Mangrove takes the reader on a journey from denial and shame to acceptance and love. In poems both narrative and lyric, comic and tragic, accessible and multilayered, Hollands explores what it was like to grow up gay in the late twentieth century, to deal with grief, and to create a family of one’s own.
Bone Valley Hymnal arrives from the molten core of Utah’s arid landscapes. Here, with the fossils mothers pass down to their daughters Franson-Thiel weaves hymns of heritage and gender performativity.
If you could have one wish granted, would you ask for another? Make a Wish would. Childhood cancer, the aftermath of divorce, sexual violence, and a teenage girl’s disappearance haunt these poems, while desire and love and the sweetness of simple mornings triumph.
Set inside a crumbling rural landscape where preachers don’t do as they say and men die by violence, neglect and strange new viruses, the poems in Twang revisit and reconfigure narratives about Appalachia and the AIDS Crisis years of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Within these lyrically rich poems, Appalachia is a kind of Eden, a paradise spoiled by humanity. Eve, the first mother, becomes a starting point for the speaker’s exploration of what it means to be a mother, an earth-dweller, a self.
Delphinium Gospel is a triptych-structured poetry collection that explores the blessing of creation as a manifesting interplay between horrific grief and desperate longing in the aftermath of Denzel Scott’s brother, uncle, and cousin’s respective murders, exploded in their interconnectedness to the sorrows that plague the United States of America.
Small Measures is an intense and vivid collection of poems one keeps going back to. It is filled with a startling and exquiste use of language.
These Strange Bodies is an intimate account of two tumultuous years and a clarifying dissection of how the female body exists in public and social spaces that are rooted in gendered and sexual violence.
So Long This Wound Stayed Open is a map toward forgiving and healing your inner child. In her poetry collection, Chang names core wounds like fear of rejection, loss of heritage and home, and welcomes them into her arms, saying: we need not let our scars turn us into islands. Let them instead be the light others use to find us in the dark.
Resembling A Wild Animal is a collection of poems which explore what it means to be wild and what it means to be only human. The poems delve into the wildness of motherhood, animal personas, and the weird streaks of feral that can be found in everyday life.