poem knows we all need a break from despairand all that residual sadness. It's been around long enoughto know that the blues are really love songsand making peace with terroris the price you pay to stay alive.The same or similar ideas and images keep turning up-a favorite sweater, interactions while teaching kids, figures that inhabit a recognizable world. With This Body is a house of many rooms, companionable. It'll get into your dreams.-Valerie Fox, author of Insomniatic

From the mountains of Afghanistan, to the devastated cities of Ukraine, to the ransacked Capitol of the United States, Steve Nolan takes you on an intimate journey, a portrait of destruction and the human impulse to rise from the rubble to construct a new palace on the ruins of the last. Whether referencing civilization, government, or a single soul, his poetry pays tribute to those who manage to find treasure amongst the shards of a shattered individual life or the shattered dreams of history. In his theme poem, "The Longest Dream in the World," he shares this: The longest dream hasn't died.Dreams are not subject to deathlike ideologies, one stackedupon the archeology of the other-a palace of ruins... The dream,like the wind, is the breathof the world.

"What is there I will not let go?" asks the introductory poem in Ghost Guest. With effortless authority, Rachel Hadas's new collection keeps answering that question. Memories of places and people segue to elegies, which lead to meditations on art and poetry, mythology and, especially, teaching. Dreamy yet precise, celebratory yet attuned to mortality, these valedictory poems tell us exactly what crucial and intangible things Rachel Hadas will not let go.

Chard deNiord writes, "Michael Simms writes with the courage of a witness and the wisdom of a survivor. These poems leap, lament, pierce, transcend, delve, witness, praise, and testify to the curative power of poetry." Simms's new collection travels through grief, love, social justice, art and nature. The book begins with the poet's return to the Texas evangelical culture of his childhood to attend the funerals of his mother and sister. The poet reveals that he's autistic, a survivor of childhood abuse who didn't speak until he was five years old. The title poem "Strange Meadowlark" riffs on his emergence into language through learning how to listen to jazz. The second section of the book explores love through the beauty of the Texas landscape in poems that capture the happiness of childhood despite the presence of the ghost of the poet's sister -- as in the poem "White Rock Lake." The third section offers poems of social conscience. Racism, war, poverty, violence and America's unacknowledged caste structure are presented through personal narrative. The poems of the third section give witness to racism and police brutality. The final two sections bring together these themes of memory, love, loss and the search for justice in poems that focus on the observation of nature. The long poem "Faye Donnelly explains why the dead are in our lives" is a dialogue with a dying wise woman who explains to the poet how to let go of the ghost of his sister and move on with his life. The final poem "Pupa - a meditation on becoming" is a long poem that attempts to make lyric sense of the cycles of life and death.

Spring Mills, a small town in rural, central Pennsylvania, becomes in these poems by Mike Schneider a gathering place for four generations of a family over a century of time. Schneider takes readers to where a grandfather recalls using a hand-crank to start his Model T-"shining image of youth & freedom"-and Guernseys in a pasture bellow to be fed. Readers learn how father and son form links in a chain of "manual transmission, / hands-on sequenced pattern of the letter H," and the poet's sonic facility opens our ears to the "metallic / industrial click / of shifting gears." With these poems, we also go to where physicists search among what's "fizzy out there in the universe"-not only for elusive cosmological "dark matter" but also to hear our inner voices, human "dark matter." In "Once Upon a Time," a remarkable marriage of poetry with skilled science writing, the Big Bang is an "unfolding like a rose in bloom" and "Love is evolution of the cosmos. What else can we do?"-a thought the poem answers with longing for, perhaps, a simpler time, a Spring Mills of "Summer evening quietness. A breeze. / The big tree across the street. / Everything made sense."

Some 40 of the 80 poems in the collection Agitations and Allelujas, authored by Harvey Steinberg and published by Ragged Sky Press, first saw the light of day in literary publications ranging from those containing a variety of genres, such as Wisconsin Review, Epicenter, Diner, Aries, and dozens more, to those that specialize: in form (The Lyric), attitude (Parody), and content (Dissections). The subjects the poet writes about differ widely too. A reader will take excursions into singular behaviors ("At sixty he still plays hockey on the frozen lake/and urges boys to clip him, aggrieves them so they must") and subliminal reveries that culminate in action ("portents toll to fasten acquiescence/. . . come day's toils I'll do what needs be done."). Steinberg's wealth of worldly experience, accompanied by substantial credentials in the arts and the academy, impel the book's diversity of themes and prosody: reflections on Hemingway and Matisse in free verse and of Dickinson in rhymed quatrain; a passionate sonnet of abandoned love ("Love's Losings") in counterpoint with licentious limericks; sightings into war, Americana, the outdoors, China, Poland; imaginings about myth-laden Greece. Humor, outrage, sighs are embedded in this volume. "Art," says Steinberg, "is taking risks."

In thirty-six poems written between February 2020 and July 2021, distinguished poet Rachel Hadas captures moments of her personal version of the first year and a half of the pandemic. With candor and elegance, these poems, which vary in form and mood, limn both the inner and outer landscapes of what the poet calls shared privacy. Like countless other people (and not only writers), Hadas has kept going partly by keeping track, striving to balance "our mortal mix of hope and love and dread." In the process, she has assembled a strong new collection.

