Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 124 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-42-0

In his poetry collection Pareidolia, Michael Brosnan asks us to see life in the abstract. Floating clouds, a fishing heron, or ducks on a pond all become metaphor describing the abstract concepts that form his life, all our lives. In the title poem we are told to listen to “the bright trill / of the winter wren,” that it is “an exhortation of how to greet / the day with full on awareness / that this is it, the all of it, bathed / in grace and beyond our grasp.”

Brosnan exhorts us to ask the unanswerable and yet constantly seek the answers in music, nature and most importantly, in self-reflection. The perpetual questions of where have we been? How does that affect where we go or end? The adult version of “are we there yet?” Do we ever get there? And if so, how do we know?

Brosnan forms poems based on phrases that come to him in a seemingly random manner. In reality these works are carefully composed and exquisitely crafted. These poems move us to look around and more importantly, listen around us. What is the “soul contained in sound”?

Praise for Michael Brosnan & Pareidolia

Michael Brosnan’s terrific fourth book, Pareidolia, lives within the curious and wonderful moments where lives brush against each other. Here, encounters with ducks, herons, lovers, tuna sandwiches, and strangers are a “parade in random patterns.” Yet Brosnan deftly — and with such heart — turns these associations into the very essence of how we experience life: nonlinear, and with an immediacy to the threads which connect us to each other, which ground us in who we were and who we will become. “Some days you’ve just got to believe / there is no grand plan,” Brosnan writes, taking genuine comfort in the seemingly chance ways our lives take shape. Through it all, Brosnan is a poet in awe of his surroundings, eager to document with clarity everything from the tongue of the vole to the expanse of language, seeking meaning within each thread that makes a life.

—Samantha DeFlitch, author of Cornerstone & 2025 Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park

An exquisitely crafted lyrical lens held up to a life not merely lived but deeply examined, Pareidolia, as the title might suggest, is an artist’s attempt to find, in the shapes and lines of poetry, meaning and patterns in the great mystery of our shared human existence. Navigating through city and country, through the natural world and the human, through the music of language and the language of music, Brosnan, with stunning verse, meditates upon joy and loss as only an older poet can and yet with all the vibrancy and energy of a still discovering artist. Pareidolia is an achievement of voice and style available only to the mature and fully realized poet.

—Matt W. Miller, award-winning author of Tender the River & Club Icarus

About the Author

Michael Brosnan is a poet and writer based in Exeter, New Hampshire. He is the author of three earlier collections of poetry: The Sovereignty of the Accidental (2018), Adrift (2023), and Emu Blis, Bums Lie, Blue-ism (2024), the latter of which was a finalist for the Wandering Aengus Book Award. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and has won awards from various arts organizations. He is also the author of Against the Current, a book on urban education, and writes often on issues related to teaching and learning.

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 98 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-41-3

As amber traps the bodies of ancient life, poet Babo Kamel preserves her memories in glimpses of family, parents, and old loves. “Can you hear the crow’s eternal laugh bending time?” She tells of her grandmother’s flight from pogroms and persecution, continues with stories of her parents, homage to her father’s painting, and how she is haunted by her mother’s death decades later. Lastly, Kamel allows us a look into her own life and memories including her first experience of death and loss. Shaded by the color blue – “Not the taken for granted blue of Florida skies,” “or the ink of love letters faint on aerogramme paper” – this work takes you deep into loss. Yet you emerge hopeful that memory, like amber, can gift you with the past.

Praise for Babo Kamel & Through the Amber

This incandescent lyric blessing of a book is Babo Kamel’s ode to family, the living and the dead, her love song of survival in diaspora—a song vital in these challenging times. In Through the Amber, Babo Kamel shows us a child born of a shtetl erased years before—a refugee of an inherited story who grew to carry the memory of aunts who die and friends who disappear, to mourn the dead who don’t know they’re dead. A displaced child who learned not to say she was a Jew, who hid from herself even when she looked in the mirror. A child who grew to write poems her artist father once told her held hundreds of paintings. And these poems do. They do. Babo Kamel’s masterful poems paint a life as indelible in memory as your own. I am grateful for these poems and for this poet.

—rose auslander, author of Wild Water Child

Babo Kamel’s dead may be securely fastened inside an amber gemstone, but they often visit, “riding currents, then circling back.” Piercing the amber, the poet releases the complex lives of her dead who sweep back and forth like “melody rising from the crimson ground.” These particular lives, enmeshed in a particular time and history, become “intimate as breath.” I was swept away by the painterly beauty, living depths, and sheer reach of this enthralling collection.

—Patricia Corbus, author of Ashes, Jade, Mirrors & others

As you move Through the Amber you will find you have entered another consciousness, and you will draw long breaths at the events unfolding, the ordinary and the surprising. You’ll be aware of the weight of the living and the beauty of the familiar. What we see and understand in the daily gathers mystery and solidity, and you will pause to re-see and re-think familiar experience. These are poems rich with family and presence, given us by the keen eye and wise heart of the poet, her past alive in her present, and they will become yours: a line, a gesture, a yellow scarf, the angle as you ascend a particular hill, or climb a local mountain. Babo Kamel’s work draws on a rich apprehension of the ordinary and is intersected by the rare; as the poems unfold, they render the dead and the living, we feel the weight of life and the vast volume of emptiness that goes on forever. These are poems made from the ordinary, and like our lives, they are rich with surprise and wisdom, poems dressed in the familiar ordinary of the daily, and rich with the unforgettable.

—Deena Linett, author of When I Was Water

Through the Amber is a collection of poems that paints a portrait of generational relationships, emotional attachments, and enduring memories that disturb and comfort. From many perspectives, and in vivid detail, these poems explore the co-existence of the dead and the living who inhabit our lives. How dreams and real places shape our perceptions and fine-tune our sensory appreciation. Like an amulet made of deeply earthen amber, a most historic gem material, Through the Amber pays faithful homage to life’s true measure - its collection and recollection, attentiveness to everyday and grand significance.

—K. Alma Peterson, author of two collections of poetry & a forthcoming chapbook

About the Author

As a dual citizen, Babo Kamel resides in Montreal, Quebec and Gorham, Maine. Kamel’s work appears in the Greensboro Review, Lily, Poet Lore, The Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry 2020 among others. She is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, and a Best of Net nominee. Her chapbook After is published with Finishing Line Press. Her full-length poetry collection What The Days Wanted is published with Broadstone Books. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers.

Publication Date: April 1, 2026

Paperback, 36 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-17-8

Sun go down and moon rise up

Time the eater be always near

If the past is another country, who lives there? The poems of St. Fursey’s Abbey hopscotch back and forth in time to invoke an imagined place where myth and magic jostle against human hopes and uncertainties. Inhabitants of a multilayered past—a cunning woman, an inanimate box of relics, the woodwose, a doubting priest—reveal themselves through their voices in poems that play with language and form, while our present moment, like a ghostly visitor, haunts the margins.

About the Author

Ann Lauinger’s previous books of poetry include Dime Saint, Nickel Devil (Broadstone Books, 2022), Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2013), and Persuasions of Fall (University of Utah Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in publications such as the Cumberland River Review, the Georgia Review, Parnassus, Plant-Human Quarterly, the Southern Poetry Review, and SWWIM. Featured in anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, she is a winner of Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize and the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry from University of Utah. Professor emerita of literature at Sarah Lawrence College and a member of the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee, she lives in Ossining, New York.

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 94 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-40-6

The poems in Habitat of Ghosts touch upon childhood, aging, and much in-between, haunted by memory, maturation, and loss. In the first three sections, poems converse with each other via images: of hands (caressers of the extant), of eyes (portals of perception), and of hair (correlatives of thought). In the fourth section those image clusters give way to various representations of the poet’s early and ongoing impulse to speak, write, engage with other writers, witness, heal, and honor. These final poems may even be ars poeticas, for they portray how poets are made and what poets do, which is, come to think of it, what ghosts also do in their own smoky style: breach the barriers of isolation and mortality to sing.

Praise for Charlene Fix & Habitat of Ghosts

In a cold and foreboding world, Charlene Fix offers us the warmth of these elegant poems— “perfect incantations” that reveal the unseen world in all its startling beauty, darkness, and tenderness. Habitat of Ghosts is a prismatic flame which transforms the ordinary into the iridescent. Handwritten letters shift into “the hearts of birds drumming softly,” and spectral loved ones appear at pianos and bedsides and in cafeterias and dog’s fur. A song, prayer, and confession, this collection is the gift of pure spiritual labor and wisdom refined in the fires of suffering and loss. Habitat of Ghosts is a masterpiece of alchemy, a treasure for everyone who encounters its light.

—Sayuri Matsuura Ayers, poet & essayist

Through Habitat of Ghosts, Charlene Fix travels with grace, love, sorrow, and smiles. Her generous poems welcome us to travel with her, her arm around our waist, her “nimble hands pushing on doors / of air, opening them…” She comforts and renews the spirit as she remembers that “beauty lingers yet in damaged things.” These poems invite us into the souls of rooms we may have lived in for years—rooms of intimacy, rooms of loss, of parenthood, of marriage, of friendship, of creation—but now, with Fix’s gift for invitation and revelation, we are guided to a more ripened understanding of these essential places. And, with these extraordinary poems and their well-wrought wisdom, we too may “endeavor to ripen well.”

—David Swerdlow, author of Empty the River

About the Author

Charlene Fix came of age in South Euclid, Ohio, one of many free-range kids in this mostly working class suburb on Cleveland’s east side. So it is no surprise that these poems wander around a bit too, loosely tethered to those modest homes and schools, and later to localities beyond, spirit soaring but poems anchored by an accretion of universal particulars from childhood to aging. Charlene started writing poems in grade three, and by high school would walk the mile from a Cedar Center bus stop home from temp jobs downtown, never missing a beat in the books held open in her hands. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from The Ohio State University where she met her husband Pat during the riots in 1970, took a ten year break from writing while raising kids, teaching, dabbling in domesticity, then suddenly found herself buying piles of paper and writing again. Charlene has published poems in various literary magazines, and has been honored by grants from The Ohio and the Greater Columbus Arts Councils, two awards from The Poetry Society of America, and several Pushcart Prize nominations. Emeritus Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design, Charlene co-coordinates Hospital Poets at the Ohio State University Medical Center, works for peace and social justice, and is the mother of three and grandmother of two. Her website is http://charlenefix.com

Publication Date: March 15, 2026

Paperback, 112 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-38-3

“What do you collect?” Like the hoarding uncle described in one of her poems, Lucia Cherciu has collected a lifetime of experience from her native Romania to her adopted America and transmuted it into poetry. Or perhaps more aptly, “translanguaging” as she expresses the process of thought at the intersection of tongues, where “My love language / is dusting.” Dedicated to and inspired by the life and art of painter Betty Ross (whose portrait of the author graces the cover), her poems celebrate the art of, and in, living. “God, let me keep what I love,” she implores, and here she both keeps and shares all that matters most in her life.

Praise for Lucia Cherciu & Geraniums in the Studio

Lucia Cherciu’s Geraniums in the Studio is rich in flowers, fruit, and trees—in nature, in art, and in the memory of the emigrant who longs for home. “Immigrant” reads in its entirety, “All those cups of coffee / I should have drunk /with my mother, // all those orchards / I should have walked through/with my father. // Send some money home.” Raised in Romania during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Cherciu writes, “My computer figured out / I want to buy a black dress / after I already bought a black dress // and now tempts me with black dresses.” She writes, “My neighbor has a TV as wide as the whole back of the house. // When the leaves fall, I could place a chair in my yard/and watch golf all day.” She plants trees in that yard, a big garden. This book is a bountiful harvest.

—Suzanne Cleary, author of The Odds

I am moved by Geraniums in the Studio partly because I knew Betty Ross, the extraordinary woman and painter to whom the book is dedicated. These are eloquent poems of friendship and memory, honoring art so deeply that “Even the grocery list is a love poem, a prayer.” Lucia Cherciu explores the life of making and discovering, connections and losses. “A poem is a letter sent over a grave,” she writes. As an immigrant from Romania, she knows the double life of language and dream. As a true poet, she leaves us “feasting on sagacity and stories.”

—David Mason, former poet laureate of Colorado, author of Cold Fire & other books

Geraniums in the Studio is a collection that invites us into a world rich in imagery and tales of family, nature, and friendship. Lucia Cherciu’s poems share the intimacy of daily experiences through varied landscapes of memory: from her garden to meditations on her homeland, Romania. In this volume, the gifted artist Elizabeth Ross (1936-2021) sits alongside the reader as a wise and benevolent presence, invoked by poems that bring Ross’s art, creative spirit, even the light in her Colorado home, to life. In one of many memorable lines, Cherciu declares: “Create your own table.” For us, her gathering of deeply-lived and deeply-considered moments provides a language of abundance and tenderness where we can linger for many hours.

—Joanna Roche, art historian and author of Then. Now. If & Tyrannical Angels & Other Love Poems

About the Author

Lucia Cherciu writes both in English and in Romanian and is the author of six books of poetry, including Immigrant Prodigal Daughter (Kelsay Books, 2023), Train Ride to Bucharest (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017), a winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, Edible Flowers (Main Street Rag, 2015), Lalele din Paradis / Tulips in Paradise (Editura Eikon, 2017), Altoiul Râsului / Grafted Laughter (Editura Brumar, 2010), and Lepădarea de Limbă / The Abandonment of Language (Editura Vinea, 2009). She served as the 2021-2022 Dutchess County Poet Laureate, and her work was nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She teaches English at SUNY/Dutchess Community College.

Publication Date: January 31, 2026

Paperback, 112 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-32-1

The title poem of Marjorie Maddox’s Hover Here entreats readers to pause to appreciate their “own / sweet precipitation of hope: / no weather of worry, / no stormy deadline of hurry.” There is sweetness in her poems of nature and of the ordinary, “For the pebble, the worm, the clothesline,” all described with exquisite precision and insight, “all the way to the I of the eye that keeps yearning / for attachment.” But hurry is here also, deadlines for dealing with contemporary perils, variously societal and environmental: “Don’t hide behind poems. Wildfires are raging.” She writes in many forms, and her mastery of all expresses and celebrates the potential for order, in poetry at least, and perhaps in life. Her closing ekphrastic poem after the cover artwork of Karen Elias contemplates a milkweed pod, “this empty / and brittle surprise / of beauty” – just so this collection opens and empties to surprise with beauty, and hope.

Praise for Marjorie Maddox & Hover Here

Marjorie Maddox’s Hover Here makes lingering look appealing—in the title poem, in her description of a girl hovering on the stories and dreams of her ancestors, in the wisps of dandelions that hover above a lake in anticipation of spring. Her descriptions of the natural world are vivid—30,000 spines on the porcupine! And there is much to like also in the poet’s other considerations (the account of being a motel maid in the 1970s is one of my favorites), where Maddox turns her attention to coming of age, socio-political justice, and the arts, including a poem inspired by a Judy Collins song.

—Susana H. Case, author of If This Isn’t Love

By turns wise, witty, and profound, these captivating poems teach us “to re-see our lives” in the “silent swooping / of story” as divulged by gull and kite, creek and toad, banjo and drum, loon and “brushstroke of buttercup.” Marjorie Maddox is a master of detail and dissonance, of tenderness and gut-punch, and Hover Here has an almost magical perspective-shifting potency. Here are prayers wordless yet tangible: lament spoken in “billowed sheets,” praise whispered through “small petals,” grace found in “water, fish, wind, wave” and the breeze-carried sparrow—together gorgeously tracing “how prayer, silent, weaves through air.”

—Laura Reece Hogan, author of Butterfly Nebula

There is a playfulness in Marjorie Maddox’s poems that takes us back to the wonders of childhood, finding a sense of the spiritual in the everyday, recognizing the connectedness in all things. Maddox is accomplished in many forms: villanelle, sestina, pantoum, as well as free verse. Many poems acknowledge lateness, autumn, and the passing of friends. Others are meditations on the threats to our environment. Lyrics that celebrate the natural world exhibit both fragility and strength, always with surprise, discovery.

—Robert Morgan, author of Dark Energy

A poet of terrific energy and wise hope, Marjorie Maddox, in Hover Here, attends to our complicated world with complicated love. In an array of enchanting forms, these poems weave artfully through spirited meditations, arriving often at moments of grace and affirmation: “…The cause of things—/ flight, companionship, love—our steady now and then.” A realist, awake to all that threatens our lives, Maddox reminds us that we’re equipped for the struggle. “Beyond flooded neighborhoods,” she writes, “…you get to choose /when to tango in the rain, /when to outstare the storm…” Hover Here is a book one needs.

—David Swerdlow, author of Empty the River

About the Author

Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, assistant editor of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA), and Professor Emerita of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published seventeen collections of poetry—including Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (Illumination Book Award, International Book Award, Paraclete Press); and Seeing Things (Wildhouse Publishing); as well as the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Small Earthly Space; Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (both with photographer Karen Elias); and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (with her artist daughter Anna Lee Hafer, www.hafer.work, and others), a 2023 Royal Dragonfly Book Award in photography/fine arts and American Fiction Winner Award in poetry.

Maddox also has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and five children’s and YA books, including the 2021 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Notable Children’s Poetry Book I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (Wipf and Stock) and the middle-grade biography A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment (Loch Ness Books, an imprint of Sunbury Press). She is the great grandniece of Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to Major League Baseball.

With Jerry Wemple, she co-edited the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005 and 2025). The recipient of numerous awards, she gives readings and workshops around the country. She lives with her husband in North Central Pennsylvania, where they raised their two (now grown) children.

