With Ghosts is a collection of twenty ekphrastic vignettes, an experiment of communication across and between generations. Matthew Schultz distills poetic memories from the abstract visual compositions painted by his four-year-old son, Arthur. This series of prose poems wonders at the possibility of speaking about our past and future selves, indeed to them and with them—like a game of telephone connecting text to image, childhood to childhood, father to son.
This full-length of centos, Butterflies Over Flame, is Aura Martin’s debut collection. Assembled as a collage, each cento draws from novels, short stories, and poetry. Butterflies Over Flame tells a story in three acts, exploring the various complicated stages of life. These centos build and swell off each other, yet maintain a coherent storyline throughout, from a girl experiencing her first period, a young woman searching for meaningful relationships, a mother grieving the death of her child, and an old woman living alone by the sea. These themes reflect life, death, upheaval, recovery, and love. Wrenching and triumphant, this collection is a must for lovers of found poetry and prose poetry.
All at once, a man finds he’s packed a Subaru wagon for college, and, as his eager son pulls out the drive, he realizes most of his parenting has been done in an anxious hush. Each of the poems in Whoever Said Love stops at a quiet way station in a two-decade journey of father-and-sonhood.
Lone is an ode to suburbia and all the girls who grow up in these beautiful yet isolating slivers of the world. In Lone, girls write their own alternative lives, make friends with the natural environment, test and steal new names, and wander through memories before they escape them.
Burning hotter than a late-night motel sign, Rachael Crosbie’s Swerve is a compelling exercise in liminal spaces, bodily and otherwise. It does not limit its own innovations in language, of course—all the while maintaining a thorough, moving readability for all levels of reader.
MIXTAPES shows us the connections between memories and dreams and nightmares like no other collection of poetry I have ever read. This collection does not hesitate to push boundaries and break expectations. Ambitious, daring and human.
In Like Us, L comes into their own. As a queer and mentally ill person, they use micro memoir to piece together the formative experiences of their sexuality and recovery. The road is winding. Join them.
“Merchant expertly reimagines the Adam and Eve myth in this collection; in lieu of Eden, we have a tiny house, a dollhouse perhaps, a metaphorical fish bowl where we can observe Eve loom large as loving partner, shameless adulteress, and eager mother-to-be.”
Chance Castro is a recent graduate of Cal State San Bernardino’s M.F.A. program in poetry. He lives and writes in Southern California. His work has appeared in RHINO, Superstition Review, Santa Clara Review, as well as others. He is the founding poetry editor of The Great American Literary Magazine and a member of the PoetrIE literary community in the Inland Empire.
A book about love that’s always in movement, the most human kind of love. Movement from city to city, movement of the snow around you as you reflect, movement of feelings in and out of uncertainty, all grounded by the details of conversations and relationships and the spaces where they unfold.