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Diana Deering's exquisitely crafted lyric poems unfurl entire universes inside small moments of time. The poet-speaker time-travels throughout the collection, revisiting early childhood and adolescence and moving through various ages as an adult, often standing at the threshold between the living and dead. To say Deering is a religious poet is not to say she professes any dogma or specific faith but that she is a poet who is 'in this world but not of it' entirely. Everything Deering observes in these poems-her 'devotions' rendered in meticulous, gorgeous images-even amidst elegy, becomes a way to bind the outer and inner selves, the material to the spiritual. These are 'luminous' poems, brimming with insight and feeling as they fearlessly 'gaze into the next world.'-Shara McCallumAcknowledging the dignified reserve of twilight moments-birth, death, childhood discoveries-these poems' crystalline language moves without fanfare, but with quiet luminescence. Deering's work speaks of a profound inwardness, never solipsistic, always inviting. She taps the unseen seams of what keeps it altogether, mushroom colonies or people in our rural neighborhoods. This is the infinite life we have, this poetry states, right here and now, on this "wide answering earth." I have waited for this book for years.-Lorraine Healy, author of Mostly Luck and The Habit of Buenos Aires

Like a collection of magic spells, Francesca Preston's evocative debut chapbook If There Are Horns imparts to us an ancient and imaginative Earth-wisdom. These haunting poems hum with Preston's sense of animism, love of nature and regard for the stories of her Ligurian ancestors. Through Preston's words we witness how we consume, and are consumed by, the nature that surrounds us; yet, this mutual consumption occurs in uncanny ways-a beloved's skull, eaten by time, becomes a honeycomb, bits of viscera and blood are stitched into sausages, the moon becomes a piece of candy and then a sweet lychee. It is an utter joy and a delight to wander in the dream garden Preston has grown for us, to partake of its rich and darkly revealing fruit.-Dara Yen ElerathFrancesca Preston's stunning debut collection transfuses softly, beautifully, potently. Her words paint and sound two Prestons: one dry like a skeleton, the other dense and juicy like the insides of pomegranates. I am left hearing "the sound of fingertips / hitting a jug / that once carried water."-Naoko FujimotoIn If There Are Horns, by Francesca Preston, bodies and landscapes are deeply intertwined, glinting against each other and finding new nuance. Many of these poems explore a California far from the beaches and sand of stereotype and delve into a quieter, complicated space of drought and folktale. There is a deep connection to the natural world here: dust, viscera, and maps. This is a beautiful collection.-Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

The title of this beautiful collection is so apt: in these poems, we indeed experience "the pleasure of not knowing what comes next", which is one of the great pleasures poetry can give. In other words, we are constantly surprised by where these poems go: they will move from beautiful and close observation of the natural world; to a childhood memory of Soviet Russia; to meditations on scientific phenomena; to the experience of love, sexuality, parenthood, and day to day life in the city. This is Ostashevsky's world: rich, delightful, analytical, deeply felt. The poet brings the entirety of her self into her work, the entirety of a life being lived. She transforms its complexities into surprising pleasures. Her implicit questions to us: should a poem be any less mysterious than life itself? Isn't there great pleasure to be had in not knowing what comes next?-Geoffrey Nutter, author of Cities of Dawn

This little book of poetry takes us on a journey through the rich mundane experiences in life. Both the challenges and joys season our days and lend a perspective of "nowness" to past, present, and future. Sights and sounds in our living space or on the road add texture to our life, so that viewing it looking back or going forward, we gain insight.

A chorus of women's voices drawn from fairy tales, history and the author's imagination sing from the pages of this wildly creative collection. By turns funny, angry and erotic, these real and fictional characters pulse with life. Emily Dickinson beats a path through a forest with her bare feet, while a landlocked mermaid sits on her boyfriend's couch and remembers the lacy algae and other delights of her past life in the ocean. Some of the women in the book are free and others feel trapped by society, but they're all alike in their fierce desire to express themselves. An unapologetically feminist book, Not Me: Poems About Other Women includes "The Ride," which was one of 18 pieces chosen to be presented at the 2015 International Women's Day Poetry Reading in Portland, Oregon.

This is a work that recalls the experiences of a volunteer nurse from North America at the Hospital San Carlos in Chiapas, Mexico at a time of conflict.

Birds of the Midwest is a collection of poems inspired by the author's native habitat, the Midwestern United States. Based on careful observation of the natural world, the poems reflect recurring themes of liminal space and transition. Topics include the changing seasons, the water's edge, and bird migration. The poet's search for truth grows naturally from her detailed studies of plovers, owls, warblers, robins and their human companions. With sly humor and insight, these poems soar toward the eternal, singing a hymn of wonder. Calm and thoughtful, this book offers the solace of a walk in the woods on a June morning with a friend. Recommended for bird lovers, as well as for those who wouldn't know a finch from a falcon. The reader will experience their own interconnectedness with nature in new ways.