For more information and to schedule readings, see www.marjoriemaddox.com

Publication Date: January 15, 2026

Paperback, 82 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-31-4

Michael T. Young’s new poetry collection Mountain Climbing a River begins with the “smell of gunpowder” and the truth of “White Privilege” that “When you’re not the target / you can ignore the gun.” But he forces the reader to recognize how we all are targets (and all complicit), how the monsters under his daughter’s bed – whether Nazis or climate change – are all too real. Which is to say this is not always a comfortable read, but it is a necessary one – one that expresses how language and memory matter, for otherwise we are left “not knowing who we are, without words, / without stories about where we came from / and the dream of where we’re going.” It also is hopeful, leaning into family and community “and how much more / we need each other to keep from drifting,” with “the only certain outcome: that everybody drifting toward / each other, faster and faster, will meet at the center.”

Praise for Michael T. Young & Mountain Climbing a River

Like the poet Langston Hughes, Michael T. Young has known rivers. Mighty and pocket sized, filled with stones perfect to give a young son, and imaginative tropes galore. He has also known oceans, waterfalls, a corporate life, a beloved family and endless mysteries. including clouds that have “found their way”; glaciers that “took detours to winter”. In his title poem, “Mountain Climbing a River,” Young writes, “But I have aged / into the lustrous ache of this river / a body of heavy churning, and wake / to the slowed currents of each morning.” And like Hughes and these lines from his poem about explaining the fleshy mountain-skin of the Hudson River to his son, his words are wide, broad, and muscular. Whether he is writing about family, rhythm in music (from Mahler to the B-52s), aging, the natural world, a naked man in the middle of 42nd Street or ghosts, he invites in an immense and bold river of imagery. These gobsmacking poems carry his reader along on a raft of intellectual and spiritual wanderings and they will leave you reeling, dizzy, aware of all language can do.

—Elizabeth Cohen, author of Mermaids of Albuquerque & the memoir The Family on Beartown Road

Michael Young’s poems are like the wings of an eagle expanding and compressing, taking the reader on a path that starts simply only to open to clouds of knowing; he understands that poets must see and hear hard. It is this visceral intensity that elevates his poetry and invites the reader to share experiences. The reader is moved to read, again and again, these most inviting poems.

—Bertha Rogers, author of What Want Brings‍ ‍

Informed by history, politics and faith, Michael T. Young crafts a powerful cry of grief and anger at the injustices of our society. “You can’t know what you forget,” the poet implores, urging us to stay aware of our individual roles in maintaining oppression.

—Michael Simms, author of Strange Meadowlark

About the Author

Mountain Climbing a River is Michael T. Young’s fourth collection. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for Living in the Counterpoint. He received honorable mention for the New Jersey Poets Prize in 2022. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac.

Publication Date: December 15, 2025

Paperback, 86 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-28-4

“I sleep in fever, if at all.” With Parse Poetica, Estill Pollock continues his multi-volume fever-dream cycle Cartographic Projections of a Sphere, preceded by Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, Heathen Anthems, and Alias, collectively an opus both magnum and magnificent, encompassing seemingly all western culture and history in poems of myriad styles, demonstrating his mastery of all. The present volume can be read very much on its own and as distillation of Pollock’s poetry program. Critiquing his own work, he describes “My late style—ungrammatical, perplexed / and obscure, remote sources / with six degrees of separation / Truants from Chaucer,” and Chaucer indeed makes frequent appearance along with a host of characters out of the literature and life of Pollock’s long adopted England. But he also casts a contemporary transatlantic eye to the “rent-a-mob platforms / of DOGE, ICE and antivax disclaimers” and “MAGA flags, wind-snap logos on / the street where I was born” in his native Kentucky, USA. Concluding this work he observes “And here, traces of a deeper salvage—old entreaties beyond a certainty / of place—where I am, or was, when I awoke / to name the turning of it.”

Praise for Estill Pollock

In Entropy, we find a visionary collection of stark and unflinching reflections that we need for these times.

—Alexander Pepple, Editor, Able Muse

Estill Pollock’s Time Signatures is a hugely ambitious and, in the end, wonderfully achieved engagement with longer poetic forms. Unique also is Pollock’s exploration of history, ideas and the lives of cultural icons.

—David Cooke, founder and editor of The High Window

Language, for [Pollock], is a precision instrument he uses to think through everything that interests him. And everything, it seems, interests him. I would go so far as to call Pollock a planetary man. His Ark is built to last, to ride out the flood tide of the 21st century that is still and always coming in.

Reading Heathen Anthems, I find myself thinking: What is poetry, if not language in its finer tunings? Estill Pollock is a virtuoso. Heathen Anthems is a book to keep close, a book to return to and return to.

—William Slaughter, Editor of Mudlark

Of Alias,

Wild connections, wilder metaphors, and somehow it all makes poetic, delightful sense.

—Ricardo Nirenberg, Offcourse Literary Journal

About the Author

Estill Pollock’s publications include Constructing the Human (Poetry Salzburg) and the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy (Cinnamon Press). His poetry collections in the series, Cartographic Projections of a Sphere—Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, Heathen Anthems, Alias, and Parse Poetica—are all published by Broadstone Books. The e-chapbooks And Then and Working Title are published by Mudlark. He lives in Norfolk, England.

Publication Date: December 3, 2025

Paperback, 116 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-25-3

At least since David Ignatow’s injunction to “Get the gasworks in a poem” there have been poets answering the call to tell the truth of working-class life. Robert Walicki is an especially apt practitioner, writing out of first-hand experience while wielding the tools of language. In the title poem of his new collection Watershed, his neighbor “speaks the language of plumber,” and the guiding metaphor throughout is the flow of water, replete with mud and rust and freezing rain. “I didn’t know this was all about structure, about surety, / about everything we gave our bodies to except for what mattered.” Here he shows what matters, and how “Grief can overtake you but grief isn’t you.” Writing for those “more Miller than IPA” he declares “I have nothing to offer / but daylight on a chipped window ledge” – and it’s more than enough.

Praise for Robert Walicki & Watershed

The poetry of the working class has a long history in the American tradition, but in this moment of division and rage, it feels more necessary than ever. Throughout his profound collection, Robert Walicki teaches that accuracy is kindness, attention is compassion. Replacing commentary and summation with intimacy, Walicki brings us close to men who would rather die than have their guns taken, who speak “in the greasy language / of thrust block and spark plug.” This, too, is the language of poetry, and Walicki says, “I don’t understand, but I love how the words hit me / four banger, 6 banger, the launch and the drift.” And in another poem, when he writes, “I’m opening like a switchblade, a safety latch,” I believe him and lean in to learn more.

—Jacqueline Berger, author of Left at the Ruin

Watershed is a stunning collection that blends the lyrical and narrative with soaring transcendental moments of insight and wonder. Walicki finds the sacred in the ordinary with imagery so sharp and precise that we squint in the face of it. He earns everything—these poems never take the easy way out. Those lonely moments of going to and from work can seem so familiar, Walicki realizes we can get lost in the going back and forth. With an eye towards repair, toward making due, he nurtures the life of the spirit. Survival is the goal—with soul intact in the battle between tough exteriors, tender hearts.

—Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy & other books

“Just remember. / You were here for this” could be the truest words ever written. And much as the body never forgets its pain and pleasures, Bob Walicki’s writing never lets us forget what it means to be “straddled across a ladder while / pipes vomit up a hospital full of psych meds and chemo, / the shit of the dying, thickening into arteries of rock, and closure.” This is the work of the real made beautiful by its immersion, a world Walicki is both tethered to and has transcended as the costs surround his speakers in the tangible aftermaths of living and dying. Or as an ironworker mentions, “Rust is a good thing... Just the right amount makes the metal stronger.” Read this book and it’ll do the same for you.

—Fred Shaw, author of Scraping Away

About the Author

Robert Walicki’s aesthetic speaks to the rich tradition of working-class poetry through his years of his experiences in the construction fields. A two-time Pushcart and a Best of The Net nominee, Robert’s previous poetry collections are Black Angels, from Six Gallery Press, and Fountain, from Main Street Rag Press.

Author photograph by Rebecca Clever, used by permission.

Publication Date: November 30, 2025

Paperback, 82 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-26-0

This nation is built of the labor of unhired hands – the hands of enslaved peoples – and David Mills yokes history and poetry to tell the stories of some of those hands. Through his compelling narrative and persona poems we are introduced to “Victoria Earle Matthews, Martha Peterson and Millie Tunnell, three African-American women who had been enslaved and who are buried in cemeteries in Queens, New York,” and in a fourth section he writes of “Massachusetts slavery… because, in 1641, Massachusetts was the first North American colony to legally enslave Africans.” By focusing on the history of slavery far from antebellum cotton fields, Mills instructs us on the pervasive endemic legacy of this institution. Writing of an 18th century Massachusetts colonist who beat his slave to death and went largely unpunished he asks, “How do the chasms in Christendom / answer for this offense?” It is a question yet awaiting an answer.

Praise for David Mills & Unhired Hands

Discover the buried stories that history tried to forget. In Unhired Hands, acclaimed poet David Mills resurrects the voices of African-Americans whose lives shaped our nation from Millie Tunnell, born enslaved and laid to rest at Maple Grove Cemetery at 111, to trailblazing journalist and reformer Victoria Earle Matthews, to Martha Peterson, the Iron Lady, whose family members rests at Maple Grove. These poems travel from the plantations of the South to historic cemeteries of Queens, unearthing slavery’s erasures with lyrical power. A vital collection that transforms silence into song, remembrance into resistance.

—Carl Ballenas, Maple Grove Cemetery Historian

David Mills is a poet of the raw and the cooked, the raw being the mass of historical details he digests both intellectually and emotionally to “cook” his poetry. As guide and interlocutor, he explores two geographical points – Queens, NY and Massachusetts – through experiential accounts of enslavement “beyond the jurisdiction of flinch.” Among many other heroes and villains, Mills delineated the lives of Millie Tunnell, who served George Washington in a Virginia tavern as a young woman and, in a wild change of scene, died in Queens at the age of 114; and Onesimus, an African enslaved by the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, who introduced inoculations to the New World. Righting glaring omissions to a mostly Whites-Only historical record, Unhired Hands, with lyricism and imagination, delves into “location… if if was / lost once but now if’s…is found.”

—Celia Bland, author of SoftBox

You never quite know where to place Mills’ work in the poetic landscape, which is a good thing given the clusters of poets bunched around the same subjects and approaches. He’s formal while wild in style; he’s both historical/recognizable and strange and innovative. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson tuning in from the outer boroughs. Like Phillis Wheatley riding Funkadelic’s mothership. Mills possesses an archival acumen akin to Natasha Trethewey; a cultural vernacular rich as that of August Wilson; the intellectual quirks of Pharaoh Sanders. Unhired Hands highlights his expressive documentarian impulses while adding to his clear technical mastery. Mills reconstructs / conjures Massachusetts, Queens, the lives of the formerly enslaved Victoria Earle Matthews, Millie Tunnell, and Martha Peterson. Mills’ research is exacting, but open; the poems are formal but never formulaic. The image of Matthews sneaking books between chores, her eyes “learning to swim, learning to sink into literature’s at turns clear and sometimes troubling waters” is a kind of statement of poetics and a lyrical reconstruction of history. He writes beyond “the jurisdiction of flinch,” into the intimacy of interrogation and also an “interrogation of intimacy.” This collection is akin to a history book scored by form and spirit, ingenuity and telepathic empathy...

—Terrance Hayes, Macarthur Genius & National Book Award-winning author of How to be Drawn

David Mills delves into New York and Massachusetts history to emancipate the memories of three intrepid Black women and an entire colony in these intensely researched documentary poems. Carved from fact and bristling imagination, we’ve found a part of ourselves that needed a deeply dedicated poet to resurrect them in verse. Their stories beckon abundantly in the verse Mills scribes in Unhired Hands.

—Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of olio

About the Author

David Mills holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA from New York University—both in creative writing—as well as a B.A. (cum laude) from Yale University. He’s published four previous poetry collections: Boneyarn, The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, and After Mistic. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Obsidian, Brooklyn Rail, Diode Journal, and Fence. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, The Cullman Center, the New York State Council on the Arts, The Queens Council on the Arts, Flushing Town Hall, The Bronx Council on the Arts, The American Antiquarian Society, the Lannan Foundation, Arts Link and a Henry James and Hughes/Diop fellowship. He served as the Bronx County Historical Society Poet-in-Residence and Boneyarn won the North American Book Award.He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark home for three years. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He wrote the audio script for MacArthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’ curated exhibition: Reflections in Black: 100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney and Getty West Museums. He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.

Publication Date: October 15, 2025

Paperback, 74 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-22-2

I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a stunning debut, a fragmented and intimate record of relationships that blur the lines between romantic, platonic, physical, and intellectual connection. From grad seminar hallways, grocery store parking lots, borrowed bedrooms, to city sidewalks, Mia Nelson crafts a collection defined by vivid texture and tonal complexity. This is not a book about falling in or out of love. It is a study in emotional architecture, where want is a blueprint and memory the scaffolding. Nelson doesn’t seek resolution. She offers immersion. Conversations coexist with theory, flirtation breaks into philosophy, and tenderness turns on itself without warning: “I believe that the moon is the size of my thumb but also something else entirely.” Rich in voice and formal experimentation, I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a deeply felt, sharply rendered exploration of connection and its aftermath.

Praise for Mia Nelson & I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse

An intimate and sensuous collection exploring the many permutations of love. Mia Nelson writes with an exquisitely aching pen. I am in awe of her talent.

—Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year

Urgent and surprising, the gorgeous poems in Mia Nelson’s debut capture how early loves shape our pleasures and our shames. These poems hold youth’s seasons and bright details, and lead you across the borders of childhood with a margarita in hand. Nelson is a student of tenderness and heartbreak, and all their lessons, all their entanglements with myth, all their vulnerabilities dressed up philosophy’s robes. Each poem is another day in love with July, a book, an orange, another beloved ‘you’. This book woke my heart up.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal

Mia Nelson’s poems are raw and filled with summer fruit—juice drips down so much skin, between fingers and kisses and kneecaps. This collection plays with language; the characters and speakers of these poems flirt and argue, tracing the creative potential of mistranslation.

—Frances Cannon, author of Fling Diction

About the Author

Mia Nelson is a poet from Colorado. She has been supported by Dartmouth College, Fulbright Spain, the University of Vermont, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the University of Washington, where she is a PhD student in English Literature. Her writing can be found in The American Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition in 2024. She writes about love.

Publication Date: October 3, 2025

Paperback, 104 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-19-2

Reasons for Étant Donnés, the second volume in the series begun with Reasons for the Long Tu’m, is a journey into the heart of modern myth. It is poetry that collects a thread from ancient stories, repeated for millennia, and strings them into a set of beads. The collection asks the reader not just to read, but to feel—to hold belief in their hands and trace its path. It peers through the key-hole size space between language and spirit and then steps aside—inviting you to look for yourself.

Praise for Sara Cahill Marron & Reasons for Étant Donnés

In Reasons for Étant Donnés, [l]ife has been reanimated in the primordial ovum of the five Mysteries of Light—Water, Marriage, Kingdom, Transfiguration, and Body. Each serves as a profound yet painful reminder of the elements that shape our reality and the forces that drive our inner, darker world.

—Esteban Oloarte, author of Transistor & Bardo

Reasons for Étant Donnés drives an intense dialogue with the reader, but also always with something else. To read is to bear witness to a compelling system at work, a curious reveal and obscure engaging in its own processes of alteration and relation. This is admirable work, stretched and emphatic without being overbearing. and when any generosity is offered, it is a succinct, pronounced humanity.

—billy cancel, author of BUTTERCUP TANTRUM MUTTON ENCORE

Haunting and haunted, Reasons for Étant Donnés is a work of genius and genus, of where we have come from, but also of ways to think about how we are linked and divided. At once a daybook of the feminine aspect, a breviary of holy motherhood, before which patriarchal structures tremble in an attempt less to understand than withstand the goddess, godless, godbody whose “iron bar (the nude’s spinal column)” stands at the center of creation and yet is the “time-giver” elsewhere seen gently swaying in “the reeds, / where you whisper/to the winds / sun is coming, / zeitgeber.”

—Michael Joyce, author of Capricorn, Venus Descendent & others

About the Author

Sara Cahill Marron is an artist working in the mediums of language and design.

Reasons for Étant Donnés and Reasons for the Long Tu’m are manuals for contemplation. Both volumes mirror the mythmaking of Catholic Church’s Rosary practice. Reasons for the Long Tu’m explores the three traditional mysteries, while Reasons for Étant Donnés focuses on the Mysteries of Light, which were added to the canon in 2002 by Pope John Paul II. To meditate on the poems collected herein, both volumes of Reasons suggest a physical root in the spiritual in order to pass through form with language. As collections of poetry, the books of Reasons lack canon or dogma. To accompany the poems, the poet has designed tactile translations of certain numbered Mysteries, which may be found at www.saracahillmarron.com.

Publication Date: September 15, 2025

Paperback, 114 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-11-6

Beginning with the declaration, “Because I have listened to train whistles spell / longings in dusks of three continents // Because three seas pulsate in my blood, / three languages threaded through the heart’s amulet,” Ruth Traubner Kessler speaks authoritatively on behalf of “We, Immigrants,” those living in flux and often fear in the global everywhere and nowhere of The Country of Elsewheres. As a two-time immigrant writing – in her third language – poetry exploring memory, place, and displacement both literal and figurative, her work presents in rich and wrenching imagery the lived experience of those “who chose not to go back, / but never cease going back.” Rooted in common human experience, appealing for common human dignity, seldom has a work of poetry felt so timely, and so necessary. “On a new scroll, write in a / beginner's careful hand: / Tomorrow … Hope’s harbor for the unfisting heart.”

