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The poems of Internet Girls concern themselves with electronic as well as physical loss and inevitability; they try to contain that slippage, to box up all that which is evanescent and disappearing. Their speaker is exhausted if not exhaustive and possibly also electronic herself, a queer female narrator staring down the untraversable span between intimacy and distance: "I keep thinking how I wish I were a poet to describe / certain things I cannot get right." A shifting constellation of images embroiders the work together through textual and linguistic disruptions. "Someone has to sleep with politicians, be a starfucker, do your dirty / service, this work of being soap-slimed and broken," observes one; in sequence, the lyrics stand for something natural, mystical, and larger than the self, even split by grief: "So I loved on, a desperate believer, / divider: three parts in vain but two / just here for the river."

It's said poems are prayers. These poems are mile markers in a life that finds faith in poetry.-Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a CountryKaren Elizabeth Sharpe's poetry collection, Prayer Can Be Anything, gorgeously shakes the reader into one "dream-soaked awakening" after another. The natural world, world of bright- flashing birds and frozen-over wood frogs, world of fields "lit with daisies" is brought to vivid life by Sharpe's deft, inventive use of language and her sure hand with imagery. But the world of this book is also shadowed with violence and loss as the speaker performs the difficult task of commemorating an imperfect and early-dead father and of coming to terms with the wounds that painfully shaped her own life. At once aching elegy and forthright reckoning, Prayer Can Be Anything is proof of the exponential power in the telling of one woman's truth.-Francesca Bell, author of Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner, What Small Sound and Bright StainReading this book is like being served an incredible new wine-something complex and many layered, something heady and transporting. With each sip, I want more. I love the language of these poems, the dark inner music, the ache in the details, the unwritten hope that somehow shines through. There's a nakedness here that tugs at our own naked hearts. These poems demand we read them with as much courage and vulnerability as it took to write them. I celebrate Karen Elizabeth Sharpe's authenticity and talent. This collection is a triumph of the heart-no matter how battered, a paean to resilience, a testament to honesty, a prayer for real love.-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of All the Honey and HushKaren Elizabeth Sharpe confronts grief and addiction in this collection that "hammers a hole big as a fist in my heart." Prayer Can Be Anything gives voice before the "voice went bankrupt." As a teen who lost her father and is rendered "weird as a broken moon," Sharpe confronts hunger in all its "Devil's cruel food cruel" forms: assault, addiction, grief. Sharpe recounts the journey from the family of origin to the family through marriage, "chewing the way an addict/follows a familiar route of loneliness." I was consistently amazed by Sharpe's bravery and her mastery of words. When I read, "I songed her silent wantings. . .I liquored the drink of her heat. . . ," I was hooked. As a person in recovery, I will return to Karen Elizabeth Sharpe's Prayer Can Be Anything again and again for its truth and its beauty, for "the golden sunlight forgiving and going on forever. . . ."-Jennifer Martelli, author of The Queen of Queens and All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes

Jenna Wysong Filbrun lives with weakened immunity due to chronic illness. In Away, she writes about the COVID-19 pandemic through the eyes of the most vulnerable, with whom she identifies. She faces the crushing power of collective harm, her small taste of it leading her both to a deeper understanding of the urgency needed to address it and a greater awareness of her own participation in it. Including the Pushcart Prize-nominated poem, "Church," the poems in Away follow the author's nature-guided journey through the losses of faith, belonging, and loved ones toward a Love that is truly limitless.

Written during Covid and with the support of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, these short lyrics attempt to explore the preoccupations on one mind during quarantine while revisiting Shakespeare's Hamlet. Moving from intimacy to isolation, from the past to the future, from dream to reality, from exterior to interior, they find that the questions that trouble a prince in Denmark might not be too removed from those of anyone in contemporary America.

Howling Down the Moon is an exploration of all that lies fragile in our hearts: the connection between love and loss, between hope and despair. In many of these poems nature serves as metaphor for life's vagaries and allows the reader to find both meaning and solace in the natural world. These works are at times wistful, often funny explorations of events, large and small, that impact our souls.

Anaphora is a chapbook of lyrical love poems set within both the small, everyday rhythms of life, as well as in the majestic, universal backdrop of space and time.

In How to Draw Fire Marcus Whalbring includes four sections that move from childhood, to reflections of estrangement, to love and parenthood, and ends in a place of healing and affirmation. This collection appeals to lovers of different schools of poetry. Those who admire the confessional mode will be attracted to the vulnerability in poems that explore the sense of anxiety and loss as the poet explores the strained relationships with family members and writes of the dynamics of love and marriage and parenthood. Those who love surrealism and magical realism, will enjoy poems of whimsy that include a strange trip into an entire existence within a box and a poem about highlighter brought to a cemetery. In Marcus Whalbring's second collection of poems, he attempts to find common humanity and vulnerability by finding the threads that stitch together the memory and the dream, the world of childhood and the world of adulthood, the momentous and the everyday.

The Second Home by Vasiliki Katsarou is a collection of spare and lyrically evocative poems exploring memory, family, and identity. Drawing on both classical and contemporary forms, vivid imagery and subtle musicality imbue these poems with emotional weight. This is a beautifully-crafted collection that speaks to the mysterious truths of the human heart.

