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Permanent for Now is a novel that inspects the binary of good and evil during one of history's most difficult times: World War II. Told through three vantage points, circumstance rises to the forefront as the engine that generates goodness and wickedness in our world.

From the universal to the personal, the formal to the experimental, Carolyn Martin's fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, takes an unflinching look at the fluidity of truth, time, identity, history, death, and relationships. Martin time-travels with Neanderthals, Lucy, and Big Foot to 9/11 to the future collapse of a holographic universe. She mines scientific discoveries, nursery rhymes, biblical characters, and the works of Issa, Horace, Yeats, Frost, Williams, Szymborska, and Collins in poems that are both playful and thought-provoking. Since she believes reincarnation is a distinct possibility, she suggests that death need not be taken too seriously ("Re-Entry Interview," "A Case for Sudden Death"). She riffs on an Issa haiku ("Thoughts on a Translation"), sits down to dinner with Horace ("Notes from a Water Drinker"), and promises literary revenge on a reviewer who negatively critiques this collection ("To the Reviewer Who Missed Too Much"). Martin's forms run the gamut from sonnets, haiku, and pantoums to free verse, found poetry, and paratactic poems whose stanzas can be read in any order. A lover of language, she builds poems based on one word ("Phonaethetics," "Disambiguation," "Stirring"), and delights in re-stitching the words of others in surprising ways ("Variations on Final Words," "10 Variations on the 50 Most Quoted Lines of Poetry," "90+ Titles Appropriated from Poetry 180 Hosted by Billy Collins"). A lover of all things poetic, Martin has created an eclectic collection for readers who have a penchant for words and who are open to believing in everything and nothing.

None of the Above spans twenty seven years (1980-2007) of the life of Increase Alt, a fearful, introverted sort who does a poor job of paying attention to things that don't directly affect his life. Throughout grade school, high school, and college, his energies become more and more directed toward his own pursuits-the study of literature, the attempt to secure a girlfriend, the forging and maintaining of relationships with his male peers. Events happening in the world, in the country, and in his hometown of Cleveland-a Reagan-Carter presidential debate, the Iran Contra scandal, the AIDS epidemic, the first Gulf War-become important only when they threaten to pull him out of his comfort zone. As a highly-educated adult, he returns to the town of his birth to discover he still has much to learn, as both personal trials and traumas in the country (and world) put his maturity to the test.

Growing up on a small dairy farm in upstate New York, Gary lived a few hundred steps from his paternal grandparents. His grandfather (hereafter "Grandpa") was a perpetually happy man and Gary wondered, in light of the nature of farm work, in light of some of the hardships Grandpa endured, in light of the pace of the town, in light of the way he was chronically frugal, how this could be so. After college, Gary moved to the city and reveled in the cadence and sophistication of the city. And began to see how places came to shape the people who lived in those places. How the way we defy and indulge in a place; how the way we yearn for the notion of somewhere else; how the cadence and influence of a place affects a person. In The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Gary recounts all the little moments - moments he never thought could or would be important - he had with Grandpa to try to understand who Grandpa was. He - with an astonishing blend of his signature humor and a reverence that only comes from a boy who loves his grandfather - then examines how his understanding of those moments has evolved after moving to the big cities for which he had always yearned. Does changing from denim overalls to a Brooks Brothers suit change a person? Should it? Is cow piss really that different from the piss with which the sidewalks of New York City are often soaked?

A LOAF OF BREAD is a requiem for the loss of the author's homeland. During the years of the civil war in Syria, the author lost her father-in-law; he was buried in a hurry in some unrecognizable ground in Aleppo. Her aunt died alone in a sieged nursing home; her belongings were stolen. Her father was flown ill around the USA on a stretcher; he never got to go back home to his village in Syria; his bones rattle in some cemetery in South Carolina. During the war, her house in Damascus was bombed. She followed the struggle of her friends and a thousand others as they boarded rubber boats and floated to the unknown; some drowned in the sea and some in their despair. A Loaf Of Bread digs into the depth of anguish to excavate the collective human experience of grieving and enduring across the maps of losses.