In this richly imagined collection of poems, Michael Simms draws inspiration from history, psychology, biology, and astronomy, yet at heart he is simply a man with stories to tell. A poet returns home from the funeral of his parents to find that the language of grief is inadequate to describe his complicated relationship with his father, so he invents new words to describe his feelings. An autistic boy on a family vacation to Carlsbad Caverns descends deep into the earth, and breathing the darkness, he becomes a bat. A high school performance of Euripides's The Trojan Women becomes a terrifying prediction of what will happen to one of the girls after graduation. A conversation between two old men about Schubert's Death and the Maiden recalls accusations of sexual harassment one of the friends faces. And in a humorous ars poetica, Simms dreams of kidnapping Charles Bukowski and spiriting him to an AA meeting where Buk slings insults, jumps out the window and flies to the nearest bar on black wings, leading Simms to realize that American poetry needs its misfits and outlaws, and in fact, he prefers poems with a little dirt on them. Simms is a poet who writes as easily about the microfauna in a compost bin as about the complexities of love. He explains the hermeneutics of suspicion as adroitly as a visit to a dog park. He describes an old couple at the seashore through the eyes of an artist drawing them and the climate crises from the perspective of a bronze age king watching his city crumble. Gifted, smart, and flawed, frank about his alcoholism and other personal failings, Simms gives us poems that twist and turn and yet always remain clear in their intent. His empathy is all-embracing, and he challenges the reader's expectations by elegantly expressing abstract ideas through wildly creative, wholly original imagery. These poems keep returning to their central concern of how love can endure in a world that is collapsing. In language both musical and vernacular, Michael Simms stretches the limits of poetic autobiography until personal anecdote rises to the level of timeless myth.

This is a collection of original poems by Christopher Bursk. The poems are inspired by Vergil's Aeneid and deal with modern issues of love, loss, family, masculinity, and more. Many of the epigraphs are in Latin from the Aeneid and some are translated into English.

We never planned to write this book. In 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa was working on an epic poem and part of it took place at Classics Books. Independently, I was working on some flash fiction that also took place at Classics Books. We bumped into each other (at Classics Books) and decided that we should collaborate on a collection of poems and stories that all take place at our favorite bookstore. We thought a collection of excellent work with a shared setting-and a shared love of bookstores and the people in them-might be an exciting project. We reached out to some of our favorite writers and artists to make it happen.

Look Again is a book of scrupulous and relentless looking, scrupulous thinking, scrupulous judgment of our "incurable" world, with its human and animal cruelties....but sees, as well,the world's myriad exquisitely detailed lives, from "green's dream of itself" in April beech trees, to "how resistant living things seem/to giving in." And it is a book full of creatures bursting with life-life for which Danson amazingly always finds the right words. -Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light

Miss Plastique, the fourth full-length poetry collection by Lynn Levin, invites the reader into a world of female bravado in which Miss Plastique and her many selves rant, fret, joke, fall in love, dress up, and do their hair. Poems inthis collection first appeared in Boulevard, Artful Dodge, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Knockout, Nerve Cowboy, and other places.Lynn Levin, a poet known for her eclecticism, humor, and range of poetic styles, is the author of the previous poetry collections Fair Creatures of an Hour, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry; Imaginarium, a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award; and A Few Questions about Paradise (all from Loonfeather Press). Her craft of poetry book, Poemsfor the Writing: Prompts for Poets (with Valerie Fox) is forthcoming from Texture Press in 2013. Lynn Levin is also a writer and literary translator. She has received nine Pushcart Prize nominations, two grants from the Leeway Foundation, and Garrison Keillor has read her work on his radio show The Writer's Almanac. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Levin has lived in thePhiladelphia area since 1980. She is the 1999 Bucks County, Pa. poet laureate and currently teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.Advance praise for Miss Plastique:Miss Plastique is a busy girl: giving it to her enemy in stiletto heels, giving it up to an Elvis impersonator, thumbing a ride across Texas. She has turned from the mirror and can't look back. She's sexy and seductive and refuses to be pinned down; she's silk so fluid you could drink her-read her instead, but watch she doesn't explode in your hands. -Meg Kearney, author of Home By NowThe poems in Lynn Levin's Miss Plastique hold their tension between fantasy and devastation. -Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of NecropolisThis book is just as explosive as plastique and packed as tightly and with the impeccable craft you'd expect from a good detonation expert. Lynn Levin has the perfect timing and sensitive touch of one who works with volatile materials-an Elvis impersonator, the Beav and Eddie Haskell,Gaspara Stampa, Eve and Lilith at Macy's. We are better for the aftershocks of this verse. -Christopher Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

The poems in this collection have a level gaze. We smile at the foibles of people and relationships exposed here-the church organist, Snow White, the carefully balanced "un-couple"-yet finally we're sympathetically implicated with them. Spare, quick-moving narratives carry us along for a day at the beach, a family reunion, a last ferry ride, each of which is more-is a key to the meaning of a life. Foos is particularly appealing when writing about flawed but loving families. These are deeply compassionate poems. Even a searing political poem-and it's a knockout-gets its power as much from sorrow as from anger. After all, as Foos says, we're just happy mutts, "looking for crowns for our efforts." "These poems open with the relentless push of small flowers. They grow in a tight corner plot bright with iris, marigold, and brave truth." -Michael R. Brown, author of The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides "I simply can't resist a poet whose prayer is 'Give us this day our daily bread/in the form of toast'-or who gives drowned virgins a second chance to 'tread the mucky earth.' Ellen Foos' work combines startling candor with effervescent wit. She makes being human seem breathtakingly easy, a difficult task in a world as complicated and cluttered as our own. Read her and you can't help but be refreshed. This is a book of small, big, and offbeat pleasures." - Elaine Equi, author of The Cloud of Knowable Things