Praise for Ruth Traubner Kessler & The Country of Elsewheres

In The Country of Elsewheres, a fierce exploration of the concept of exile, Ruth Kessler opens us to the many layers of loss that shape our lives: loss of our past, of homeland, of innocence, of certainty, even of self. Kessler conjures Ithaca, a patient about to undergo surgery, the remembered streets of Prague, and the terrible barriers erected by war, and knows that we always have the power to “return as all exiles do: shaken, and changed, and grateful.” Her images spike her lines with continual reminders that our moments of rightness, of perfect love, of belonging will all pass, are shards of light in the vast space that is the human condition. Kessler soars unafraid through this existential firmament, calling and calling to the beloved and to home in poems that mourn, rage, and cherish equally. Her lines, sometimes long and driving, sometimes swiftly cascading, insist the reader stay with her every step of the journey. This collection, where “reliquary itself is religion,” offers its readers a catharsis in verse, reuniting us with our essential nature and with the life-force that propelled us from Eden, banished and flawed and aware. We return at last “home to ourselves,” and she promises us “Hope’s harbor for the unfisting heart.”

—Nancy White, President, The Word Works

Ruth Traubner Kessler writes from a state of continual exile, as an immigrant and a traveler – across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Central America – a worldly poet who writes from the liminal space between worlds, from deep within the layers of time and memory, from a place neither here nor there, but always elsewhere – which is to say everywhere – and she invites her readers to journey with her. “Exile is an uncomfortable situation,” Helene Cixous wrote, “It is also a magical situation.” Kessler shares with us this magic

—Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (new edition) & others

About the Author

Ruth Traubner Kessler is an Israeli-American poet born in Poland. Her publications include the chapbook Fire Ashes Wings, and over eighty poems, some with special honors. Her poetry has been set to music, featured in concerts and festivals, and made into an artist book. She has received grants and fellowships from NYSCA, NYFA, Yaddo, MacDowell, VCCA, VSC, and the Saltonstall Foundation. Her other writings include a short fiction collection, a children's book, light/nonsense verse, and poetry translations. She lives in New York City. www.RuthKessler.com

Publication Date: September 15, 2025

Paperback, 96 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-18-5

Megan Leonard’s sparkling poetry collection Larkspur Queen opens with the Castle Queen exclaiming, “[Y]ou don’t know what my cells have endured / in this life or in another / unless you sit and listen / to me tell it.” What follows are six, awe-making sections of lyrical narratives that transport the reader to lands just unfamiliar enough to set the world we know off-kilter and make it new. Leonard weaves personal and universal tales taking her inspiration from the Lais of Marie de France, a collection of 12th century narrative romantic poems. “This is the magic,” Leonard writes, and readers will eagerly embrace the women of these stories: the Castle Queen, The Queen of Small Things, the Forest Queen, The Princess and the Falcon, the Spider Queen, and the Larkspur Queen. “Calling them by their names makes them friends,” the poet might say, and the reader comes to know each subject intimately brought to life in verse. “I will never leave you, we will find a way. . .” says the Larkspur Queen to her ghost daughter; Leonard’s writing holds this promise.

Praise for Megan Leonard & Larkspur Queen

Megan Leonard’s collection Larkspur Queen is a sparkling and haunting gift. This book—comprised of poems that are all delightful surprises—leaves us guessing around every corner. She pulls you in quickly with the second-person point of view in the very first line—as if someone has grabbed your arm and pulled you aside to tell you something critical and time-sensitive. From the start, you will be questioning this narrator and wondering about their past. Leonard writes, “I, for my part, / will tell the truth this time” —an intriguing invitation to wonder. There is a rhythm to these poems that keeps me reading—the words luring my eyes along—stopping to re-read but never miss a line because each line is a gem of storytelling. You may find that it’s impossible to read a line like “ when the first light of dawn, / just purple yawn across the mountain ridge” and not keep going. Likewise, Leonard’s description of a castle will put you right there: “of crystal and moonstone, / and ice, / and its rooms glowed with / the cold morning light: / the thinnest blue, the thinnest pink.” In one poem titled “Anyone Who Thinks Thunderstorms Are Romantic Has Never Lived In An Attic Apartment On Top Of A Hill In An Otherwise Flat City,” the piece is constructed of squares of text with a white space in each square- like the windows of a house. “You may be wondering why I am telling you this story,” writes Leonard. Lines like this remind us that she is speaking directly to us. This collection is like a fairy tale or a fable with characters you’ve never seen and yet they remind you of some part of yourself or some person you once knew. I dare you to start reading Larkspur Queen and try to put it down.

—Sarah Alcott Anderson, author of We Hold On To What We Can

The spine of Megan Leonard’s Larkspur Queen is a series of contemporary expansions on the medieval Lais of Marie de France. Rather than focusing on courtly love, as did their 12th century counterparts, the women in these maximalist, lilting poems are concerned with girlhood, motherhood, autonomy, and the body. In the face of the pandemic, chronic illness, persistent pain, and medical gaslighting, Leonard’s queens don’t practice gratitude or experience epiphanies. “It is easier to remember in the gray crepuscular light,” Leonard writes, “that her body is not the enemy.” Grounded in the specificities of the natural world, yet unafraid to reference modern absurdities like Paint and Sip parties, spanning terrain from the horizon line to the preschool pick up line, Leonard creates a chimeric collection, both narrative and poetic. How I gasped when a formative incident from early in the book—a pot of hot water accidentally spilled on a child’s face—reappeared, refracted, in another poem near the end. I inhaled the deeply engaging, linguistically stunning Larkspur Queen in one sitting, then went back, poem by poem, to savor it again.

—Nicole Haroutunian, author of Choose This Now

Megan Leonard declares herself thankful to Marie de France, who “could not have imagined how her poetry would inspire and comfort and delight another woman, another writer, some 850 years after she created it,” but now Leonard has taken her turn to inspire and comfort and delight, and her readers will be thankful to her. In her inspired and inspiring Larkspur Queen, Megan Leonard herself does what she shows her Enyette, Queen of the Forest, doing: “Like mushroom spores, she flies on the wind, / scatters herself into countless specks across / a forest sunbeam.”

—H. L. Hix, author of Moral Tales

Megan Leonard’s second poetry collection, Larkspur Queen, centers six fabular queens in narrative poems, guided by shorter, meditative ones. Each poem contains the natural world and swaths of color that weave us into their (now spoken, rather than unspoken) inner lives. She asks in one poem, “what do we need but poetry,” as an answered statement. Throughout, solitude is something sought, a kind of protection from men and others’ needs, providing a vividness for the women in the poems. The reader, one of the cast of queens without kings, is ultimately brought to herself in this beautifully crafted collection.

—Chloe Yelena Miller, author of Perforated & Viable

About the Author

Megan Leonard (she/they) is the author of Larkspur Queen (Broadstone Books) and book of lullabies (Milk & Cake Press), as well as the chapbooks Dear ______ (Milk & Cake Press), and where the body ends (Platypus Press). Meg’s work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Fourth River, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly, and she is the recipient of the Prospero Prize in Poetry and the Puerto del Sol Prize; her work has been nominated for Best of the Net. Meg lives in coastal New Hampshire, where she works as a writing mentor both privately and for the University of New Hampshire. Though primarily a poet, Meg also enjoys visual art and prose, and themes in Meg’s work often include disability and chronic illness, mental illness, madness, motherhood, and dark little fairy tales. Meg lives with her spouse and children, as well as two cats, a tortoise, and a bearded dragon.

Publication Date: August 15, 2025

Paperback, 76 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-06-2

Adam Day’s book-length poem The Strategic Crescent, a satirical travelogue, weaves together the picturesque medieval plazas and pomegranate trees of Afghanistan and Iraq, with Western military intervention. Modeled after The New York Times travel series, “36 Hours in _____,” Day does not disappoint curious readers. “‘So, forget magazine covers that promise: “Undiscovered M____!”/“Hidden H_____” “Secret T____,’” exclaims the speaker, a female journalist. “When a region has been attracting / admirers for more than 1,000 years,” she writes, “no square inch is undiscovered.” The speaker reports in both fact and fiction, and aspects of the two nations and the region are often conflated, as the casual Western observer is apt to do. This book is a thought-provoking adventure, full of great mosques, night owl nightspots, and “At sunrise… [an] outdoor abattoir... [Where]… water/steams and hisses on the white stones.”

About the Author

Adam Day is the author of Illuminated Edges, Left-Handed Wolf, and Model of a City in Civil War, and is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. His work has appeared in APR, Boston Review, The Progressive, Fence, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle Press.

Publication Date: July 15, 2025

Paperback, 102 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-09-3

David Dodd Lee’s new poetry collection The Bay is a “a hymn made out of spider webs.” Lee creates a pulsing lyrical narrative of our nature, a fragile but enduring ecosystem—animal, bird, fish, and human. “Personally” writes Lee, “I’m happy to live beside fish, inside this day that is divided/by birds.” Lee sees life and death through a lens known only to those who wholly appreciate the wild and what it offers. He writes with admiration. He writes with awe. He writes with knowing. Perhaps most importantly, he writes with connection. Nature and Humanity, he seems to express, are inextricable. We are part of the wild from which we so desperately try to separate ourselves. “I have a maple leaf inside this bible,” he writes. “One autumn it turned yellow and it is still yellow/and flat and delicate as a piece of paper with a love letter written on it.” We save what we can. We record what we can. While disappearance is inevitable, reading The Bay is like listening to a heartbeat for a while, our life’s rhythm. “The heart is just/a muscle,” Lee says. “Please Let’s watch the end together.”

Praise for David Dodd Lee & The Bay

David Dodd Lee’s The Bay is a book that wrestles with life in 21st Century America. The poems explore the events of our times—pandemic, political strife, climate change, and general tumult— with language that is intelligent, wry, specific and often aching in its beauty. These poems remind us that careful observation is a form of love. The world with its geese and foxes and even ticks, with beloved pets and humans we love and struggle with, deserves our full attention. So often we are turned to our devices, our internal landscape, and The Bay asks us to look outward, to see and find a way out of our habits of distance and dislike into a consideration of what to make of our world and our time on it. This is a bracing, often funny, and exquisite book.

—Cullen Bailey Burns, author of Slip

I know of no living poet more at home in the multitudes of themselves and their world than David Dodd Lee. The company of his poetry is like the company of the most genuine people and of nature itself—immediately and recognizably singular, yet infinitely, wondrously varied. Plainspoken, rhapsodic, familiar, hymnal, distracted, disjointed, centered, meditative, broken, healed, sentimental, sober, lost, wise . . . Lee’s new book, The Bay, reminds us that we too are infinitely complex, and that each of us can be worthy company to ourselves if we listen to all that we and our worlds are trying to say.

—Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island

About the Author

David Dodd Lee is the author of thirteen poetry books, including the forthcoming chapbook Dead Zones, the Dictionary Sonnets (2025) as well as a full-length volume of persona poems, The 574 Calling Area Has Been Hit by the Blast (2026). He’s also the author of Downsides of Fish Culture, Abrupt Rural (1997, 2004, both from New Issues), Arrow Pointing North, The Nervous Filaments, and Animalities (2002, 2010, 2014, all from Four Way Books), Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), and two volumes of Ashbery erasure poems. His prose and poetry have been published in Southeast Review, New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Pleiades, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, River Styx, The Nation, Hunger Mountain, Tampa Review and Willow Springs. Lee is also a painter, collage artist, and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one-person exhibitions, mixing collage and poetry texts into single improvisational artworks. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Lily Poetry Review, Off the Coast, The Hunger, The Rumpus, and Watershed Review. His collage work, accompanied by an interview, appeared in a recent issue of The Journal. In 2016 he began making sculptures, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. He teaches at Indiana University South Bend, where he is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary journal The Glacier.

Publication Date: July 15, 2025

Paperback, 78 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-05-5

“We are ambulance chasers of the soul.” So begins the poetic manifesto, An Illegal Feast, collectively penned by Addison, Flores, Goyan, King, and Wong. This powerful, energetic, thrill-ride of words has a musical beat that will keep you moving. “Wildly human” and daring, these poets plead, “I exist. / Paint me.” Classical, astrological, historical, and traditional references weave unique stories united by lyrical flare. Each poem pulses, making it easy to imagine an emotional stage performance, arresting and honest. Rarely does a collection make you nod your head line by line in solidarity. Read if you desire harmony, if you crave clarity, but especially if you find yourself asking, “Do you see me?”

Praise for An Illegal Feast

A multicultural collection of poetic thoughts on love, nature, myth, human rights, and more, inspired by prompts from E. E. King given to four other talented poets, whose words are seamlessly stitched into a large poetic tapestry of light and darkness, empathy and truth. Recommended!

—G. O. Clark, author of Mindscapes

Everywhere I look in this world I see disarray and terror. Very little in me has felt like poetry has the requisite confrontational minerals to act as an effective resistance. But this avant-garde poetry project confronted my meager imagination and revived my hope. In An Illegal Feast four performer-poets responded to a prompt with a poem from a fifth poet to synthesize into one poem. Then wash rinse repeat for each subsequent poem. The spirit of the project—so free of vanity, so full of enthusiastic letting go—is a trust exercise on the page that reminds us that “our world has become dark energy driving us apart” so we must rely on community if we are to survive. Each poem’s reliance on the voice of the other poets is a revelation, the way the ideas and words curiously weave in and out of each other, blurring origins. Reading An Illegal Feast calmed my nervous system by suggesting that we must love all the unsolved “loop of preguntas” that vulnerable intimacy raises in us, rather than focus on seeking answers to the origins of our social ills. This innovative collection of poems was a soup line at the back of an artful church indeed serving a feast to my malnourished soul.

—Joe Loya, award-winning essayist, playwright, TV writer, podcast host & producer

A mélange of masterful talent & sumptuous creativity, An Illegal Feast will have you salivating over every piece in this collection, satisfied yet always craving more. I gorged myself in one sitting but returned for seconds & thirds, & I’m still licking sticky sweet poetry off my fingers.

—Jessica McHugh, 3x Bram Stoker Award nominated author of The Quiet Ways I Destroy You

A collection starting with an amazing introduction, which gives the backstory of the project. This, in and of itself, is extraordinary.

The collection is divided into three parts:

Part 1 Shows love in all its many forms. The wondrous joy, and hardships it creates.

Part 2 Feminine power, impatience, hope, ancestors, and the never-ending.

Part 3 Portrait of existence, self, mystery, and mantras for an unsettling peace.

This collaboration, among five extremely talented writers, has created a collection of words, laced with the purest type of magic. And that is connection.

—Cindy O’Quinn, Bram Stoker Award-winning writer & Elgin, Rhysling, & Dwarf Star-nominated poet

About the Authors

E.E. King is proud to be the editor of @Addison, Flores, Goyan, King & Wong. Turning their brilliance into our poetry. She’s an award-winning painter, performer, writer, and naturalist who’s in over 100 publications. Her novels include Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife and Gods & Monsters. She’s shown paintings at LACMA and painted murals worldwide. Check out paintings and books at: www.elizabetheveking.com

Linda D. Addison, the author of five award-winning collections including How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend, recipient of the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry. Her site: www.LindaAddisonWriter.com

Consuelo G. Flores is a leading Los Angeles Culture Bearer, specializing in the Day of the Dead celebration, curating exhi-bitions, presenting academic workshops nationwide, and building altars. She’s written short and full-length plays and has produced cultural events throughout Los Angeles. FB: https://www.facebook.com/consuelo.flores.9406

Andrea Goyan (she/her) is an award-winning author and co-host of Metastellar's Long Lost Friends. Recent stories can be found in Flash Fiction Magazine, Dark Matter Presents: Monstrous Futures, All Worlds Wayfarer, and The Molotov Cocktail. You can find more of her words at www.andreagoyan.com

Elizabeth Wong is an award-winning playwright (China Doll, Kimchee & Chitlins, Space Nuns of the Rescue Mainframe, @Lys), a sitcom writer, Los Angeles Times essayist, and theatre professor at Boston Conservatory@Berklee. www.elizabethwong.net

Publication Date: June 15, 2025

Paperback, 102 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-07-9

This latest collection from British poet Estill Pollock begins and ends with “Jazz guys riffing Shakespeare, poets / riffing Jazz guys riffing Shakespeare,” signaling another heady mix of samplings ahead, preparing the reader for the latest foray into his multi-volume series of poetic dissections of culture (high and how) and history (literary and political), a “world too bizarre to calibrate / except by bots” – or, just maybe, poets. As the title suggests, Pollock once again exhibits his talent for assuming identities and voices, particularly fine in the section “Mr. Coleridge, and Other Portraits” from the English Romantic era. Still he keeps a keen eye on the present, a time of “elections / poised between apathy and White Power militias” (his transatlantic critique of his long-ago native land, the Kentucky and American South of his youth, has never been so necessary). “In the history of everything, there / is always room, for the watchman in the shadows,” for “memories and the ceremonies of chance.” Pollock is that watchman, and his ceremonies conclude with the question, ‘Tell me who you are, who / are you now //Who are you now.”

Praise for Estill Pollock & Alias

Wild connections, wilder metaphors, and somehow it all makes poetic, delightful sense.

—Ricardo Nirenberg, Offcourse Literary Journal

...deftly conjured poems that stay in the memory.