In these twenty-six poems - one for each letter - words that are infrequently used by some of us serve as springboards, prompting introspection and reflection. Childhood and what comes after, as well as all the accompanying emotions, are sometimes circled, sometimes dissected, to understand and reconcile what came before. Returning from school to an empty house, losing a high school friend, the test with unknown answers, and the feelings that come with those memories - these and more are examined with the aid of words like graupel, lacuna, fantod, and somaticize. These uncommon words do what words commonly do: they fix.

The poems in "Poems for a Winter Afternoon" emerge from a winter landscape in literal and figurative senses. The landscape isn't barren but rich in imagery, allusion, emotion. Meighan conjures as much as creates a landscape rich in imagery, allusion, and emotion as the poet addresses the pain of exile, the meditation of the solitary figure, the warmth of communion with friends around a 19th-century tavern fireplace or at a modern diner counter. The setting varies from the present-day city street to lonely woods and meadows and extends geographically and thematically to the Russian Steppe of the poets whose music influenced this book. To read "Poems for a Winter Afternoon" is to explore a landscape that should strike the reader as simultaneously mysterious and familiar as well as exhilarating.

Inside a speeding car, somewhere in the afterlife, the driver calms her brother with strange and hopeful tales. He responds in kind, and so they pass the time with poems, as they furiously race towards their uncertain end.They tell each other stories of East German circus clowns crossing the border and buffaloes riding the Subway. Ghosts wander a post-apocalyptic mansion and doomed lovers plot an ice storm getaway. Memories of London mix with robots in the future as they meet an escapologist's daughter, and the Invisible Man in a Times Square hotel. So settle down in the back seat and be taken on a journey from the past to the future and to beyond the grave.

Mistletoe sinks its tendrils into the oak tree, a cuckoo lays her murderous egg in another mother's nest, a worm slips into the grasshopper's gut and convinces it to drown itself. Green leaves unfurl, the warbler feeds her accidental child, and the pond continues to shimmer. From the slick burrow of the snubnosed eel to the human autosite brushing her sister's teeth, Your Body a Bullet lifts the veil between the ghastly and beautiful relationships of parasites and their hosts. All are given equal measure here, inviting us to face our own extremes and urging us to think about what really drives our behavior. A spider says "I have no questions/about God, just the irrefutable alchemy/of your infant apothecaries." The female anglerfish "can no longer discern where my body ends/and yours begins." Where is the line between instinct and decision? What are we willing to do to one another; what are we willing to sacrifice? These poems are an homage to the brutality of survival, the nuances of love, and the exceptional lengths mothers will go to for their children.

Los Angeles, December, 1989, is when we first meet the seventeen-year-old Piers, a runaway and a savant puppeteer. Addicted to Sike, an experimental drug which promises a surrogate return to Childhood, Piers, in an act of revenge, robs a briefcase full of Sike from her dealer and flees L.A., pursued by two hit men. Hiding out in the Southwestern town of Redline, where she meets and is taken in by a man named Henry Hook, Piers is soon confronted by the buried trauma of her past. Comprising a jigsaw synthesis of narrative, journal entries, letters, monologues, film footage, poems, photographs, and press clippings, Nocturne renders an interior world of fragments and parallels, and casts a tinted light on that neverland between dreaming and waking.

To Square a Circle is firmly rooted in the rich, at times, mythically rural language of the Deep South, as it peels back the edges of an arrested coming-of-age story, told in honest language and evocative imagery through the eyes of an unnamed narrator wrestling with his own independent voice against the persistent truths inherited from within the wound and ache of a dying, patchwork family.