Surreal, madcap, and brilliant all at once, Andie Francis's creative universe is lit like fireworks. Music and meaning collide, redouble, and dissolve in poems where "great lights give. And great lights light. And great lights light upon." Welcome to a pyrotechnics of sound and sense, a wonder of imagination, reality, and myth. Francis reminds us that while the world is strange and inexplicable, the world of poetry offers us ways to resist and also to act. As she writes, "Here, hold out for more." ­-JANE MILLERAndie Francis's A Fresh Start Will Put You on Your Way is a book of beginnings in the same way every life is a life of beginnings-each of us is each of us from one day to the next, but each instant of time is new, and in its combination of events unrepeatable. Here, narratives build from poem to poem, but no single narrative consumes the book, and at the end of the book, with the remarkable long poem, "A Genesis," Francis collapses all narratives to their single beginning. This is a book capacious enough to withstand the collapse "in and to existence."-SHANE MCCRAE

W.H. Auden says poetry is "a clear expression of mixed feelings," and that's one of the gifts in this compelling book of poems. Nancy Hewitt traces the movement from the constrictions of a 1950's childhood, content to draw within the lines, to an adult freedom in which she can say, "I use language to open the skies." The speaker does not shy away from trouble, but traces the complex entanglements of family narrative with insight and compassion. Art and travel become ways the world opens up for this speaker, as when she visits the Guggenheim and learns "the fine art of looking out and up." Indeed, she looks and sees with remarkable clarity. There's a fine tension here between the need for measure and the longing for abundance, and amazingly these poems give us both through their shapely forms and vivid moments of transport. Hewitt is a poet of rich vision and intelligence, and this is a beautiful book.-Betsy Sholl, author of House of SparrowsNancy Hewitt's beautifully crafted chapbook begins in childhood and ends in wisdom. Visual art provides a frequent counterpoint to the harsh realities the poet remembers and, in the wider world, observes. Most centrally "there's the light offered up by words," which fill the poems with vivid images and narratives that will linger long in the reader's mind.-Martha Collins"No ideas but in things." Nancy Hewitt proves the point of that William Carlos Williams line in her new collection. Here are poems about a trailer park childhood where her parents' volatile marriage is on display. Here, many inventive prose and ekphrastic poems. Here, landscape poems of Barcelona and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, awash in oh, so much color and light, "the light offered up by words," as Hewitt says in her title poem. Her words, that light-here now for you.-Moira Linehan, author of Toward and & Company

The opioid epidemic has hit a small Ohio town hard. While living with his grandparents, a young boy navigates abuse and neglect through a latchkey childhood. Through the use of free verse and sonnets, the boy's coming of age story is explored-fantasical creatures like pixies and the Grassman are imagined by the boy while the drama of an addicted grandfather and bedridden grandmother plays in the background. As the boy deals with constant anger from his grandfather, he discovers escapism and freedom in a rural, Rust Belt landscape, using the woods as a shield from an abusive home.

Beautifully lyrical and deeply elegiac, Charlene Stegman Moskal's Leavings from My Table is an exquisite exploration of the body as vessel and emotion. These poems remind us that grief is an excruciating-as "imaginary spaces shimmer, / fade in a moment's breath"-yet brilliant form of palpable love: "the empty passenger seat of my car / that still bears your shadow," "the twigs of abandoned birds' nests," a gentle note that "None of us are the sun." Moskal reminds us that our bodies, our hearts, and our minds are radiant and failing, substantial but never quite decipherable. They might be best understood as living verbs and imagistic metaphors, "neurotic pieces" hanging "marionette-like on nerve strings, on loose raw tendons," which can become strong and steady-solid as "cinder block," "fierce and protective," "insulated by structure and hope"-when we allow ourselves to exist within the conditions of profound and time-tested love, that of one's self, one's friend, one's partner.-Heather Lang-Cassera, author of Gathering Broken Light, Clark County, Nevada Poet Laureate EmeritusCharlene Stegman Moskal explores the fraught territory of grief in images both vivid and physical. "There is a hairline crack / in the bone o my heart," she writes; "my palm is an empty cavity." She mourns the loss of permanence, "an improbable house sitting in a field of sand." She knows the moments when the simplest actions become ambushes: "I open a drawer/ and my heart falls into it." Anyone who has experienced loss-and that is all of us-will find resonance in these poems.-Deborah L. Fruchey, author of Three Kinds of Dark Editor, Our Lady of Telegraph Avenue: A Tribute o Julia VinogradThese Leavings aren't castoffs or scraps as much as they are farewells. In these poems, Charlene Stegman Moskal speaks to that part of us that wonders how to keep going when so much of us-and those we've loved-have been left behind.-Will Everett, Author of We'll Live Tomorrow NPR Documentarian and Journalist