—George Simmers, Snakeskin Poetry

Whether shaking up Shakespeare, perambulating with the Lake poets, or castigating CEOs for “slam-dunking dividends,” Pollock’s poems intrigue and engage. Varying in length from snapshots to sustained reflection, each poem gets under the skin of an assorted cast of characters, sharing their entanglements with authorial compassion and inventiveness.

—Hannah Stone, Dream Catcher Magazine

About the Author

Estill Pollock’s publications include Constructing the Human (Poetry Salzburg) and the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy (Cinnamon Press, Wales). His recent poetry collections, Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, and Heathen Anthems are published by Broadstone Books. He lives in Norfolk, England.

Publication Date: June 15, 2025

Paperback, 116 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-94-3

This ethereal trans-Atlantic collaboration pairs the bilingual (Irish-Gaelic and English) tanka poetry of Irish author Gabriel Rosenstock with American photographer Margaret McCarthy’s atmospheric black & white images of the ancient world (with some complementary contemporary additions) — of art, landscape, and standing stone structures. Rosenstock’s ekphrastic poems were written and translated in spontaneous response to McCarthy’s photographs, with a theme emerging out of the process: our very human search for the (literal and personified) belovèd, throughout history, across place and time. Through the synergy between image and text, their work creates a third thing—a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Praise for Margaret McCarthy & Gabriel Rosenstock

Some artists defy conventions and merge different mediums to create something entirely new and thought-provoking. Pairing photography with tanka poetry adds a layer of depth and complexity to the visual art, engaging the audience in a different way than traditional approaches might.

— Charlotte Parkin, On Landscape Magazine

Margaret McCarthy captures a spiritual dimension, both seen and unseen, in her extraordinary black and white photographs published in her first monograph Belovèd: Photo-Tanka Meditations.

— Elizabeth Avedon, Independent Curator

Gabriel Rosenstock is a force of fiery nature, sweeping across the world of dispossessed cultures, languages, and voices, of disfigured and forgotten histories and landscapes, bringing them alive in the embrace of his songs.

—Waqas Khwaja, Poet

Filíocht dhomhanda í filíocht Rosenstock.

Rosenstock’s poetry is world poetry.

—Robert Welch, Author, Scholar, Editor, The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature

About the Author & Artist

Gabriel Rosenstock is a bilingual poet (in Irish & English), tankaist, haikuist, translator, essayist, playwright, novelist and short story writer. A Lineage Holder of Celtic Buddhism, he is the author of HAIKU ENLIGHTENMENT and the author/translator of over 180 books. Recent titles include: BOATMAN! take these songs from me (Manipal Universal Press, India); LOVE LETTER TO KASHMIR (Cross-Cultural Communications, NY) and GARSUN / BOY: A memoir in verse (Arlen House, Ireland). Rosenstock’s appreciation of Zen haiku, Sufi poetry and bhakti devotional poetry infuse his writing with an ethereal longing that explores our concept of the “belovèd” in all its vast, varied and complex dimensions. Rosenstock filters these cross-cultural references through the prism of the Irish language; with his bi-lingual poems, he brings a 1,300-year old tradition from Japan to illuminate our current moment.

http://roghaghabriel.blogspot.ie/

Margaret McCarthy has been drawn to the landscapes of antiquity throughout her photographic travels. She photographs with an immediate, intuitive reaction to the “genius loci” —the spirit(s) of a specific place. Her work has taken her to the standing stones across Europe, the pyramids of Mexico, the temples of Greece and the castros of Celtic Spain. Many of the photographs were made in Celtic landscapes of Europe, where the “other world” is inherent in indigenous Celtic beliefs and mythology. Inspired and indebted to mythology, she brings the eye of a poet to her photography, exploring archetypes of myth, dream and the divine feminine. McCarthy’s work is driven by a sense of wonder at the fecund creativity of the natural world. A multi-award-winning artist, her work has been exhibited and collected widely, and published extensively.

https://www.margaretmccarthy.com/

Publication Date: May 15, 2025

Paperback, 32 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-12-3

The title of Margo Taft Stever’s new chapbook suggests daring, danger, and exhilaration, and all are evident in her poetry. One found poem quotes a bookseller’s note advising that a book she purchased was “rescued from oblivion on the streets / of Brooklyn,” and Stever’s verse provides a similar service, rescuing memories and, in the process – just maybe, if we’re lucky – all the world and all of us from everyday oblivions. Like the woman in her closing “Epitaph” who “died / trying to save / a bug,” Stever knows that the smallest actions may have great consequences, and that such actions are always within our reach. “The door was just an old excuse / for you to walk through” – what a delight to step through that door, and to take this thrilling ride, with her.

Photographs from noted artist Lynn H. Butler grace the cover and frontispiece.

Praise for Margo Taft Stever & Bareback Rider

The poet is an animist, living in the skin of the creatures she loves and animating the place she loves—our natural world on the verge of destruction and mass extinction.

—Sarah Arvio, author of Cry Back My Sea

Margo Taft Stever’s Bareback Rider continues her focus on climate change, her problematic family, and the majesty of horses, including her beloved horse Chimney Sweep and their serious jumping accident. With mastery she addresses a brother who dies from a morphine overdose, a sister who plies her with cough syrup, and an unstable manic-depressive and alcoholic mother who inflicts unending trauma, among others. Within this dreamscape, a couple have sex in the window display of a high-end furniture store; creatures, but not dogs, poke their elongated noses from paper bags; and the bellies of children are distended by hunger. In this stunning collection, the reader’s usual presumptions are disrupted, encouraging us to rethink all we take for granted.

—Susana H. Case, author of If This Isn’t Love

In the poem “Slow Train at Night,” Margo Stever describes the engine as “Vacuuming the trout / and stars from the motionless / river.” It’s one of many instances in her collection Bareback Rider that give the reader pause—the absorbing sound of it—the emptiness after. Stever is an accomplished equestrian; you can tell from the way she insists that she and the horse must become one: “she is part / horse. They are both seers / of the path.” For the uninitiated, this ride through the landscape of family history can be daunting. It requires holding on, trusting implicitly the poet/rider who knows the difficult jump that is coming up next.

—Mervyn Taylor, author of Getting Through: New and Selected Poems

About the Author

Margo Taft Stever’s full-length poetry collections are The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), winner of a 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and a NYC Big Book Favorite in Poetry; Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019) which was shortlisted and received honorable mention for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize; and Frozen Spring, Mid-list Press 2002 First Series Award for Poetry. Her latest of four previous chapbooks is Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in literary magazines including Verse Daily, Plant-Human Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, Rattapallax, upstreet, Salamander, West Branch, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Poem-A-Day, poets.org, Academy of American Poets, and Prairie Schooner. She co-authored Looking East: William Howard Taft and the 1905 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Asia (Zhejiang University Press, 2012). She is an adjunct assistant professor in the Bioethics Department of the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. Stever also teaches a poetry workshop at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children and adolescents. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and was recently reappointed to their board of directors. She is also the founder and current editor of Slapering Hol Press.

(www.margotaftstever.com)

Publication Date: May 15, 2025

Paperback, 190 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-02-4

In Appalache, author Steven R. Cope examines the concept of self worth in a philosophical, often intimate journey through the eternal pulse and pull of Appalachia. In this profoundly honest, sometimes humorously introspective collection, Cope weaves history, place, and legacy to capture astute reflections of the untamed and inescapable: “I move and the eyes of an entire forest lift.” Drawing from three of his previous collections—In Killdeer’s Field, Clover’s Log, and The Mad Reverend—Cope examines the nature of our impermanence, suggesting authenticity exists in a place of humility and reverence: “The frogs sing like the past. / We know him, they sing. / We know this man and what he is, / this one from the many. / We know this man and from whence he is, / this insanely misplaced man.” This richly surreal reflection questions estrangement and belonging, reminding us humanity lies in vigilant fortitude and commitment to land.

Praise for Steven R. Cope & Appalache

Steven R. Cope is a poet of the finest haunt, crafting poems rich in the imagery of our natural surroundings and daily lives in order to carry us both beyond them and deeper within our own inner worlds, propelling us away from minutiae and the trivial toward the elements which buoy and anchor us.

—Timothy Dodd, author of Orbits 52 & Fissures, and Other Stories

We are taught that we must overcome doubt with faith. Steven R. Cope’s poetry offers a different vision—that uncertainty is what opens us to the mysteries of our incarnated being as we might access it through the world around us—animate and inanimate but always numinous. Never fully revealed, never fully present. Listen for these poems as if you’re looking over your shoulder and they’re not there, but you hear them anyway, not the words emerging from the silence, but words that open the silence. Don’t look over your shoulder. Listen. Learn the faith of uncertainty. Then walk in the woods and remember these poems. You will remember them.

—Tim Hunt, author of Western Where & Voice to Voice in the Dark

In Appalache, Steve Cope challenges us to pay attention to our surroundings, to appreciate and consider our place in the natural world, physically and spiritually, as well as our place among our ancestors. He gently reminds us, “I know all my gone dead still live in me.” Drawn from three early collections originally published with Wind, this new reimagining of poems invigorates that conversation. Cope captures the uneasy recognition of being at that place in the forest where you hear your name called and gently reminds us that we are “trained well to ignore / what you cannot / reasonably account for.” In forms ranging from joined couplets to dense luxurious stanzas or scattered word play in the white space, he weaves a brilliant narrative of stories that could easily have sprung from our own lives and populates it with so many folks we think we recognize. This collection resonates most deeply in Cope’s close observations of the world around him, in darkness and in light, in awe of a crane and mite-colored crows, and “sparrows thick as fleas,” in sun permeating grasshopper wings, to a prayer for us to “parley with foxes” or “go to the ant.” Appalache is a welcome return to Cope’s earlier work, an encouragement to explore his extensive catalog, and reminder for us all of the glorious cycle in which we exist.

—Jay McCoy, author of The Occupation

About the Author

When Steven R. Cope’s first book of poems, In Killdeer’s Field, was published in 2002, a blurb noted that he had never lost “his almost obsessive attachment to the hills of eastern Kentucky, where he was born.” Despite the passage of many years and the appearance of many more books since that remark, his obsession remains undiminished. Born in Menifee County, Kentucky on July 3, 1949, Cope’s heart ever remains in those hills. The undergirding and the heartbeat and muscle of his creative impulse derive not from the city, not from the archives of literature, but from a close and fundamental connection with the land and its creatures. However, his thought and his vision extend far beyond any regional boundaries, and his literary antecedents include such writers as Camus, Hesse, Tolstoy, and London. Although he has devoted half his life to music as a songwriter and performer and teacher, having taught guitar to hundreds of students, he is foremost a prolific author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, along with over a hundred works of short fiction and countless poems in publication.

Publication Date: May15, 2025

Paperback, 90 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-03-1

Explore eternity with Timothy Dodd, riding shotgun through the Appalachian heartland of Orbits 52. This introspective journey follows a son and father as they traverse the steep reaches of Route 52, the King Coal highway. Amidst abandoned hollers and radio static, Dodd weaves a delectably surreal examination of vanishing traditions, the sore truth of environmental decline, and the shared weariness of human and natural grief: “Blackness under and out of the ground, blackness to burn. Our heads, too, burn, under and out of the ground, combustible.” Stylistically smart and packed with dark humor and sore history, Dodd offers a dizzying compression of time and place, recognizing what’s left unsaid and what’s left to rot: “We are passing Ennis / Mountains leading us like wreathing black / snakes. Where has all / that coal money gone?” Finality is illusionary in Orbits 52, a land of striking beauty and roads that lead to nowhere, a nowhere that has always been home.

Praise for Timothy Dodd & Orbits 52

Epic in its scope and cinematic in its approach, Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 is a must-read for anyone who wishes to come to terms with the material and spiritual conditions of present-day West Virginia. From the Blakean music of his aphorisms to Wheel of Fortune overheard on a television in the next room, Dodd shifts registers moment by moment, digging into substrate, not unlike “Over one hundred mines carved near / these thirty-three miles of pavement, / and a hundred more on to Matewan…” On the surface, Dodd is reporting a road trip down King Coal Highway—his father’s reluctant passenger—to visit his mother committed long ago to a mental health facility, but it is in fact a complete history animated by a voice that is generous, piercing, vulnerable.

—Jacob Strautmann, author of The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business & New Vrindaban

Orbits 52 takes readers on a cosmic road trip along Route 52 in southern West Virginia, father at the wheel, grown son in the passenger seat. On the way to visit the wife of one, mother of the other, hillsides “pass on either side of us, the deep woods and sedimentary rock faces moving.” The son’s sight-seeing narrative transforms the ordinary to the extraordinary in an account of wonders that include the monstrous and the innocent—trilobites with calcite-lensed eyes based on eyes formed millennia before; local cryptids; and gods from old mythologies appear and then vanish, seeming as natural and as supernatural as the possum, bear, and deer that roam the woods. Scenes appear, disappear, and reappear in a verbal magic-lantern show that demonstrates the relation between sight and insight. Enigmatic in spirit and yet natural in language, Orbits 52 blends the poetic and the ordinary, making even heirloom tomatoes and convenience stores part of this high- and low-spirited tour through time and space.

—Edwina Pendarvis, author of Ghost Dance Poems & Another World, Ballet Lessons from Appalachia

Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 follows the illustrious tradition of the “road poem”. He names himself as narrator, and it is clear at the outset that the journey is personal, and biographical with a mouldy air of claustrophobia and last chances, travelling by car with his father through the Appalachian backroads of West Virginia, a country that is for him both strange and strangely familiar. As father and son follow the mountain roads through a wasteland of failed towns and failed resolve, the mining outback left to fend for itself in a country seemingly forgotten by governments in a slow decline into economic stagnation, we witness the passing landscape, where Route 52 only marginally qualifies as within the boundary of the Civilised. Dodd is adept at utilising the device of (Homeric) cataloguing to set his passing frames of reference within the scope of a greater narrative and sense of time. Time itself is fluid, and a simple view of the passing landscape drops us into scenarios of Deep Time, where foresight and hindsight are skewed. The “orbitals” of (Route) 52 are metaphorical in the reflective sense of return journeys, but, too, set in a present, desperate reality. Again, the skull’s orbitals double as both anatomy and as a seer’s anchor points, with other apt references salted through this thoughtful and evocative poem. “You cannot see the road ahead, but faith / in your vehicle and the highway does not / waver. Even when the darkness falls, you / carry two beams of light, enough wattage / to blind owl, opossum, and your own soul. / (...) There is no beginning and end.”

—Estill Pollock, author of Ark, Heathen Anthems, & others

About the Author

Timothy Dodd is from Mink Shoals, West Virginia. He is the author of short story collections Small Town Mastodons (Cowboy Jamboree Press), Fissures, and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press), Men in Midnight Bloom (Cowboy Jamboree Press), and Mortality Birds (Southernmost Books, with Steve Lambert), as well as poetry collections Galaxy Drip (Luchador Press), Modern Ancient (High Window Press) and Vital Decay (Cajun Mutt Press). His stories have appeared in Yemassee, Broad River Review, and Anthology of Appalachian Writers; his poetry in Roanoke Review, Crannog, The Literary Review, and elsewhere.

Tim is co-editor at Southernmost Books as well as a visual artist who primarily exhibits his work in the Philippines. His expressionistic oil paintings can also be sampled on both Instagram @timothybdoddartwork and timothydoddart.crevado.com.

Tim completed his B.A. in comparative religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his MFA in the bilingual creative writing program at the University of Texas El Paso. He is an avid traveler and has spent extensive time in such places as Zimbabwe, Chile, Ethiopia, and the Republic of Georgia. Visit him at timothybdodd.wordpress.com.

Publication Date: May 19, 2026

Paperback, 94 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-36-9

Judith Kerman returns with her twelfth collection of poetry, A Hard Frost, in which she confronts aging and disability with honesty, wit, and an undiminished creative force. Written from the lived experience of becoming moderately disabled later in life, the poems examine the physical limitations of an aging body while refusing narratives of decline. What emerges is resilience, humor, and a fierce attentiveness to the world.

With an imagistic and naturalistic voice, Kerman explores her developing relationship with the natural world—its beauty, its menace, and its capacity to ground a life under strain. A quiet, unconventional mysticism runs through the collection, in poems where perception, science, music, and history interact.

A Hard Frost affirms the emotional and imaginative vitality of old age, offering poems shaped by perspective, irony, and hard-won insight—and demonstrates that older women shouldn’t be underestimated or overlooked.

About the Author

Judith Kerman is a poet and multi-artist (singer, performer, and crafter). She has published eleven previous books and chapbooks of poetry along with three books of translations. She founded Earth’s Daughters magazine in 1971 and Mayapple Press in 1978, which she continues to run today. For more than 25 years, she has coordinated annual writers’ retreats and online workshops. Kerman earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Buffalo.

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 86 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-34-5

In his new collection Unpainted Houses, Mervyn Taylor recalls “Getting Lost” as a child on his way home from the movies, and of his relief upon finding familiar landmarks and knowing himself safe. The nostalgia in these poems serves a like purpose, his memories of his native Trinidad and his long-adopted Brooklyn both anchoring him in the uncertain present where he wears black “for the dead, for the strong / shoulders of the bearers.” The title poem recalls a tax dodge of leaving houses unpainted, “how we managed island / by island, until the day we could / afford to paint the house purple, / orange, any damn color we want” – a sly tribute to making do, skirting the edges, the celebration of getting by. An encounter with a Guinean neighbor leaves him “wondering if heartbreak is / different in another language.” In these poems, Tayor has mastered the universal language of heartbreak, of humanity, and of hope.