Allen Wrangell is a terminally-ill, geology-obsessed loner who makes his way to an isolated mountain town to reconnect with Liz, a long-lost love. Allen takes a room at a bed and breakfast run by the enigmatic Maria and soon finds himself embroiled in a conflict with her abusive, alcoholic boyfriend. The drama is complicated by Allen's growing suspicion that Liz, Maria--even Allen himself-might not really exist. As Allen's relationship with Maria deepens, he's troubled by the knowledge that any new love is destined to be short-lived. Perspective and sanity are maintained to some degree when Allen meets Ted, the town's mysterious bartender, who provides a safe refuge in his bar. Ted accepts Allen without judgment and through their conversations the fear and havoc of Allen's haunted experience are made more manageable. The conflict comes to a head when Allen is pummeled and jailed on apparently false charges by Maria's boyfriend. Visited for the last time by Liz, it becomes clear to Allen that she is a mere phantom, and that he might in fact be completely delusional. Bailed out by Ted, Allen is recovering in the back of Ted's bar when he finds Maria at his door. They make a decision to free themselves from the earthquake-doomed town and seek refuge farther up in the mountains, there to face whatever may come. In a nod to the story's ambiguous reality, the last sentence of Terrane reads, as Allen and Maria approach their mountain refuge, They were almost there.

The poems in KEEPING THE CHAFF AND THE WHEAT attempt to retrace and re-imagine stories that have remained untold, filling the gaps between symptoms and family myths. The place is somewhere in rural Europe. The stories could be those of a woman and her children and their children. The time is a long time ago, but it is also now and maybe tomorrow. They come from the earth, the one you cherish and feed and get fed from. Archeology requires some imagination. Mental illnesses require attention. Reality isn't completely important here, as long as we can finally walk to a river, and in a fresh and slow world, start to talk.

Peter Schireson's The Salt is a chapbook of 21 poems which touch on a wide range of subjects, including romantic love, the nature of the self, aging, and loss.Self-Portrait with TreeI want to have you,I murmurto the photograph in an airportof a tree on a ridge,its frail silver gelatin silhouetteleaning against a bright sky.The shadow hoveringat the edge of the framemust be me.

Good art makes, at least in part, a useful comment about art. (Great art defines itself.) What new can be said about the themes of "love" or "death"? What can be new is the words associated with "love" or "death", how they might feel in your mouth, and how the words in a line can create a previously unseen reality within a stanza.

My Paper Dreams investigates deep, existential concepts. Shahab Mogharabin searches for lost dreams in the life-throttling vacuum of time. The poems in My Paper Dreams open life's most impossible, intangible doors and bring life to the forefront of the imagination. The poet acts as both observer and incitor. The poet is lonely. The poet reckons with feelings formed from what is inevitable: Death. Mogharabin's poetry has a deep concern towards decay and annihilation. It stands up to the dark side of human existence in favor of a life filled with beauty, peace and tranquility. Love and solitude motivate many of the poems, with a sharp focus on a society that has lost its values and its intimacy -- Shahab Magahrabin writes with love, with the hope that love prevails despite the troubling state of the world.

The Man Who Never Was was a failed TV show from the late Sixties whose protagonist was a spy named Peter Murphy. The poems in The Man Who Never Was borrow the titles of the show's 19 episodes and explore identities, politics, lies (Sorry, that's redundant), and personal mythology while shamelessly punning and quoting from Murphy's Law, The Peter Principle, The Dropkick Murphys and the English post-punk-godfather of Goth, Peter Murphy. If that weren't enough, the poems test the reader's patience by alluding to celebrities such as Lance Armstrong, Robert Blake, James Gandolfini, Greta Garbo, Samuel Johnson, Dee Dee Ramone, Jada Pinkett-Smith and others born on the author's birthday, September 18, as well as Daj Hammarskjöld and Jimi Hendrix who died on that same date. What a mess.

A spectral, existential noir set against the aging irons of Coney Island and old guard lions of hip hop and silent film, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale tracks the singular odyssey of would-be sleuth and soon-to-be wordsmith, Salvatore Massimo Lunezzi. Prompted by an enigmatic phone call from a writer-friend claiming to be dead, Lunezzi launches an investigation that leads him to Ghostwriters, Inc., a company selling inspiration to struggling writers through the medium of "ghosting." From Buster Keaton to Arthur Rimbaud, a boozy and brilliant dwarf to an enchanting femme fatale, Lunezzi is drawn deeper and deeper into the soul of story where fiction and reality inevitably converge.

