Everything We Create Smells Like the Earth is a rhapsodic primal scream for lovers of poetry today. Reading this volume of poems was similar to sitting down over a stiff drink with Allen Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and chit-chatting about the predicament of the world. Paul McGlamery reminds us of our ever present relationship with Mother Earth and yet the nuances and mysteries of primitive life are still resonating in our modern lives.
Sometimes things happen. Memories store themselves in your head like stories written in a book. Heat Washes Through is a collection of poems of recollections from a year of madness and loneliness. William L. Alton takes confessional poetry to a new and journalistic level, making each poem visceral and timely, recording his own life with an emotional depth couched in minimal and detailed images.
Cover the Sky With Crows is haunted—by shadows, lost love, lost lives. Osayande fashions doors into mirrors and invites readers to see grief for what it plainly is–an embarrassed sword swallower. This work walks the line of the interior and exterior landscapes of Detroit while boldly naming the complex realities of blackness on fire in America.
The Upper Peninsula Misses You is a book of poems that tells an unpitying family tale with brutal sympathy—a narrative that is fractured by semi-historical acts or section breaks. While it is very much writing of place, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the broken landscapes and languishing families can be found all across America.
Speaking Through Sediment began as an adventure in a speculative style of leaping that Cindy Rinne and Cooper simultaneously experimented with. Both poets are seekers, and as such were engaged in a style of play where they leapt without being sure of where they were going to land.
In The Great and Terrible, Natalie Byers seamlessly weaves together the narrative and the lyrical to bear witness to tragedies most people would prefer stayed safely locked away—childhood abuse, a brother’s murder, and the trauma adult survivors must learn to endure.
Lilius maps her bipolarity with elegant intensity and rage of spirit. Sifting through a body scape of emotions twenty miles wide, Lilius’ poems bravely plunge the reader head first into an icy pool of depression and alienation only to catapult our minds upward where we shake, grasp at strong holds, and attempt to balance on a high wire act of fiery mania.
Heart Full of Tinders is a hybrid—it is not quite poetry, and it is not quite prose either. The book exists in the space between these forms, just as we all exist in gray spaces–our bodies in slow decay from day to day, our bodies that vie for dominance over the less tangible, but arguably more real, human soul.
Dreams of the Living has poems in it which I wrote as early as 2001, but the book really began to take shape in 2007 while I was obtaining my MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona.The book is an intensely personal response to the death of my mother in 2004, and the death of my partner in 2006. It is an exploration of the intricacies of grief, the body, and the intangibility of all things.
Justin Parnell’s poetry mini-collection, Strange Tapestry, is a fusion of poetic styles including confessionalism, formalism, and hermeticism, a work which resists concrete definition in order to explore the multiple valences of meaning and uncertainty involved in the retrieval, recollection, and writing of memory. In Strange Tapestry, moments from the author’s familial and personal history are sites from which to explore the human processes of communication, interpersonal connection, and the construction of self.