Praise for Mervyn Taylor & Unpainted Houses

“The Music Must Be Coming from Somewhere,” the first poem in this new collection, opens onto a landscape of sound, where memories hiss in the air, and history dances at the front of a Carnival parade. Houses hold secrets and share gossip and dream of being painted. Curtains turn into capes spun from ancient threads, fabric of the islands brought to this city by the poet Mervyn Taylor, himself a masquerader. Follow the 9/11 Man, covered in soot, as he comes to the place where Sonny Rollins practices, and the songs here partner with the ones over there.

—Rashidah Ismaili, author of Autobiography of the Lower East Side

“When I saw the blue house at the corner of the lane, I / laughed out loud. I knew where I Was …,” writes Mervyn Taylor in this collection that fuses the cultures of Trinidad with that of Brooklyn. Sensuous, aching, and illuminating, poem after poem juxtaposes the ruin of humanity and the planet with the sweetness of “a hummingbird’s pee.” Unpainted Houses is a homage to houses painted and unpainted that serve as refuge to the people who live there: “I like the quiet, in-between notes / that linger…/…coming / from a voice so like mine.” These poems are steeped in love, caught in the circle of leaving and returning. “And when / the basin on your lap was nearly full, / I saw your hair, like mine, was gray.”

—Catherine Strisik, author of Goat, Goddess, Moon

Each of these visionary poems embodies the “song that’s been sung since Day One, its lilt, like light from a worn-out star.” Mervyn Taylor’s poetry chronicles the hope and pain people endure, as they live between cultures and through political upheavals. Taylor does not solely define himself or his friends by their clashes of geographies, but draws from them the wisdom “of the universe, which sounds like someone playing with a door, opening and closing it.” Luckily for us, Unpainted Houses provides the doorways for strangers and foreigners, not only through the glimmer of “a worn-out star,” but with a calypso beat leading to survival.

—Melinda Thomsen, author of Dropping Sunrises in a Jar

About the Author

In a broad, ongoing Savannah meets Prospect Park narrative, Mervyn Taylor’s poems join experiences of his native Trinidad with those of having lived for many years in Brooklyn. He has taught in the NYC public school system and at The New School, where his Banana Boat Poetry Cruise was a course on the Caribbean in verse. Currently, he serves as editor with Slapering Hol Press, Hudson Valley, New York. Unpainted Houses is his tenth full-length collection of poetry. About Taylor’s work the poet Derek Walcott once said, “There are many words for what is perhaps the most difficult aspect of good verse: honesty. Mervyn Taylor is an honest poet, and that is high and sufficient praise indeed.”

The cover art, “Unfinished House,” was completed during the COVID lockdown period spent in the house where he grew up, in Belmont, a short walk to the Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain.

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 90 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-39-0

“Sometimes to forget / is to remember / & to remember / is to forget.” Tim Hunt’s latest poetry collection is an exercise of memory – and at time an exorcism – as he considers what of the past (his and our national collective) bears remembrance and what should be left behind. Nowhere is this examination more necessary than in the cycle of “Manzanar” poems memorializing the World War II Japanese-American internment camp of that name, which at this moment seems less history and more dire warning. He bids us “do not read these pieces, / but listen, if you will, in the way / your thumb and forefinger might / rub the sleeve of an old coat” – as if to say, yes, our history may seem threadbare, but still may be a source of comfort if we will take it up and take it on.

Praise for Tim Hunt & Then Back Again to Now

I like the clarity of Tim Hunt’s voice, the overlaying of memory and the present, the seeing and re-seeing, the outward and inward gaze finding the key details that bring a scene and a character to life. These are poems that call for a doubletake, especially after one has read a few of them and seen how they work together and build on one another.

—Greg Pape, former Montana Poet Laureate, author of A Field of First Things & others

Tim Hunt writes aptly about growing up in small-town 1950s-60s California. His poems highlight his compassion for this rural community: friends, family members, as well as Japanese Americans in the nearby Manzanar internment camp where 110,000 were once held. He imagines their losses and fears, walking through its ruins. He also details with precision the atrocities in the Viet Nam war. Though loss is a theme, lightness is a quiet force in many of the poems. Hunt sees light as a voice in the desert that says “nothing at all— / and everything;” a boy’s family's evening of storytelling as he drowses “in the lamp-shaded light / of the voices” on a winter night; moonlight which suggests “its light is not his father’s light;” and “...this war is wrong. That I am right / and that conscience is real—some inner/light....” Light’s physical presence here leads to awakenings, lifting memories from the darkest edges of the past. Even the poems’ structures appear to be light with the poet’s use of white space, one-line stanzas, creating pauses that give a sense of deep thought.

—Jan Minich, author of Coming into Grace Harbor

Then Back Again to Now is, as the title promises, Tim Hunt’s exploration of time and memory, like the “real” road that was there before they built the interstate, that new road that “pushes north past the little towns / as if they aren’t there.” That’s where the people live, though, in those little towns that Hunt brings alive for us, with their regulars at the café who all share their same history and the same songs, “Strangers in the Night” and “Little Girl Blue” that they sing together at the karaoke bar. Some of us remember, as Hunt does, “when we were so sure / that all that mattered was injustice / as we wondered what to burn to make us free.” In these newly troubled times, we should be grateful to be reminded of when freedom and justice mattered to us, and also of the earlier time when, to our shame, we sent those who didn’t look like us, who were born across the ocean, to camps like Manzanar where they were at the mercy of the desert and the guards. Even if memory is really the desire for memory, as Hunt also says, we need to hear those stories again, and think about what stories will be told of us.

—Susanna Lang, author of Like This & the forthcoming collection This Spangled Dark

About the Author

Tim Hunt was born in Calistoga and raised primarily in Sebastopol, two small towns north of San Francisco that were, in the 1950s and 1960s, still agricultural, working-class communities. As a boy, he identified strongly with the Lake County region of his father's family, an area where quicksilver mining had once been profitable. Here one of his aunts taught him “I Can Tell You Are a Logger ’Cause You Stir Your Coffee with Your Thumb,” while a rockabilly cousin offered “Be-Bop-a-Lula.”

Educated at Cornell University, he taught American literature at several schools, including Washington State University and Deep Springs College, before concluding his career at Illinois State University, where he was University Professor of English. He and his wife Susan, a retired respiratory therapist, have two children: John, a visual artist, and Jessica, a composer.

Publication Date: March 15, 2026

Paperback, 42 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-37-6

Praise for Lance Le Grys & Stray Hunter’s Bullet

Lance Le Grys’s Stray Hunter’s Bullet challenges not just the meaning of the narrative but, in Beckett’s tradition, the act of storytelling itself where what is of most interest to the speaker is “what never happened.” Fragmented, ironic, and irreverent at times, LeGrys’s poems mix equal doses of tragedy and comedy because at the heart of this work are the random forces beyond the individual’s control and the story that’s doomed from the beginning: “I have tried to tell / the story of Gabriel / but there is no story / just a death.” Gabriel, aptly named for the messenger angel, is blessed with musical talents that come from the realm of mystery (“whoever heard him loved it / but none ever knew what it was / they thought it was him”), but his gift is misunderstood and incongruous with how he is being perceived by others, including the speaker (“Gabriel looked like the yard man / which he was”). The story of Gabriel is marked by failures, hesitations, and repetitions, and as the poet re-imagines the anti-heroic existence of the artist, he also poses deep philosophical questions about the nature of art, life, and above all, love itself (“yes three of us did / loved him / for no reason / for if there is a reason / there is no love / but love for the reason”). Indeed, those who love Gabriel must also deal with the cruelty of fate in which they are all entangled, though it all happens amid the mystery of art and the abundance and wildness of life.

—Lucyna Prostko, author of Infinite Beginnings

About the Author

Lance Le Grys was born in 1970 in Cambridge, New York. He received his B.A. in Classics from Middlebury College in 1992 and has made his living first as a Latin teacher and then as a librarian. He currently lives in Castleton, Vermont. He is the author of the poetry collections Mortal Variations (In Case of Emergency Press, forthcoming) and Views from an Outbuilding (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019), and the chapbook Pilate Suite (Bottlecap Press, 2024). A selection of his songwriting indiscretions can be heard at legrys.bandcamp.com.

Publication Date: January 31, 2026

Paperback, 84 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-30-7

“Growing up meant losing beautiful things,” Erica Goss writes near the end of her new poetry collection Landscape with Womb and Paradox, and to traverse this landscape of the paradox of womanhood is to encounter a litany of losses, her own and the generational traumas of parents and children. “Repeated enough times, / words lose energy” – but that isn’t ever true here, as her words resound with her experience, vision, and imagination, and with her persistent hope: “I am not through with believing.”

Praise for Erica Goss & Landscape with Womb and Paradox

Erica Goss’s new collection celebrates the blessings and grieves the burdens of the body, the initiations we experience, via both awe and trauma. These poems point to “flowers that bloom for only one day” but also possibilities and promises (“My son sings in the new house”). Whether declaring that her “nerves were shot by the time [she] was ten” or confessing that she is “making darkness”, Goss approaches the everyday as a portal into the archetypal, conjuring great truths and greater mysteries. In verse after verse, her lines open like invisible doors, revealing multilayered panoramas, the universe in its wondrous and terrifying glory. Goss has done it again, reminding us – painfully, joyfully – what it’s like to be a human being.

—John Amen, author of Dark Souvenirs, editor of Pedestal Magazine

In the title poem of Erica Goss’s engaging collection, the speaker tells us that her “youth was a canvas turned / to the wall.” In another poem, she speaks of childhood as a time of “bewilderment, our youth // a shield against too much / knowing.” And yet, she admits, “Had I known, what would / I have done?” This is one of the paradoxes explored by Goss. She wants to embrace—and thereby understand—her past, yet at the same time she hopes for “a delicious flood of amnesia.” How to solve this dilemma is the quest of Landscape with Womb and Paradox, another compelling collection by this award-winning writer.

—Andrea Hollander, author of And Now, Nowhere But Here

Landscape with Womb and Paradox considers how bodies, particularly women’s, hold tight knots of our hunger, wildfires, and “war-DNA,” but also, music, garden tomatoes, visitation owls, the ocean, and trees. These poems often exist in liminal spaces between wildness and society, with the speaker wishing for an escape hatch, yet not really wanting solitude. A woman travels in the “tiny house” of her car, her father’s ashes in the passenger seat. A child hides in the realm beneath a populated kitchen table. And despite these departures, “Yes,” the poet writes, “I want life, yes.” Rendering an exquisite universality connecting us to each other and to the natural world, Erica Goss claims, “all trees had difficult childhoods … cannot grow up alone,” expressing both resiliency and the need for community—for trees, for the poet, and for us all.

—Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Singing from the Deep End

“I’ve come across the world / for my inheritance.” So starts a poem in Landscape with Womb and Paradox, a compelling, accessible, and remarkably honest collection filled with stark, realistic, yet often slightly experimental poems that paint an intimate portrait of identity, interpersonal struggles, loss, family, and the ever-present need for empathy. In these vibrant poems of community, nature, biography, Goss showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Each poem maps out the human heart in relation to that larger human heart we all share together, in all their internal conflicts, with precision and grace. Overflowing with vivid language, Landscape is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, reminding us of the beautiful complexities of being human.

—John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another

About the Author

Erica Goss is the author of Landscape with Womb and Paradox and Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. She has received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a 2023 Best American Essay Notable. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, The Indianapolis Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, West Trestle, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Publication Date: December 15, 2025

Paperback, 56 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-27-7

How do I stop your absence / from following me to every room? In this haunting debut, Absence Descending, Bill Verble explores inheritance, memory, and the ways absence lingers like a shadow, a presence that refuses to let go. Displacement runs the length of this collection like a caught thread. Readers follow the speaker through abandoned spaces and memories, places once alive and now unrecognizable. From the weight of inheritance to meditations on mortality that stretch back thousands of years, this collection insists that absence is not empty. The poems ask, Is this what ghosts feel? suggesting that haunting is not only what the dead do to us, but what we do to ourselves when we return to places that no longer hold us. Elegiac and thought provoking, Absence Descending is for anyone who has felt haunted by memory yet consoled by its persistence. These poems remind us that while time moves forward, what is remembered continues to live, reshaping us in ways we cannot forget.

Praise for Bill Verble & Absence Descending

Absence Descending, Bill Verble's outstanding debut poetry collection, is a book about changes – wanted and unwanted, expected and unexpected. Changes in attitudes, bodies, relationships, lives outlived. How does forever disappear? asks the speaker in his love-infused elegies for important people in his life. We are welcomed as trusted friends as we become privy to little secrets in the speaker’s pocket while he poses difficult questions and faces the facts of mortality – his own, or everyone else’s. Even though the larger theme in Absence Descending is death, the poetry is very much alive and every reader will be able to connect with these beautifully crafted, relatable poems.

—Katerina Stoykova, author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House

Absence Descending is a meditation on midlife, a collection that is both holy and wholly human. In it, Bill Verble tenderly and masterfully explores the quiet bargainings we make as we navigate what it means to be in the middle – as we simultaneously face the mortality of loved ones, the ever-changing dynamic of growing children, and our own reckoning with impermanence. In these poems, Verble has captured ether, transforming universal experiences and emotions into a balm for others who are in the in-between, as he reminds us “Life surrenders in winter / making way for life.” I read Absence Descending with both an ache of recognition and a sigh of relief as I realized I’m not alone in deciding what to hold on to and what to discard, in wondering what it would feel like to be a ghost drifting through past lives, in fearing “my mother’s paradise / does not include / being my mother.” Absence Descending is one I will return to often as I seek to see spirit in the everyday and remember that none of us are alone in our human experience.

—Missy Brownson, author of Hush Candy

About the Author

Bill Verble is a poet from Lexington, Kentucky, where he works as a human resources director. His work has appeared in The Poeming Pigeon, Okay Donkey, Spare Parts Literary, and Yearling. He was honored to receive a Pushcart nomination in 2023. Bill has always been inspired to write by his father, who was a poet-in-residence for a school system many years ago. He currently serves as the treasurer for the Kentucky State Poetry Society. Most important to Bill is sharing his days with his dear wife Shannon, his children Kate and Liam, and two large, unruly cats.

Publication Date: December 15, 2025

Paperback, 114 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-29-1

Of all the literary works to emerge in response to the pandemic years, few are as harrowing as David Swerdlow’s Empty the River. Bosch-like in its surreal intensity and excruciating details, this collection of poems presents the hellscape of societal collapse in “a city on the river … besieged by illness,” narrated by survivors who might envy the dead. A father’s cry is swallowed by a blank page. City leaders “scratch / by memory our names / in the walls in case we do not / remember them at the times / of our deaths.” “I worked for the city,” says the man who plowed under and tallied the dead, those around him “keeping our distance in case / he carries something from the past.” Empty the River joins the ranks of great apocalyptic literature from Camus’ The Plague to Rebecca Gayle Howell’s American Purgatory as works that force us to confront the nightmares of our past and present in order to make possible the dream of a better future.

Praise for David Swerdlow & Empty the River

David Swerdlow has written a stunning parable. Read Empty the River, and you will find it at first compelling and gorgeous, then wise, then haunting—then, finally, essential to feeling alive in these bereaved and bewildering times. You’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

—Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of As Is

David Swerdlow’s Empty the River joins Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic as an essential poetic allegory of our times. The collection depicts a city by the river that is plagued by mass illness where each body “suddens / with death.” We learn about the sickness through its townspeople: the city council, an old woman who cuts off all her hair and writes her dead husband explicit love letters, an androgenous librarian who flies to the corpses of past lovers, a sick a boy who waits to die because “My sister tells me / I’m made of silence and she will / go first,” their mother who carries “one death in each eye,” and their civil servant father who, after driving the plow that pushes the dead into a mass grave, “sat alone / in a wide room for hours, still feeling the scrape / of the plow against the road.” This collection eerily foreshadows a time that is already collapsing, a time when civil servants “worked for the public / good (so it was called).” Combining the political scope of magical realism and the emotional precision of poetry, Empty the River shows the resiliency of everyday people who spit in the face of death by taking “it in / the way furious black horses took in / the winters of our childhood.”

—Allison Pitinii Davis, author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk & Business: a novella

About the Author

David Swerdlow is the author of four full-length collections of poetry and a novel. His work has appeared in many distinguished publications, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Laurel Review, and Poetry Northwest. The recipient of several awards, Swerdlow has served as a Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Peru, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and as visiting faculty on two Semester at Sea voyages. Since 1990, he has taught literature and creative writing at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.

Publication Date: November 15, 2025

Paperback, 76 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-23-9

“And so, one day, I found myself wanting to write formal verse narratives that critically addressed traditional themes of Western art, molded and shaped as it is by patriarchal thinking and feeling. Folly? Well, the poet will write what the poet wants to write!” What self-described “queer-friendly Marxist punk” Michael Perret has chosen to write in The Miracle on the Cross & Other Mythological Poems is a brilliant folly indeed, a breathtaking and often deliciously transgressive (with emphasis on trans) interrogation and reinterpretation of Western mythologies ancient and modern (Tiresias and Daniel Paul Schreber both appear), “progressive in interpretation, conservative in form,” focusing particularly on gender identity and fluidity. This book makes a vigorous case for the vitality of traditional formal verse as a means of addressing the most contemporary themes and experiences. It’s a bravura performance, even if likely a challenging and discomforting one for some readers, a celebration of the “divine miracles” of the body.