Avery Lane is a singular poet, forging memorable voices that usher us on exquisitely crafted journeys through consciousness and experience. In these vivid and tenderly evocative poems, she draws upon the savage grace of the Arizona desert as it yields insights into the equally mysterious landscape of the human spirit. Lane invites us to learn the lessons of serpents, to ponder what the bees know, while reminding us that "There are days when I cannot separate howling wind from mind." We are wiser and stronger for the journey.-Phil Ivory, Instructor, The Writers Studio

In Handbook for Unwell Mothers, Jill Crammond's poems turn motherhood on its head, shake it up, and pop the cork. When the second stanza you read is, It is morning in the gingerbread house/and no-one has eaten the children yet,you know you are in for some fantastic and engaging work. Crammond's voice is like no other-funny, dark, powerful, honest, vulnerable-she continually engages the reader with playful language as well as giving a few nods to poetry's past such as William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and even Mary Oliver with the humorous, After the second glass of wine/you will know/what it is you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life. This is a book I could not set down. If you are ready for an exuberant ride into the lives of women, Mary, ex-wives, children you may want to devour, and mothers who could have #MotherhoodForRealz tattooed on their back, read this book. Highly recommended for anyone who is a mother or anyone who was born from one. Pop the champagne, this book is so bubbly and refreshing!-Kelli Russell AgodonLike the Fractured Fairy Tales I loved so well, Jill Crammond's startling poems twist the old stories of motherhood until they crack, and let in both light and darkness. Archetypes of Mary, Jane, Barbie, and the witch are all delightfully re-envisioned here. I wish I'd had this slim guide of how to survive divorce and single motherhood sooner. Give it to all your friends. You never know when they might need it. -Barbara Ungar"Say the word mother enough times it becomes other, " Jill Crammond writes in her chapbook Handbook for Unwell Mothers which confronts the mythos and mysticism of motherhood. This stunning and surreal chapbook flings open "windows closed tight from the truth" to show how close the darkness and domesticity sit. Crammond deconstructs the fairytale of motherhood to show the way mothers are perceived as: witch, object, prey. Through Crammond's impeccable worldbuilding, here mothers "[wear] the weight of yesterday's mascara," "dress the children in napkins," and [forgive] the plates their stains," as they confront isolation and subjugation from homes, men and even their children. This book, glittered with haunt, offers the danger and power "of a mothering.. that doesn't mother."-Kelly Grace Thomas

A Cast of Characters is a compilation of poems based upon familiar literary characters. Written by a retired high school English teacher, this chapbook summarizes, analyzes, and relates these characters to modern times. The characters memorialized range from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the nursery rhyme, "Henny Penny," from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Wilder's Our Town.

The poems in Work of Body: Body of Work slow down time and ask us to appreciate the artistry and magnitude of the smallest Work of Body such as a single breath or a spinal adjustment. As the poems progress the Works of Body grow larger and help us recognize our small connection to larger Bodies such as a Body of Water or a World Body. With physicality, poignancy and humor, Work of Body: Body of Work explores the blurry lines where each Body begins and ends and invites us to share in the insights that arise from the inquiry.

The world in these poems is constricted by the demands of tending to a mother in cognitive decline, who talks to her daughter in "a circular spin," a welter of tears, accusations, and delusions. Musselman writes clearly about the strain of juggling intense caretaking and daily life. Certainly, there is grief for all that is being lost and for the pain in this family's past. As the poet's voice carries readers through the shocking and wistful moments in her mother's end-of-life struggles, fear is balanced by gentle humor-providing essential and humane relief. Those who have cared for a loved one with dementia will, by turns, shudder or nod at the emotional accuracy of this collection. It's a book to be read with your heart.-Jayne Marek, author of In and Out of Rough Water and The Tree Surgeon Dreams of BowlingStaring Dementia in the Face ¿chronicles Lylanne Musselman's stunning poetry exploring the challenges of caring for a mother in decline who "doesn't think she needs anyone / to stay with her, to take care of her - / make sure she eats, make sure she takes meds." The poet approaches dementia with an honest and insightful voice-filled with grief, loss, and love.-Leah Huete de Maines, Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Northern Kentucky University

"Sophoetics: Philosophy Poems thinks uncannily as a collection, wondering what exquisite and gruesome facts of the universe give us our everyday experience. J. Martin Strangeweather addresses this question smartly askew, often funny, and always skeptical in a mode that is more psychedelic than it is Sextus Empiricus."-Daniel M. Gross (Professor of English at University of California, Irvine, and the author of Being-Moved: Rhetoric As the Art of Listening)

In "Hush, Puppy" a neighborhood, a city and memories are more than just a neighborhood, a city and memories. "Hush, Puppy" is a call and response praise song to the antimony of being Black and Gullah and Southern in Charleston, South Carolina and the world. This chapbook explores familial, societal and community relationships with spice and a dash of humor. "Hush, Puppy" braids love and wrath into one lyrical plait. Meet "Hush, Puppy" at the intersection of the past and the future, sip the bitter tea of its history to explore where we are today.