In Wendy Miles's stunning debut collection, memories break and enter the rooms of the present and objects come alive with the spirits of those who once possessed them. Miles's poems are inextricably tied to place-pastures, houses, yards and rooms-but there's a restlessness to them, too, an exquisite tension to their lyricism and a refusal to be still. These poems leap and roam and strike out into territory that's as startling as it is fresh. "Love is a breath," Miles writes at the conclusion of the titular poem. Reader, this outstanding book will have you catching yours.-Sarah Freligh, author of Sad MathIn Float, Wendy Miles excavates place and memory in search of what "will not be called a ghost for many years." Her sacred elegies unearth relationships to mine their links: a bird is a girl "pleading for mouth aflame," a cat is a mother, "face streaked behind a roof of hands," and a father is a redbud, yielding "to the hush, the barest pink light." At the center: the tether of suffering to love.-Allison Wilkins, author of Girl WhoFloat is a remarkable debut collection filled with vital, visceral imagery and fully formed within the fractured and yet unclouded syntax of remembrance. I was held throughout by its pulse and the cleaving resonance of its crafted language. Miles gives us lines taut as thread wound around a finger, so that wherever the speaker of these poems points our attention, a heartbeat is always present.-Jon Pineda, author of Let's No One Get Hurt

"Helminski's work is witty and incisive as he examines the inanities of contemporary life. His sensibilities veer toward the ironic, but his is an unendorsed irony that leaves plenty of room for tenderness. Hyper-aware of the ways we've imperiled life on our planet, Hunger Anthem asks the reader to wonder at our folly and question whether we can still save ourselves from it. Swiftian in places, yet channeling the insistence of environmentalist poets like WS Merwin and Mary Oliver, this little book is both rigorous and whimsical."-John Freeman, author of Brother of Leaving and Fight Songs"Hunger Anthem is a book you'll want to read by a poet you'll want to watch."-Bill Yarrow, author of Blasphemer and The Vig of Love.

In this collection, and in so much of her verse and prose, Susan Marsh writes with precision and passion for wild places and their inhabitants. Her poems read as lyrical calls to action to notice, to love, and to protect wildness in the world and in ourselves. These poems create habitats where the reader's imagination can thrive in the restorative power of nature and bear witness to its loss. Reading This Earth Has Been Too Generous reminds us that as we allow wildness in the world to fade, we are ourselves diminished. We need collections like this one.-Matt Daly, author of Between Here and Home (Unsolicited Press, 2019)Susan Marsh's inaugural poetry collection is filled with prayers and elegies for what our Anthropocene era has wrought to one blue planet. These poems invoke the land Marsh has walked and revered for decades. Her scientist's eye and ear offers readers meditations on places some will never wander, places with their "Bright, laundry-day air / Water we can drink." Marsh's writing always paints a scene, whether this "last blue folding chair," that "blue-green power of the wind," or those "Blood-red lines of sunrise (that) broaden to a saffron streak." She wonders, like many of us, if it's too late to "Abide instead this rough and unkempt row," this planet that "has been too generous" for us to foster, to leave Earth as human beings found it.-Connie Wieneke, poet and author

Rachel King wrote the poems in City Walks upon returning to her hometown of Portland, Oregon, after over a dozen years of living away. Their "precise details wired to lively music and memorable images" (Mark Wagenaar) investigate a known place, witness gentrification, acknowledge death, and insist on the possibility of beauty and joy despite it all: "I have rarely been happier than walking miles / around my city, learning its history, / while watching people play out their needs" ("City Walks"). Full of devotion and intensity, these poems "call us to love a little more humbly, a little less selfishly" (Charity Gingerich).

Beth Gruver Gulley captures it all: the truth in the words of a poem that once "just rolled like a chocolate drop" from her 6th grade tongue, the amazing gift of a twenty dollar bill in "the pocket of some forgotten jeans," the way someone's eyes light up when she enters a room. All those incredibly precious moments we might not note, much less celebrate, had Corona not ruined our trip to the library; had we not lived in a time when we dared not assume we'd make it to summer. Yes, we humans are absurdly inconsistent. We invest in the future with purchases of coffee and snacks and "stamps from the US Postal Service" while insisting that our youth set goals, plan steps for a future we hope to enjoy; do-gooders are do leave a daunting task of cleaning up a nature trail for another day. Sure, we have our differences. For some, strike two is just one strike from the end. For others "life is a game of t-ball with our dad," who provides "unlimited chances to hit the ball," while for still others, "getting out of bed and walking on the diamond" means they're "in the game." Reading Since Corona Ruined Our Trip to the Library. . . is like coming "into the light" and finding "a familiar face."-Eve OttBeth Gulley is a writer of profound insight, someone who can see both the catastrophe and the miracle in almost anything. These poems are proof. In them, there is a cat that rides thirty miles on the motor of a car being towed. There is an asteroid that almost hits earth on a beloved's birthday: "Your birthday will still be sweet / without the explosion." This is the world of Aimee Bender or Judy Budnitz, but it is also our world, as Kansans-or your story, wherever you live.-Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019, More Than Words