Praise for Michael Perret & The Miracle on the Cross & Other Mythological Poems

Michael Perret’s poems are dense, painstaking, honest, sensuous and jagged. They are concerned with myths – Greek, Christian, Freudian – but never depart from the immanent. They are always about the body, and always in the moment of speaking. In their formal compression, their determination to get the colloquial and the ornate, one inside the other, they remind me of Allen Tate or Randall Jarrell, but they deploy the resources of this stylistic lineage against the conservatism that often has, but need not, animate it: instead they work to transmute their myths, to turn them not only towards transness, but towards resistance; and not only towards resistance, but towards difficult, costly joy.

—Cat Fitzpatrick, author of The Call-Out

About the Author

Michael Perret is a poet and translator from Austin, Texas. His books include Ennui Sonnets, The Chimera, The Decadent Book of Babylon, and his translation of Octavia, the Quadroon by Sidonie de La Houssaye. (michaelperret.bandcamp.com)

Publication Date: October 15, 2025

Paperback, 70 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-21-5

The sly word play in the title of Jeanne Griggs’ poetry collection After Kenyon is that while this volume indeed follows her retirement after long years at Kenyon College, reflecting on her time there and revisiting people and places familiar to all Kenyons, it also contains a number of “after” poems inspired or suggested by other poets. As she explains, “Identifying a previous poem that a new poem is ‘after’ indicates an attempt to recall some part of the feeling that the previous poem conveys and build on it. Writing an ‘after’ poem is an attempt to arouse the memory of that previous poem in order to reveal another perspective on it or even to twist and turn it into something quite different. An ‘after’ poem is not an imitation but a transformation; it is a continuing conversation about an idea or image or form of some previous poem.” Some poets echoed here had specific connections to Kenyon, such as James Wright, Robert Lowell, and John Crowe Ransom, while others seemed to permeate the air on campus. Her poems may follow on works and experiences that preceded them, but they lead the reader into new discoveries on a campus of the mind.

Praise for Jeanne Griggs & After Kenyon

These poems are subtle, self-effacing, then surprising, even shocking, as if a profile you’d been contemplating suddenly turns and looks at you. After Kenyon is a deep and detailed meditation on the long impact of place, taking as its exemplar the campus of Kenyon College. Claiming for each building and path a character with uses and names that change over time, Jeanne Griggs offers us the reward of her seasons and years of close observation and felt experience. “We walk with our heads down / in the footprints of others, / icy gravel shifting / with each step, gray // as tree trunks in old snow, the stone of the buildings, / the low sky of every day.” But the book is also a collection of love letters – with all the complex shades of feeling that implies – to literature itself, an implied anthology of poems that these poems – really a single, unified work – converse with as inspiration and ancestry. Most of all, this is a moving elegy for a way of life in service to writing and writers, “thinking about how to hold / the attention of young people,” “everyone attentive / to their needs and my job to be / attentive to everyone else’s, / providing training and pads of paper”. “We could get close to our heroes / in Weaver Cottage, just inches away / from a famous poet or novelist…” Griggs speaks for the irreplaceable lovers of language who stand and wait “in the little kitchen, / off to the side, where the after-reading hors d’oeuvres / were warming”. By its closing lines, After Kenyon has revealed itself as a masterful testament to the writers’ creed that only through particulars can we glimpse universals.

—Anthony Clarvoe, playwright, author of The Living & The Art of Sacrifice

Readers familiar with college campuses will recognize the buildings in After Kenyon: a library, student commons and classrooms, a bookstore, theater, chapel, and a few quirky houses that serve as community and literary spaces. But we don’t need to know Kenyon to enter these poems. Several “after” poems read as intimate conversations between Griggs and other writers—living and dead, local and not local—whose words now live in Kenyon’s identity as a literary place where the old and the new collide and cohabitate. What thrives and survives, what becomes worn and painted over, rekeyed, forgotten, or refurbished depends on who inhabits the campus. Nostalgic, playful, and resigned to change, these poems document a shifting physical and literary landscape witnessed in all its complexity.

—Diane LeBlanc, Director of the Writing Program at St. Olaf College, author of The Feast Delayed

How does memory dwell in a place after we depart? With remarkable attention, Jeanne Griggs writes with wonder in this tender tribute to a place enlarged by its history. After Kenyon offers a literary map, marked by a college’s iconic buildings and imbued by the fertile memories that arise from “the edge of our imaginations.” From the classrooms in the Gund Gallery and Ascension Hall to Chalmers Library and the athletic tracks at the Lowry Center, each architectural landmark is transformed into something deeply nuanced and curiously human. After Kenyon guides readers on a walk down the middle of our memories and invites us to notice what comes after their transformation.

—Orchid Tierney, William P. Rice Associate Professor of Literature at Kenyon College, author of looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading

About the Author

Jeanne Griggs is a reader, writer, traveler, and violinist. She directed the writing center at Kenyon College from 1991-2022. Her presentations include “A Survey of Reanimation, Resurrection, and Necromancy in Fiction since Frankenstein” for ICFA, her reviews include Stephen Dunn’s The Not Yet Fallen World for Heavy Feather Review, and her first volume of poetry, published by Broadstone Books in 2021, is entitled Postcard Poems. Her poems have appeared in the Mid-Atlantic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Thimble Literary Review, Calliope, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Jeanne reviews poetry and fiction at https://necromancyneverpays.wordpress.com/

Publication Date: October 15, 2025

Paperback, xx pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-20-8

In her fifth full-length poetry collection Jane Rosenberg LaForge declares “I realize in context / I have given up on significance.” Nevertheless, she takes her readers on a deep and unsparing dive into her family and heritage, admitting that in chronicling the final years of her parents’ marriage and lives “I am looking for myself.” When she asks her father what he is thinking, often he answers “Everything / I would have done differently,” and the dreams of what might have been haunt the inhabitants of her narrative, along with the consequences of choices made by forbears where “we all / would have to reap the results of this whirlwind.” Still, she describes how the sunrises and sunsets of her native California youth were rendered “spectacular in / those days, when dust / was a euphemism for / the junk and alloys we / poured into the air, and for / the stubborn debris of / humans: the skin we shed that insects won’t eat, and the exhaust of dreams / adulterated.” There is, then, beauty in our detritus, and the satisfaction of survival at the end of our haphazard journeys.

Praise for Jane Rosenberg LaForge & The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated

In her newest collection The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated Jane Rosenberg LaForge explores her life and identity through captivating narrative poems. Echoing back to Robert Lowell, Rosenberg’s “I” guides us through deeply personal familial memories with detail and judgement. Whether through a failing Christmas tree business, a crumbling garden wall, or a burning California landscape, images of decay echo the destruction of her parents’ marriage and bodies breaking down from illness. In these courageous confessional poems, LaForge’s “ancestors, antagonists, / heroes” shine brightly in all their flaws to become “like stars held in suspension of moments / rather than miles” to the reader.

—Liz Marlow, author of They Become Stars

The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated is primarily set in a Southern California pocked with amusement parks, the Hollywood Forever cemetery, the family Christmas tree business decimating the land, blanketed in omnipresent smog, fractured by mirages, snobbery, Santa Ana winds and other perils. In this autobiographical collection of poetry, LaForge examines the toll our pursuit of dreams can take, and how these repercussions can impact successive generations. It is both a personal and a distinctly American story of immigrants striving for a better life, trying to avoid “being called out for their fantasy lives as resolute Americans and responsible parents.” With a keen, critical, and sometimes humorous eye, LaForge peoples her book with distinctive family members whose aspirations fade like “trails of lasting smoke and ephemeral splendor.” While the poet states “I was done with dreams,” she exhibits compassion for her predecessors, especially the females who she witnesses rise to plant roses, ride rollercoasters, as they free themselves “from the weight of their genesis.” This book serves as “an urn to tidy up whatever you leave behind,” and in so doing, shows us how, despite our exhaustion, to find ways to carry on and breathe unadulterated air.

—Betsy Mars, poet & assistant editor of Gyroscope Review

About the Author

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of four previous full-length collections of poetry: With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women (The Aldrich Press 2012); Daphne and Her Discontents (Ravenna Press 2017); Medusa’s Daughter (Animal Heart Press 2021); and My Aunt’s Abortion (BlazeVOX [books] 2023). She also is the author of four chapbooks of poetry: After Voices (Burning River Press 2009); Half-Life (Big Table Publishing 2010); The Navigation of Loss (Red Ochre Press 2012); and In Remembrance of the Life (Spruce Alley Press 2016). Her memoir is An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/ Fantastical Memoir (Jaded Ibis Press 2014). Her two novels are The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War (Amberjack Publishing 2018); and Sisterhood of the Infamous (New Meridian Arts Literary Press 2021). She writes book reviews for American Book Review.

Publication Date: September 15, 2025

Paperback, 78 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-15-4

J.D. Smith sagely examines and savagely excavates life of “the innocent and the contrite” in his seventh book of poetry, The Place That Is Coming to Us. His work begs the question: What type of world are we creating? From poems about “Sea Jellies” and “Canine,” to places like “Panajachel” and “At Finzel Swamp, or “Questions on Toads,” Smith’s gaze is far reaching, keenly observant, and honest. In the poem, “Apology in Siege,” the poet would “still like to imagine some god / would help, but” he observes, “that line looks broken/like the water, the gas and electricity.” With intellect, dry humor, and wit, Smith strips the world back, making visible that which the reader may overlook. Herein lies this book’s beauty and necessity. Somehow, Smith remains hopeful in the face of a questionable future. Living, the poet seems to say, is “To watch the animals / as more than travelers across a field of vision, / more than objects spotted in a vehicle’s window…” Even if connections in this world are illusions, dream of them, dream of more.

Praise for J. D. Smith & The Place That Is Coming to Us

Well-traveled and far-seeing, J.D. Smith observes the natural world with wonder and regret. From Longwood Gardens’ seemingly prehistoric dragonflies to the possible evolution of a future millennium’s savage squirrels, Smith serves as ironic skeptic, playful visionary, and sober guide through a troubled Creation whose human populace faces the “long curdling of Republic to Empire.” Invoking Walt Whitman, Smith aspires to “watch the animals / as more than travelers across a field of vision,” and in poems whose non-human cast ranges from aquatic Chesapeake Bay dwellers to bats, corvids, bowerbirds, and more, he succeeds brilliantly. His knack for concision only heightens his poetry’s intensity as he examines the failures of policy and politics that define our time. The Place That Is Coming to Us, quietly urgent, perfectly meets our contemporary moment.

—Ned Balbo, author of The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots

This “report from the capital” shows a keen eye for both humanity and the creatures we share the world with. From toads to crows to bats, J.D. Smith describes these frequently endangered animals and how through metaphor they symbolize humans’ and earth’s struggles. In short, precise lines and stanzas, Smith warns readers of our damage to the world and the possibilities of saving them if we’re willing. This book by an established master is admirable for both its restraint and beauty. We’re lucky to have more of Smith’s work.

—Donald Illich, author of Chance Bodies

About the Author

J.D. Smith is the author of poetry collections including Catalogs for Food Lovers (Kelsay Books, 2021), The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016), and The Hypothetical Landscape (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series, 1999). His poems have appeared in Dark Mountain, Gargoyle, Harvard Review Online, The Hopper, New Verse News, Tar River Poetry, Terrain.org, and numerous anthologies; and his prose has appeared in Boulevard, Chelsea, and The Los Angeles Times. His fiction collection Transit was published by Unsolicited Press in 2022, and he has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A graduate of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, Smith lives in Washington, DC with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals. Further information and occasional updates are available at www.jdsmithwriter.com.

Publication Date: September 1, 2025

Paperback, 70 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-08-6

Michele Wolf’s poetry collection Peacocks on the Streets possesses immediate mystique and grit. Life is strange, the poet alerts her reader, strange things happen. Embrace the strangeness, Wolf suggests, for “Living with wildlife is a part of life—/What we fear, what we prize.” Wolf draws a clear parallel between humans and animals; our worlds and our habitats constantly come into contact, even blur. In “Manatee Viewing Room,” the poet thinks, “Next they’ll receive Publix/Gift cards wrapped in BOGO circulars.” While the sentiment concerning these manatees is light-hearted, the inevitability of destruction due to carelessness and a sense of false-ownership is clear, and it extends human-to-human. Wolf asks, “Who is it who owns the recounting of history?/Who is it who owns a Black man’s life?” Peacocks on the Streets presents what at first feels absurd, and then through quick twists of imagery, absurdity becomes normalcy. This is our reality. In “Postcards at the Museum,” Wolf candidly describes, “The murderers had no fear of identification. Sometimes/The murderers were police. Vendors sold pop and sandwiches.” We are all spectacle, Wolf seems to say. Make the choice, come watch us.

Praise for Michele Wolf & Peacocks on the Streets

Every moment of these powerful and evocative poems is embedded with honest-to-life reflections on loss in relation to the perseverance of the human spirit. Wolf awakens in us the beauty of witnessing all the tender as well as devastating moments that serve all our lives. As Anaïs Nin noted, writers “taste life twice,” and Wolf does this phenomenally, recapturing the rich and complicated tapestries of a wild life fully lived.

—Richard Blanco, author of Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems

In a world where “wild loss is what we have,” Michele Wolf, in this gathering of polished and poignant poems, finds beauty in the most unlikely of places, including her childhood home’s crayon-eating palmetto bugs, which “burst into a psychedelic mess / Whenever I thwacked one with a shoe.” The scan of her mother’s plaque-riddled brain becomes “a garden—cornflower-blue lesions of decay.” Even in the face of a cascade of natural and man-made catastrophes, Wolf reminds us to hold on to our dreams of “run[ning] one more time in the sun.”

—Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of Piano in the Dark

Imagine a world in which animals talk—or, better—a world where we would learn their language and learn to see as they see, know as they know. Such is the premise that Michele Wolf has mused into being in her new collection, Peacocks on the Streets, with poems that range from elegy, to portraiture, to personal history. Michele Wolf is a poet of delight and mournful sensitivity; the work she has produced since her award-winning Conversations During Sleep only further underscores my fandom. Peacocks on the Streets is her best work to date, a gorgeous achievement.

—David Keplinger, author of Ice

[Michele Wolf’s] poems are candles held just high enough to escort us out of the surrounding darkness.

—E. Ethelbert Miller, author of the little book of e

About the Author

Michele Wolf is a poet, writer, editor, and teacher. Her previous poetry collections are Immersion (Hilary Tham Capital Collection winner, The Word Works), Conversations During Sleep (Anhinga Prize for Poetry), and The Keeper of Light (Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series winner). Her poems have been featured in The Southern Review, Poetry, The Hudson Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies, as well as on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, poets.org, and the Poetry Foundation website (Poem of the Day). Among her honors are a literary arts Independent Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, and fellowships from the Montgomery County, Maryland, Arts and Humanities Council, Yaddo, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. She teaches at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda and lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Her website is http://michelewolf.com.

Publication Date: August 15, 2025

Paperback, 98 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-16-1

Political Prisoners USA and Other Poems by James Madigan is a necessary debut that draws on expansive public and private experiences to create a lamentation for racial and social inequality. The poems are daring and direct, igniting consciousness and conscience. Madigan recognizes divisions, the fissures in our humanity, and often, the injustices we manifest. Smooth and intimately detailed, this writing calls the reader to action. “Look to the person next to you. Look them in the eye and say:/I will be there with you—.” The reader can count on a reliable speaker, a poet with a vision, and a mission. “Political Prisoners USA: A poem in five parts,” is the narrative thread that intermittently snaps the reader out of disappearing entirely into reflection. His correspondences with political prisoners creates a dose of reality, a sharp pain in the reader’s side: persecution and incarceration exist. The language Madigan uses in the face of such disappointment is lyrical, innovative, and deeply moving. Where equality may not exist socio-politically, it can exist artistically. In “For Every Person,” Madigan writes, “There was a poem/for former Black Panther Billy Che, / for Nathan a proud gay man, / for Phyllis who loves music/that plays down her spine.” His hard-truth content paired with lyric imagery presents the reader with the dichotomy between ugliness and beauty. He is confident, informed, and careful. Madigan’s commentary about ongoing historical, political, environmental, and personal injustice seem to possess a glimmer. “As we approach the end singing,” Madigan muses in the poem, “Songs for Ceasefire,” “Which Side are You On? / a woman appears offering a platter / of sliced watermelon. / Take some, she says. Eat.”

Praise for James Madigan & Political Prisoners USA

In his new collection, James Madigan writes with energy, vivacity, tenacity and heart, and with a firm belief that poems have a role in public life and discourse. As he challenges the state's obsession with imprisoning and disappearing both human and non-human life, Madigan offers counter histories that begin from the body of the poet and move outward to find a language for murder, extinction, and the violent legacies of white supremacy. These are poems about survival, witness, and how we make meaning amid the neverending apocalypses of empire.

—Daniel Borzutzky, 2016 National Book Award winner for The Performance of Becoming Human

With the title Political Prisoners USA, I expected poems that speak frankly about justice issues, and this book did not disappoint. In “Hens and Eggs,” for example, gentle terms describing the care given organic chickens are juxtaposed against images of “children in cages at the Southern border,” run by officials “who find satisfaction in removing dolls and blankets.” Protest against such injustices, other poems make clear, opens a vision of new possibilities: “We march / into the center of the city, meet with other streams of marchers / to create a mighty river of rebellion.” Madigan also affirms a positive role for the arts. Concert goers on a train home from a concert share poems celebrating social justice advocates. “Yes. // There is a poem / for every person.”