In Jessica Mehta's tenth book, Drag Me Through the Mess uncovers what it means to be an indigenous woman in a society where "NDNs" are seen as fashion accessories at best and obsolete at worst. Each poem grips the reader and reveals a king of honest emotion and telling that's almost unnerving. All the ugliness and hurts of life are explored with a kind of lyrical beauty that causes deep contrasts and juxtapositions. No matter the subject, readers will relate to the work and themes because at the heart of each is a shared experience.The "mess" of life is one everyone shares, and Mehta touches on emotions and feelings at subcutaneous levels. Inspired by the works of Li-Young Lee, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Kim Addonizio, and all the great of confessional poetry, Mehta finds a way to tap into themes we'd rather turn away from and see them with a lens attuned to discovery-and ultimately healing.Drag Me Through the Mess takes the reader on a journey that delves into the darkest parts of the human experience before bringing them into a soothing light. Featuring perfect word choices, strong line breaks, and recurring totems that tie the collection together, Mehta's tenth book is perhaps her strongest. It's a collection that showcases the full spectrum of the human experience that will leave readers saying, "I thought I was the only one." It's beyond confessional because confessions are often shrouded in shame. Here, there's no asking of forgiveness.

"Sea of Rocks" is a collection of poems about love, loss, endings, and new beginnings. Poems which intertwine the author's childhood memories, the reinventions of self and relationships in a landscape-changing transnational life, and aim to capture the ephemeral and the unwavering. The sweat that pearls the nightmares; the ghost that blows the birthday candles; the love sound of hydraulic hammers; the reverberations of sunlight on sand. These poems inhabit an embodied land of ancient soils, stardust, solar-panels-captured light and grey-as-rock horizons where the eyes have to work hard to find the contours of the everyday and the unexpected.

This fierce story rifles the turbulence of mind encountered in the twenties. Life's third decade mercilessly right-sizes the dreams of childhood and sometimes, buffeted by forces beyond our control, diverts us completely. The narrative hovers around a tangle of friends and strangers interconnected by both serendipity and intention, and unfolds across the tables of a sprawling, urban café. Place is as much a part of this story as the characters, providing subliminal images and intrigue for the events. Cressida Fruith, who changed her name in high school from Ruth while pulling an Emo persona over her life, is coming apart at the seams. An only child of a single parent with no extended family, she watches helplessly as her mother's cancer progresses. Even the friendship of her oldest and best friend begins to fray. Enter Hobart Wilson, a much-maligned outcast stoner from her high school days. Infuriating Cressida, Hobart becomes her mother's closest companion, and confessor of a secret so dark it will change her future. Woven and twisted within the narrative by the characters and their relationships are archetypal psychological and spiritual battles, even ordinary conundrums ("thoughtwalls") that nearly everyone encounters. More than one "Ah ha!" is seeded amidst the dialogue and action, which makes this a compelling story with real-time implications. Laugh, cry, and steam as these twenty-somethings do battle with pernicious struggles of the mind, and sometimes prevail where even Socrates and Freud fumbled.

DON'T TURN THE PROJECTOR OFF! by Matthew LaFreniere is a poetry collection that touches on the innermost wonders of humanity. A combination of absurdity and endearment transform everyday images into works of art.Matt sits in his basement and stares at his laptop. He thinks about movies. He thinks about poems. He thinks about anything but you, reader. Then he thinks about you, reader. He sits beneath a poster of the movie The Purple Rose of Cairo. He likes the movie fine, but not as much as the poster. The cat walks past. He hears his wife and kids shuffle above him. He stares at his laptop.