The Last Time I Saw You is both a poetic memoir and a tribute to noted New Orleans photographer and art critic D. Eric Bookhardt, who died in 2019. Author Diane Elayne Dees, a decades-long friend of Bookhardt's, introduces the reader to his views on art and his personal philosophies, which were strongly influenced by his practice of Buddhism. Dees invites the reader to explore Bookhardt's beloved New Orleans, from his uptown house next to the levee to the street cats he fed and cared for. The author also examines conflict within her relationship with Bookhardt, as well as her grief over his death; the chapbook was described by one reviewer as "a long letter to her late friend...floating her grief through balmy sea to sky."

The Boy Born With A Pinhole Heart focuses on a Massachusetts boy becoming a man. As a boy at the beginning of the chapbook, he overcomes the emotional trauma from the death of his beloved grandparents. Following their deaths, challenges continue when his uncle dies, he's confronted with a family member being molested as an altar boy, and his father loses his job. When his mother's depression leads to hospice care, she ultimately dies. After his mother's funeral, he moves from Massachusetts to San Francisco. However, in his new city, he spirals into alcoholism. Through all these family tragedies and personal flaws, he stands on a Pacific Ocean beach in the last poem. As waves break anew, he in turn is a new man breaking anew.

Reading Patricia Hemminger's visionary What Do We Know of Time? is a delight and a privilege. We watch bird, beast and flower offer themselves to her lucid and sensuous language, and see how she herself flowers as a poet by speaking for living things, for village and countryside and ancestors. The profound past and the remote cosmos are nearby. "I see that we are mayflies of the cosmos," she says. Vitality and mortality are her companions in this tenderly crafted, soul-satisfying work.-Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate, Author of The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2018Patricia Hemminger's poems invite the reader to examine the natural world through a scientific lens that shifts between the infinitely small and the grand galactic views of an astronomer's glass. Here, things matter across the scales of time and distance. Rich in language and metaphoric illuminations, What Do We Know of Time? delivers the thrill of inward discoveries in ordinary moments like fishing at night or sitting together in a garden. In the way science and art are, at their best, inextricably entangled, these poems forge a crafted and deeply moving ecopoetic narrative.-Sean Nevin, author of Oblivio Gate, Southern Illinois University PressHemminger's meticulous science-mind wanders sea-trails and woodland paths, village lanes and city oases, measuring mortality and the enticing immortal. The "dandelion clocks" and faraway stars, exploded, have already "flung their elemental seeds." Though time, like reverie, cannot be charted, Hemminger studies and sings it, an abandon that I love. It's as if her lyricism tastes revelation and seasons mortality with that essence. In two remarkable gestures, Hemminger offers that we "understand meaning belongs to the feeling world/that lawmakers cannot bear to inhabit," and affirms love's fusion: present-past-present: "ripples/of the stretch of tangled weeds,/that revealed us, standing there/with nothing now between us." Only love-for grandchild, mother, husband, planetary convergences and explosions, and for an erotic Other-interrupts the dreamscape. I'm seduced, too, and follow the poet's maps.-Judith Vollmer, Vollmer is the author of six books of poetry, including The Sound Boat: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming, Spring 2022, University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Prize)

"A poignant book about what it is to love in the 21st Century from a fantastically gifted and perceptive writer."-Johanna Lane, author of Black Lake"By expertly balancing what is revealed and what is withheld across the tightly-connected stories of this engrossing book, Ted McLoof assembles an honest, amusing, and moving puzzle of desperate lovers and the lives that lie just outside their grasp. Each story feels delivered right into your ear at a dark, windowless bar, by a long-lost friend, who jokes about the wreckage of his life, chokes back a sob, and then orders another round. Like all well-told tales, you never want them to end. An addictive and deceptively powerful book. "-Mike Harvkey, author of In the Course of Human Events"Wry and deft, at times melancholy and self-deprecating, these stories slip neatly into the fine line between romance and comedy. Ted McLoof writes with enviable awareness about the insecurities and uncertainties of relationships, and even more so about how we come to terms with our lonely self-delusions. "-Manuel Munoz, author of What You See in the Dark