—Margaret Rozga, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2019-2020

James Madigan’s Political Prisoners USA And Other Poems is an affecting exploration of the contradictions that define America’s historical and political landscape. Through sincere, visceral imagery and poignant references, Madigan wrestles with the hypocrisy and cruelty that have encircled his lifetime. He evokes outrage and guilt with what humankind is capable of. Yet, amidst the storms of injustice, this collection finds redemption in the power of activism, solidarity, and love…and hope for the next generation. Salvation for Madigan emerges through poetry and music, serving as both a refuge and a rallying cry. This is not just a collection of poems—it’s a call to reflect and rediscover the resilience that binds us. Madigan closes with these words: Come the twilight of this day, the way grows darker. So, I continue, open to the shock of the new, that one brilliant blossom in bloom just around the next curve of the green path.

—Albert DeGenova, poet and publisher

I am 1000% certain. Liberation does not require permission. It is a matter of decision and discipline. Liberation is also a commitment. A commitment that this vibrant volume of poetry possesses. Madigan pens verse in the continuum of noted Revolutionary poets such as Dylan, Whitman, and Neruda. This poet understands the language of resistance as a tool and necessary disruption. In reading this work, the bodies of these poems become monuments for every freedom fighter named. And most importantly, Babylon is chanted down in the midst of everyday occurrences. Madigan has shaped a body of work that definitely says Revolution is a life lived ON purpose.

—avery r. young, Poet Laureate of Chicago, author of neck|bone: visual verses

About the Author

James Madigan was born in Chicago, the eldest of twelve children. He began writing and publishing poetry in retirement after twenty-five years in public library administration. His background informs his writing, and includes working in retail, assembly line, delivery truck, banking, and administrative positions in non-profits arts and social service organizations. He is a long-time political activist in peace and social justice movements. He returned to school after retirement, and was the recipient of the Michael Anania Award for Poetry in May, 2022 awarded by the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the father of three daughters, and he and his partner divide their time between Oak Park, Illinois and Cleveland, Wisconsin.

Publication Date: July 15, 2025

Paperback, 78 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-10-9

Screens are ubiquitous in this technological moment, the word itself simultaneously conjuring connection and concealment, knowledge and obfuscation, communication and distortion, and in these new poems from Henry Crawford screens serve as metaphor for the dislocations of contemporary living. “How is life any more real than our dreams?” he asks, answering in verse often surreal, sentence and syntax and punctuation fractured and fragmented nearly to the point of incomprehension, suggesting the limitations of language itself to contain and convey meaning any longer. In “Afterwards” he imagines the erasure of everything, until finally the burnt coffee of a roadside diner is left “just the black no longer hot / holding all the secrets.” This is a witty, wily, and wise collection of secrets, equal parts challenging and delightful, in which Crawford bid us go “With confidence. Into the future. / Use your head. It’s what we do best. / But don’t say. I didn’t warn you.”

Praise for Henry Crawford & Screens

Henry Crawford’s work is the definition of “passionate virtuosity,” a term the late novelist John Barth coined for what he most wants from writing. Take Crawford’s poem “The Clown Car Memorandum” where he uses his patented “bracket” style to turn a scenario of clowns squeezing into a car to reflect the world economy at its worst. This kind of virtuosity is added by depth of feeling, such as the poem “Jersey City” where he conveys a sense of loss just by showing a woman working alone at the Go-Go Mart. Crawford’s incredible range extends from economics to law to history, basically a hundred subjects that gives his work authority. I am so excited to see this book out in the world. Almost anything you could want in a poetry collection is found here.

—Donald Illich, author of Chance Bodies

What does it mean to be human in this age when technology inundates us until we imagine we are drowning? How do we hold on to that humanity? Henry Crawford reminds of the infinite grace to be found in the details of living — a mother’s eyes “sweeter than strawberries”; “a summer window partially opened” — even the loneliness of a house “with coffee to be made and nobody home”, or the pain of a prize fight, or a lost love. Humanity is all of that, and each page of Crawford’s Screens contains such gems, images that startle the reader toward awakening. Crawford asks “How is life any more real than our dreams?” and leaves it to the reader to find the answer on their own. And that is how it should be.

—W. Luther Jett, author of Flying to America & The Colour War

With humor, passion, a quizzical mind, and original punctuation, Henry Crawford guides us through a technocratic world that was the future, but seems to be now. This is poetry as serious play. In lyrics that surprise, challenge, and delight, Screens manages to catch the Zeitgeist while doing what poetry has always done best—record the awareness of an individual mind moving with amazement through its moment of time.

—Jean Nordhaus, author of The Music of Being

What a delight to read Screens, Henry Crawford’s rollicking dive into contemporary existence mediated through screens and marks, slogans and Chat GPT. These poems dare to ask if “the things words mean [are] leaving”; they’re brave enough to note that we’re all in the process of dying even as life springs up, delicious and improbable. These often propulsive poems expand time and space, taking the reader before and now and after, from sky to the center of the earth. In the hands of this writer’s keen intelligence, incisive humor, and deep tenderness, daily life is burnished.

—Katherine Williams, author of Still Life

About the Author

Henry Crawford is the author of two previous collections of poetry, American Software (CW Books, 2017), and The Binary Planet (The Word Works, 2020). His poem “The Fruits of Famine” won first prize in the 2019 World Food Poetry Competition. His poem “As We Were Saying Goodnight” was nominated for the 2022 Rhysling Award given out by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He is a co-director of the Café Muse literary salon.

Publication Date: July 15, 2025

Paperback, 88 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-14-7

Steven Mueske offers a refreshing perspective on existence and all its intimacies and absurdities in The Book of Lazarus. Through rich images and intricate form, Mueske invites us to witness the radiant fracture of being, to examine ourselves and our longevity. This work reckons with our limitlessness and what it means to be human in an age of collapse, longing, and persistent spiritual hunger. This author’s voice is familiar, resting with the reader momentarily in the in-betweens, each line carefully illuminating the profound fragility of our connected consciousness, “The in-between place is the radius’s / way of saying, I am the meadow. / From there, every direction you look / seems exactly the same.” This is a luminous, unflinching exploration of grace and humanity, packed full of wit, myth and metafiction. The collection offers a gift to its readers, a lesson on presence through life’s estranged shifts and magnificent returns.

Praise for Steven Mueske & The Book of Lazarus

In his poem “Invocation” Steve Mueske writes, “something not- / quite-wild, but of the world...” and The Book of Lazarus is truly of this world, a work of art, and just wild enough. This book is controlled in stunning ways by his sense of poetics, and by what he accomplishes on each page, those fields of white he fills with extraordinary language, exceptional appreciation for all that punctuation can do, and, of course, intense content that carries us deeply into his preoccupations, his obsessions, his way of seeing. This book is deeply concerned with death, with the work to stay alive, with what God is or was or can be. The poems are elegant. We see every choice he makes, what stays on the field, and what the margins must keep out. Mueske’s been such a poet, for many years, and now gone too soon. In this final book he writes about the suffering of the world, “Don't give me that story // about a garden. A pomegranate, / The Origin // of sin. We live / in the mad, pointless // profusion / of days lived // in the fiction / we created. We were // always alone with our stories, weren’t we?” As one of his readers, I’m grateful for every poem he leaves with us, grateful to see in this collection some of the poets who inspired him, grateful this stunning book is in our world.

—Deborah Keenan, author of eleven collections of poetry & a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer

About the Author

Steve Mueske was a poet and electronic musician. He loved reading and writing poetry and making music. Previously Steve had two books published, Slower Than Stars and A Mnemonic for Desire, and a chapbook titled Whatever the Story Requires. Steve also has countless poems published in print and online including The Iowa Review, Typo Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Water~Stone Review, Verse Daily, Hotel Amerika and many more.

In spring of 2024, Steve was very excited and proud to have his third poetry manuscript accepted for publication. Unfortunately, just one month later, on June 12th, Steve passed away. While he won’t see his last book in print, his family wanted to bring his book to life. As you read The Book of Lazarus, please take a moment to reflect on life and embrace those around you.

Sincerely,

Steve’s family

Publication Date: June 15, 2025

Paperback, 80 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-04-8

Ellen Devlin’s poems are “strangers with notes in their hands.” The Light of Small Ones Blinking is composed in masterful bursts of visions: past lives, the past itself, and places we may or may not have been. Dedicated to the poet’s grandchildren, this collection is an offering of the highest kind, one that acknowledges darkness that exists and continues through it. Devlin’s writing is urgent. She wants us to brace ourselves for survival, for the aftermath of “wet family photos on your desk.” The sentiment is crushing, but regardless of shadows, joyful light reenters in “the railroad builders, fishermen, laundry / baskets carried through Arles by wet-wash boys, / carpenters, cooks, and artists.” While we will all become “ghosts at the edge/of place,” Devlin reminds us, children’s “sneakers tread, the light of / small one’s blinking.”

Praise for Ellen Devlin & The Light of Small Ones Blinking

Reading The Light of Small Ones Blinking is like walking briskly past a life and catching glimpses through a slatted fence, or like a landscape of memory illuminated by successive flashes of lightning. These honed and startling poems offer up images of the past as talismans for the women who touch them: “a ladderback chair’s measured spaces,” the “presser foot and throat plate” of an old Singer sewing machine, telephone booths that “stood on street corners like risky / invitations, glass-walled, upended coffins.” Object by object, channeling Nora or Rita or Missouri or Anna, each poem bespeaks the well-practiced vigilance and seasoned humor of one who has done, over and over, the work of care: “I have searched this bus and there are no sleeping children.” This book offers the breadth of biography sliced as thin as possible, starting all the way back where “Before is a child swinging on a gate.” Then the during, the long middle after innocence, is a dress: whether excavated from humble closet or high fashion, for Devlin the dress is a figure that stands in for the shape and weather of women’s days, their devotions and departures. As for after, I’ll let you discover the chilling final poem of that name, a poem that heaves the weight of fate over the threshold of the uncanny, for yourself. I’d know an Ellen Devlin poem anywhere—a rare, keen, singular voice.

—B.K. Fischer, author of Ceive & others

There’s as much to be gleaned from what’s said as what’s left unsaid in Ellen Devlin’s The Light of Small Ones Blinking. Part Valentine and Tate, Glück and Ruefle—but wholly Delvin’s—these Janus-faced, chiseled capsules of “scattermoon” catalogue obsoletion (manually-operated elevators, pay phone booths), upend expectations (what does it mean to be the “anti-bride,” to mother?), and smolder with observation (“blistered shingles,” “pillowed hammer”) through “remembering like lightning.” Like “strawberries taken too long with,” these poems bid relish and pause—to read them is to sample the “almond taste of stillness.”

—Flower Conroy, author of Zoodikers: A Bestiary

About the Author

Ellen Devlin is the author of two chapbooks: Rita and Heavenly Bodies at the MET, both published by Ĉervená Barva Press. Her recent work has appeared in The Coachella Review, The Amethyst Review, Mom Egg Review, RockPaperPoem, Beyond Words, and The Westchester Review, among others.

Publication Date: May 15, 2025

Paperback, 44 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-13-0

Praise for Clifford Bernier & Chattel

In poems that gather force like waves before an approaching storm, Clifford Bernier’s Chattel documents and probes the practice of human bondage and forced labor across the globe and throughout history, from ancient Babylon, China, and the Khmer Empire to the more familiar Africa, Brazil, and Virginia. The reportorial voice—informed, authoritative, creditable—is implicit with irony and outrage, and historical figures like Nat Turner, Harriett Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth speak for themselves. The style is rich with detail. Exotic names of tribes and colonizers, historic dates, lists of commodities produced by slaves crowd forward and strain syntax, like subterranean truth that will out, but the effect is consistently clear and powerful. Over and over, the poems repay the attention they command.

—Harry Moore, author of We the People: Confessions of a Caucasian Southerner

In his powerful new chapbook Chattel, Clifford Bernier uses world history and persona to describe our turbulent past with slavery. “In the Dismal Swamp we are all slaves/of Gilgamesh,” the opening poem boldly claims, “Turtles on dry logs, rat/snakes on the trail.” It may be challenging to fully identify with some of the speakers of these poems, but Bernier’s writing style fixes your gaze when you feel you’re meant to look away. He provides no respite. Each poem jerks the eyes open and implores them to remain wide. Some of Bernier’s persona poems give Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and even Nat Turner a voice. “…[W]e murdered them all/while they slept, climbed/Blunt’s house to Jerusalem/and the Kingdom of Heaven,” Nat says, “where I hung from the neck//until dead.” As readers journey through Chattel they’ll wonder intently: Do I believe in good? In ghosts? In redemption?

—Alison Palmer, author of The Offing

About the Author

Clifford Bernier’s The Silent Art won the Gival Press Poetry Award. He is also the author of Dark Berries and Earth Suite (each selected by the Montserrat Review as a Best Chapbook), Ocean Suite, and Wetlands. His collection Bakary and the River is forthcoming. He appears in The Write Blend poetry circle collection among other print and online journals and anthologies. In addition, Mr. Bernier appears on harmonica in the Portuguese Accumulated Dust world music series and is featured on the EP Post-Columbian America. He has been featured in readings in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Washington, DC area, including the Library of Congress, the Arts Club of Washington, George Washington University (where he is a member of the Washington Writer’s Collection) and the Bethesda Writer’s Center. He has been a reader for the Washington Prize and a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. From 2003-2008 he hosted the Poesis reading series in Arlington, Virginia and performed with the Jazzpoetry band at venues in and around Washington, DC. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Award. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Publication Date: April 22, 2025

Paperback, 62 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-95-0

In Enchanting the Ordinary, author and educator Libby Falk Jones combines her tandem pursuits of writing and photography, pairing poem and image on facing pages to create a “conversation.” Not truly ekphrastic in that the poems are not written in response to the photographs, nor conventionally illustrated in that, likewise, the photographs are not intended to convey the same subject matter as the words, these twinnings encourage the reader/viewer to combine “separate energies to bring into being a new creation” in order to foster “awareness of the beauty and mystery of the ordinary, to be present to inner and outer worlds, to grow.”

Praise for Libby Falk Jones & Enchanting the Ordinary

In this book one plus one is not only more than two, but also elevates the flight of perception into “some other world” where the reader celebrates the abundance of leaps among words, shapes, colors, and meaning alongside the complex connections between them. Stunning and emotionally engaging in equal measure, the poems and the images arrest, engage, and educate in the gentlest of ways. This could be accomplished only by a creator with decades of dedicated practice, patience, humility, and love. “At the heart of both arts is seeing,” says Libby Falk Jones in the introduction. In Enchanting the Ordinary, I see the heart of art.

—Katerina Stoykova, author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House

Libby Falk Jones is that rare thing, a master of not one but two art forms: poetry and photography. They rarely appear together, but in Enchanting the Ordinary, Jones has set them side by side in pairs, to brilliant, mutually illuminating effect. Often the photographs register as half-rhymes of the poems, or as variations on loosely construed themes. A poem about constellations in the night sky is paired with a photograph of droplets of water dangling from spider webs. A villanelle about kneading dough is followed by a photograph of a rock formation elaborate enough to have been formed, well, by hand. Almost equally in the poems and photographs, light goes about its business, revealing, reflecting, leaving a wake of shadows. At its core, this exquisite book is about seeing, all the ways we can.

—Kevin Nance, author of Even If: Photographs and Haiku & Midnight: Photographs and Haiku

About the Author

Libby Falk Jones is a life-long writer of poems, stories, and essays. She has authored or co-authored four books of poems, and her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in more than 30 journals and anthologies. She’s a member of Bluegrass Writers Studio (Eastern Kentucky University) and a past president of Kentucky State Poetry Society. Co-director of Coming of Age, a grant-funded writing project for Kentucky women over 60, she serves as a writing coach at Western Kentucky University’s Mountain Workshops (photojournalism), as creative writing instructor at New Opportunity School for Women, and as Writer Workshops Coordinator for Shadelandhouse Modern Press.

She holds degrees from Duke University (BA, history) and Stony Brook University (MA and PhD, English). An Emerita Professor of English at Berea College, she’s taught a wide range of courses in writing and literature, including creative writing, contemplative writing, experimental writing, nature writing, journalism and technical writing, and critical and research writing. She’s taken students to study writing, literature, and photography in the Southwest and abroad (Austria, Denmark, France, and Turkey) as well as serving a term as Visiting Lecturer at National University of Ireland in Galway.

Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries in Kentucky and Louisiana and are part of the permanent Healing Art collections at several hospitals in the Bluegrass and in Baton Rouge. “Begin Beneath Your Feet: a Journey Through Four Lands,” an exhibit of more than 100 of her photographs from Japan, India, Iceland, and Ireland, was featured in the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College, 2020-22. She has published critical essays and made numerous presentations on contemplative seeing.

Jones lives with her husband, Roger, also a writer, in Berea, KY, where she is working on two new poetry collections and a book on teaching. For more information, see www.libbyfalkjones.com.

Publication Date: April 15, 2025

Paperback, 84 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-01-7

The title poem of Robert Fillman’s new collection recalls watching as a child his uncle being interviewed on TV about losing his job as a welder, “summing up his life / in a thirty-second spot, / his words broken up / and clumsily put back / together.” This signals much of what is examined here – the metaphor of melting as an act both of binding and of coming apart, the portrayal of working-class life often absent in poetry, and the inadequacy of language to convey the fullness of existence – but there is nothing clumsy about the way he puts his words together. Instead, they are searingly honest, even when he writes of his wife’s weakened heart, or the generational trauma of abuse hearing his father’s voice “when I yell at my son,” or his daughter listing “When DADDY Drinks Too Much” among her pet peeves. He confesses his uneasiness with legacy and the expectations of manhood, admitting “I have never held a gun,” never hunted, instead buying his meat at the butcher counter. “I’m glad that nothing rustles / in me.” Even if not bloodlust, quite a lot rustles in Fillman’s verse, and we feel it throughout these pages.