Curiosities tells the stories of a variety of mythical creatures who reside in and around the towns, woods, fields, rivers, and lakes of Ohio. Hercules tells about working out in a gym in south Zanesville, a griffin talks about life along the Muskingum River, the Loveland Frog narrates his adventures along muddy banks, and Bessie describes her experience as an aging monster in Lake Erie. Through these voices the book explores the role of story and folktale in all of our lives.

I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So is comprised of poems the author wrote as responses to questions he collected over the years, whether asked directly or mined from other poems, novels, billboards, surveys, Facebook memes, leaflets, and many other places. He used these questions as a way of looking inside his life, the lives of the askers, and the world around him.

Katie Kline, a hip, introspective eighteen year old, spins classic blues records and reads Susan Sontag. Rebellious next-door neighbor Ronny Hopkins loves everything about her. A Polaroid photo launches them on a tempestuous, romantic odyssey stretching from the Kent State shootings to the first iPhone. They discover human hearts seldom rest. Regret and resentment derail them-while Katie is lambasting Nixon and trailing John and Yoko for the Village Voice, Ronny is notching saves and sex partners on his Jersey Shore lifeguard stand. But sometimes memories can become realities, and after twenty years, a reunion offers hope. Old and new love letters, dog napping, zany fisticuffs, tattooed millennials, and renewed passion have them scrambling for one last chance...

Dearest Summary, Enclosed are pieces of my brain,During a time in which didn't seem real,A time that that changed everything,A time when there was a before than an after, Deep Fried French Toast tastes differently, Because the tears stuck inside my eyeballs,Fell so far back into my sockets,That my lungs had to catch them into,A pile of pneumonia,Where my rib cages couldn't see through the door frame,Of the old Sequoia House anymore,And those little birds had to say,Adieu. Oh Summary, I wish we could stay,But it must be done. You and I. Let's breakup.So the reader can enjoy. Your heart. Of the Matter. Flip over to start.

Megan Denese Mealor has been writing stories since she could scribble on walls in crayon. She has always been determined to become a writer, never once wavering from that goal. When she was fifteen, Megan was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. She decided to channel her leaping imagination into journals to combat the newly hostile, raging forces in her mind. More than fifteen years later, Megan's debut poetry collection, ¿Bipolar Lexicon, ¿is at last ready for release. Written amidst the hair-trigger mania, dallying depression, and spiritual numbness both vacillating and viperous, Megan writes of sickness, fleeting but freeing good fortune, scraps of her spirit, feral observations of fragility, odes to harlots and flowers and lost loves. Lyrical, lush, frank, and fresh-voiced, ¿Bipolar Lexicon ¿examines the quiet, quirky beauty immeasurable around us, the untold grace of eloquence, the towering fire inside one woman's fractured yet infallible heart, and the eternal redemption of language, love, imagery, and imagination.

Poems that dive, move, surprise. Lyrical laments. Love poems. Rants with bite. Poems from the "corner of Lyric and Strange." A "hip-hop sermon/montage" on America and the state of its dream. Sardonic humor. It's all there and more in Jim Bohen's first book of poetry, I travel in rusting burned-out sedans. It's in slices from a life of writing - remembering the first day of school, singing the rock band blues, growing older, grandparent-hood. It's in the ominous tone that lurks behind the opening poem quiet to the weary rhythmic distress of the closing Cycle. In between, there are tender looks at the past. bitter rants about injustice and mortality. There's some delightful fun, whether it's playing with a word like "tell," deciding what to do with the kids' stuff once they've moved out, celebrating a first grandchild with some clever exuberance, or delving into memories of secretly listening for late-night baseball scores on a "hidden" radio. Sometimes lyrically wistful, occasionally surrealistic, always thoughtful, Bohen's poems probe and preach, smile and reflect, snap and snarl. And wherever the poems travel - to challenging, down-to-earth, dark, funny and more - they bring back insights and give readers a chance to luxuriate in the poet's lifelong love of words, his meant-to-be-read-aloud rhythms and his unique use of rhyme. And everything found in a surprising variety of very satisfying poems.