Praise for Robert Fillman & The Melting Point

Robert Fillman somehow manages to be both serious and funny at once, sly and direct, wry and heartfelt. Who would have thought that a poem could embody so many contradictory energies and not sink under its own weight? Fillman’s work keeps returning to the lovely intersection between dailiness and mystery. Poems like “Buying Ice at the Wawa for My Wife,” in which a stop at a convenience store becomes a meditation on the fragility of life, remind me of why I came to poetry in the first place. The Melting Point is stunning.

—George Bilgere, author of Cheap Motels of My Youth

The Melting Point builds on the momentum of Robert Fillman’s previous book, House Bird, in its continued exploration of the everyday in search of the poignancy and depth so many of us miss in the daily sameness of our lives—he can turn taking out the garbage into a transcendent experience. In the wake of harsh masculinity with its coded silences, he finds ways to redefine tenderness and toughness. The difficult intrusion of illness, the lingering effects of hard work, and both the ravages and comforts of alcohol, all cast their shadows over the ordinary homes in this fine collection. Fillman writes of the heartfelt complications of family life with the skill of few poets writing today, reminding how its subtle edges can cut deep.

—Jim Daniels, author of Comment Card

About the Author

Robert Fillman is the author of a chapbook (November Weather Spell, Main Street Rag, 2019), and a full-length poetry collection (House Bird, Terrapin, 2022). His poems have appeared in Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and many other journals. In addition to poetry, his literary criticism has been published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, CLAJ: The College Language Association Journal, College Literature, and elsewhere. Fillman holds a Ph.D. from Lehigh University and is an assistant professor of English at Kutztown University. He lives in Macungie, Pennsylvania, with his wife and their two children.

Publication Date: March 31, 2025

Paperback, 70 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-99-8

“These silences I hear, are they not / music? … And when I / interweave these tunes, shaping them / into one distinct melody, / will you recognize its heart and shiver / to the beat?” Not since Oz have we encountered such a sentient scarecrow, who compelling leads us, shivering in the wind rattling the reeds and the soul, through Robert Okaji’s poetic wonderland. His scarecrow is but one guise or “self-portrait” that he adopts on his journey “Selfward,” as bereft of epiphanies and prayers he nevertheless seeks “Oh, to be whole in this splintered self.” But he speaks most forcefully in his own voice, out of his own life, finding at the close that “What astounds is the continuing. / That pulses resound, even during this slow / crumbling, this erosion of flesh.” Like the exclamation point he dons in one poem, “This is my hope: to be / heard, though silent.” Through these poems, reverberating on the wind, his hope is fulfilled.

Praise for Robert Okaji & His Windblown Self

His Windblown Self by Robert Okaji welcomes the reader to follow a poetic vision that shifts in nuanced and direct ways. Like wind, Okaji’s poetry is lyrically transparent, offering clarity and insight on all it comes across. There is as well an urgency to this collection that runs like nerves through the body. Whether from the persona of a scarecrow or from a more intimate vantage point, ruminations on mortality run alongside expressions of wonder in these poems that ask us to feel as much as to witness. In evoking the “windblown self,” this book progresses like footsteps on the wind, which can only be seen by the effect they have. And like wind, Okaji’s lyric poems course your way to stir and connect. Welcome them.

—José Angel Araguz, author of Rotura & Ruin & Want

Crows fill this book, and a playful earnest scarecrow who talks, and vultures who wait. Its score, a sort of adagio in spite of the rush to live, a wish to continue, to repeat and figure out why. There are letters to friends to be read and reread that break the heart. Which is to say, a weight and a will in Bob Okaji’s work transforms not by metaphor exactly but this poet thinks things, observes what is lush, brief and eternal in the natural world as if layers and layers of seeing will keep all of it intact and banish self-pity. The poet IS that crow—has such brothers and sisters among them. Brace yourself, reader…. This book is a testament to what is noisy then silent in trees.

—Marianne Boruch, author of The Figure Going Imaginary

One sees in Okaji’s poems something of an ontological investigation of his world. But it’s also a personal study of the Earth that pulls us all in on a less abstract level. As such, the poems vividly express the beauty that surrounds us without shying away from those aspects of living with which we must do battle. Certainly, what nature gives us it can take away almost immediately. Robert Okaji’s poems, on the other hand, will stay with you for a long time.

—Jose Padua, author of A Short History of Monsters

“The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth,” wrote Emerson. In His Windblown Self, Robert Okaji identifies with the glory of all that is souled in this transcendent poetry collection. Poems offer a journey toward and into sky, bird, the invisible. Glory flutters, for Okaji, the grieved body recognizes and offers a celebratory vision of the in-between life: pulsed, crumbling, and as promising “as a pollen grain.” In its meditation, this collection is as brilliantly composed as any birdsong. I am in awe.

—Catherine Strisik, author of Goat, Goddess, Moon

About the Author

Robert Okaji holds a BA in history, served without distinction in the U.S. Navy, toiled as a university administrator, and no longer owns a bookstore. His honors include fourteen Pushcart Prize nominations, the inaugural Shō Poetry Prize, the Slipstream Press Annual Chapbook Prize, the riverSedge Poetry Prize, the Etchings Press Poetry Chapbook Prize, and the 1968 Bar-K Ranch Goat-Catching Championship. Two years ago he was diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer, which he finds terribly annoying. But thanks to the wonders of modern science, he still lives in exotic Indianapolis with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper—stepson, cat and dog. He is the author of Our Loveliest Bruises (3: A Taos Press), multiple chapbooks, including Buddha's Not Talking and Scarecrow Sees, and his poems may be found in Louisiana Literature, Threepenny Review, Only Poems, Wildness, Panoply, Vox Populi, Evergreen Review, Boston Review, The Big Windows Review, Shō Poetry Journal, Indianapolis Review, and other venues, including his blog, O at the Edges.

Publication Date: March 15, 2025

Paperback, 38 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-98-1

The wetlands of the title of Clifford Bernier’s deceptively gentle chapbook are specifically the region around the James River in Virginia, but as he announces in his opening poem, the “River” here really is a metaphor, a locus from which the reader is invited to “invent yourself / but without restrictions.” Many of these poems are in the voices of the animals that inhabit the region, conveying such natural wisdom as “The groundhog told the otter / you are meaning simply by being” – and that the act of being arises out of the creative tension on the boundaries of the “real and not-real,” of “time and the / absence of time.” Like “The Sad King” crushed by the weight of the world, we are bidden to “leave the crumbling castle // wander in the wild” until it is time to take leave of the James, “where the river turns to rest, / singing with the singing earth.”

Praise for Clifford Bernier & Wetlands

In the style of Chinese brushstroke painting, Clifford Bernier expresses in this compact collection called Wetlands the appreciation of being. Nature speaks to him and others as it simultaneously speaks to itself. This thoughtfully rendered work is a musician’s meditation of song and dance set mostly in the wetlands of Virginia’s James River.

—Karren LaLonde Alenier, author of How We Hold On

With Wetlands, Clifford Bernier weaves a tapestry of natural and philosophical wonder out of the James River and its environs. His poems sing with the voices of birds, flow with the currents of rivers and breathe the rustle of leaves in the wind. Underlying the natural wonder of his poetic landscape which is set out in luminous detail, Bernier offers meditations on the self, being, and the majesty of the imagination. Come to Wetlands for its visual imagery, stay for the timeless reflections of this talented poet.

—Henry Crawford, author of Binary Planet

In his beautiful, lyrical collection, Clifford Bernier makes surprising connections that put the reader at the crossroads of contradiction on one level, while above and below, meanings in images resonate as clear and true. Through witness of the natural world, capturing a Taoist-like feel of reverence and movement, Bernier reveals understandings of human relevance — imagination, reality, invention, time. In Wetlands, Bernier gifts us a marvelous, soulful collection.

—Kristin Ferragut, author of Escape Velocity

Clifford Bernier takes the reader on a river journey in this extended meditation on the nature of being and the being of nature. On the surface, Wetlands contains a sequence of short poems — beneath that surface, Wetlands contains a cosmos. The work acts as an extended zen koan, gently prodding the reader toward an understanding of the essential interdependency of life. Join Clifford Bernier as he walks along the water’s edge, following the river to the sea.

—Luther Jett, author of Flying to America

About the Author

Clifford Bernier’s The Silent Art won the Gival Press Poetry Award. He is also the author of Dark Berries and Earth Suite, each selected by the Montserrat Review as a Best Chapbook, and of Ocean Suite. His collection Bakary and the River is forthcoming. He appears in The Write Blend poetry circle collection among other print and on-line journals and anthologies. In addition, Mr. Bernier appears on harmonica in the Portuguese Accumulated Dust world music series and is featured on the EP Post-Columbian America. He has been featured in readings in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Washington, DC area, including the Library of Congress, the Arts Club of Washington, George Washington University (where he is a member of the Washington Writer’s Collection) and the Bethesda Writer’s Center. He has been a reader for the Washington Prize and a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. From 2003-2008 he hosted the Poesis reading series in Arlington, Virginia and performed with the Jazzpoetry band at venues in and around Washington, DC. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Award. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Publication Date: March 15, 2025

Paperback, 78 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-97-4

Irene Fick’s expansive new poetry collection The Fragility of Winter is a triumph of deft, often humorous, and always careful observation. Fick creates interconnected narratives that draw from her own Italian heritage and middle-class upbringing. Through poems like “I Lost My Aunt At Kmart,” Fick breathes life into family members long gone, musing, “As we leave Kmart, I wonder: how did she / disappear so easily? How could I have lost her?” This is a dance between grounding detail and thoughtful questioning, what Fick does so well—she distills the beauty found in day-to-day life. “We are caught in this avalanche of ache, this dried-up sea of broken glass,” she writes in “A Narrative Poet Lost in the Lyric Moment.” Yet, despite the pain that often accompanies the raw truth of recollection, Fick finds a path to comfort and acceptance, not despair. She assures her readers, but perhaps more importantly, Fick seems to assure herself, “…what I wouldn’t give / to return to my life, its uneasy turbulence, / its precious, beautiful mess.”

Praise for Irene Fick & The Fragility of Winter

I’ve been a fan of Irene Fick’s poetry forever; but I never expected to be so taken and stunned by her new book, The Fragility of Winter. Fick’s family becomes my family: a mother in a bowling outfit, suddenly not depressed; an aunt barricading herself away from imaginary predators; a grandmother we see through life; supplies of sympathy cards from the dollar store. The truth and complexity of these characters—sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious—are made rich with the prosody that good poetry can bring. There’s not a more authentic and moving book written this year, because the speaker/poet becomes a kind of antihero, amazed at her own world, making every page a delight. The child, in one poem, says she wishes that someone would ask “How was your day?” Well, Irene Fick, your day is magnificent!

—Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

The Fragility of Winter is a book about life and “its precious, beautiful mess.” Author Irene Fick declares herself to be “the white space,” not as that all important tool so valuable to poetry, but rather as the placeholder of the spaces in our lives that include love, family, uneasy truces, loss. This is a book about kindness, to animals, to each other, even “Rachel from Cardholder Services,” who has a life beyond the telephone. The Fragility of Winter is an important book for our tumultuous times. A must read.

—Linda Blaskey, author of White Horses

Irene Fick’s The Fragility of Winter is the work of a writer who has come fully into her own, who does not flinch from critical self-assessment, who shares the joys and sorrows of memory – memories of family, failed relationships, and the daily grime and sometimes grimness of daily life, that part of life which is necessary to just getting by, those things which must be done between the writing of poems. Here also is a spark of hope, faith, an indefatigable sense that there will always be an upside, if one can just plug ahead, dig through the debris, the flotsam and jetsam of generations washed up on the shores of her life. Bravo!

—Jamie Brown, publisher, The Broadkill River Press

Irene Fick’s The Fragility of Winter is a splendid book. The poems come to us in the trappings of middle-class life, “black stretch pants/hair high and lacquered, lips painted a deep coral.” But the details—often conveyed with a wonderful sense of humor, sometimes a sense of the ridiculous—tell us something universal about the modest lives lived by all of us. Fick has a natural ability with metaphor, she speaks to us with spontaneous humanity. We join her in picking through the clothing left by a mother or aunt—“the slacks and shirts in shades of green, from chartreuse to shamrock”—and these articles lead us to consider the weight of our shared mortality.

—David Salner, author of Summer Words: New and Selected Poems

About the Author

Irene Fick is the author of The Fragility of Winter (Broadstone Books), The Wild Side of the Window (Main Street Rag) and The Stories We Tell (Broadkill Press). The earlier books received first place awards from the National Federation of Press Women. Irene’s poems have been published in such journals as Delmarva Review, Gargoyle, The Broadkill Review, Pine Row Press, Blue Mountain Review and Willawaw Journal. Her essays have appeared in River Teeth Journal, the Schuylkill Valley Journal, Short Reads and Hippocampus Magazine. In 2025, she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Delaware Division of the Arts and the Delaware State Arts Council. Irene lives in Lewes, Delaware with her husband, Ed, a retired music teacher. She may be reached at: irenefickpoet.com

Publication Date: April 15, 2025

Paperback, 70 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-00-0

In Lea Marshall’s visionary debut collection, The Slow Hammer of Roots, poems gently suspend the reader in Time, actively and avidly dissecting past, present, and future with grace and wonder. Marshall’s deep-sweeping journey reaches back to the beginning of grass, explores Lee’s surrender at Appomattox where her 4th-great grandfather was aide de camp, follows a series of future folktales, and even hypothesizes Totality. Roots weave themselves “through concrete, their own heart— / the deathly intertwining of desire / and waste.” These roots, both healthy and strangling, bond Marshall to the immediate family she knows and to slaveholding ancestors she is just discovering. She asks, “Do we light // a fire now that glimmers down the loop/of time until it reaches each of them?” Marshall illuminates truths over many years covered and recovered with vivid and vast imagery, a perfectly constant state of lost and found. The moon's bright light can disrupt the world and comprehension, yet the “heart will lift a little, like the grass.”

Praise for Lea Marshall & The Slow Hammer of Roots

These poems take my breath away, their visceral beauty and dark truth. The twelve Future Folk Tales threaded throughout are by themselves worth the price of admission. Lea Marshall knows both nature and humanity, past and present, and shows with nuance and delicacy how the one can profoundly illuminate the other.

—Jennifer Ackerman, New York Times bestselling author of What an Owl Knows, The Genius of Birds & The Bird Way

To enter into Lea Marshall’s mesmerizing debut collection The Slow Hammer of Roots is to be transported beyond our limited, frantic daily lives into the realm of deep-time, a space in which the future speaks to us as if it were already the past. ‘Roots’ here connotes not only the speaker’s family history in the American South (and her reckoning with that) but also our essential human rootedness in the natural world. Marshall’s magical vision is infused with hidden meanings and resonances. These chiseled poems invite readers into a landscape in which it is possible to be instructed by folk-tales not yet written, as vanishing animals, insects, and the earth itself instruct us in powerfully moving and mysterious ways.

—Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City

Lea Marshall’s The Slow Hammer of Roots brings us an incisive, moving new voice in American poetry. These are poems of delicate but exacting images that reckon with our human mistakes, calling for urgent change in the ways people treat one another and the natural world. From her “Future Folk Tales” sequence, which threads through the book, looking beyond human mythmaking— beyond human prominence— is the wonderful “Future Folk Tales: Fireflies,” in which the fireflies who “somehow still emerged... though not as many as before” are the ones to speak to us (who may be gone by the time we really listen): “Don’t mistake us for innocence, / they said, constellating on a thundery / evening. We know the dark and we string / it through the trees you left behind.” In other poems we hear from the Saharan Desert, warning us of our thirst, and from a crow beside a second, dead crow on a highway: she turns her back on “your awful wonder/at my grief.” The precision with which these scenes are rendered makes the mysterious clarity of what they communicate real, immediate, and pressing.

—Debra Nystrom, author of Night Sky Frequencies: New and Selected Poems

From its first poem, “History of the Grass”—“we are the grain / and the cow. Where your body falls we hold your shape. / We spear through time. After fire, we are the first to return”—Lea Marshall’s haunted and haunting debut collection reveals its kinship with the biophilic cosmos of Walt Whitman. In beautifully wrought poems both specular and speculative, and at times fabular, in their loves and elegies, Marshall explores the “roots” that not only connect humans with the imperiled natural world, but also historical and familial systems of intergenerational trauma, violence, culpability, and responsibility. A series of “Future Folk Tales” celebrates and mourns a litany of endangered entities—mosquitoes, doves, egrets, forests, luna moths. “On the day / the waves first broke they breathed a sound / so new and fine we shuddered,” she writes in “Future Folk Tales: Stone & Water,” “and heard / the song as our own ending until we learned / to keep water’s secrets in the world we made / together, breaking each other, re-forming, / breaking and re-forming, laughing, / roaring, singing, crumbling inside time, / revealing it as elastic as ourselves.”

—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

About the Author

Lea Marshall’s writing has appeared in Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Atlantic, Dance Magazine, and elsewhere and her poetry has been published in journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, JAMA, Diode, and Rogue Agent. She worked as a producer and arts administrator for over 20 years, earning her MFA along the way from Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently works as a grant writer and lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia.