Having children fundamentally disrupts and remakes us, in terms of body, identity, perspective, and voice. The world shrinks and exponentially expands. Our already-fraught human experience of time is shredded and magnified.

Cadence captures the poet’s point of view as a new mother, reveling in a position of heightened vulnerability and ferocity. The poems in this chapbook are breathless, hyper­attentive to others’ needs, and equally in love with earthliness and repulsed by the monstrousness we enact/bear witness to.

“In Punctum:, Lesley Jenike’s new collection, she writes, ‘It’s our language: what can we call a thing / that is and is not.’ These poems are haunted by a ‘non-child,’ a child who was not to be born, and with it, a life the speaker was not to live. Absence itself becomes a nearly tangible presence. I don’t know how Jenike does it—breaks your heart and makes you want more—but I can’t remember the last time I read poems as smart and sure and devastatingly precise in their language, imagery, and feeling. In a poem about a fateful ultrasound, one that reveals no fetal heartbeat, she writes, ‘the doctor calls it “practice,” snapping off // the screen, tearing up the spit-out photograph. / “Next time,” she says, “it’ll be the real thing.”’ Mark my words: these poems are—and this poet is—the real thing. Punctum: is a remarkable accomplishment.”
—Maggie Smith

“Seven Boxes for the Country After is a book about a way-making and way-finding. It is a journey, both internal and external, across a map, over borders, through a life, and in a body. It is passage and pilgrimage, odyssey and exile. Above all it is a book of questions. What do we carry with us and what do we leave behind? Where do we keep the past and what do we keep it in? How do we measure a person, a country, a love, a loss? What do we remember? What can’t we forget? What do we declare and what do we declare it with: our words and mouths? our bodies and hands? in blue ink or black? If as Eudora Welty wrote, ‘The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit,’ then McAdams is an honest and faithful courier. The poems serve as storage boxes into which a memory is placed, then wrapped and bound. In poem after poem McAdams guides us to our most intimate spaces, the candy tin nestled between the handkerchiefs in a dresser’s top drawer, the cigar box packed in the trunk and stored in the attic, and she allows us to open and sit with our deepest selves.”
—Catherine Wing

“In Little Nest Diana Lueptow shows a unique skill for bridging the everyday and the mythic. In lines and sentences that blend formal elegance with earthy, idiomatic force, Lueptow weaves surprising and moving connections between ourselves and our histories, just as she reconciles our vulnerability with our fundamental need for what Stevens once called ‘ideas of order.’ But don’t be fooled by this poet’s meticulous technical care: ‘Nimble isn’t the half of it. Fierce is. . . .’ begins ‘Mink and Rabbit,’ and that declaration makes a fitting emblem for Lueptow’s own well-wrought yet ferocious collection.”
—Peter Campion

“Local Fauna opens with a meta-poem about Jack Spicer, and I couldn’t help but think of his ‘dictated’ poetry, poetry as vessel, poetry getting down what needs to be said. Brian Brodeur’s poems have this urgency—life, death, cruelty, politics, war, capitalism, and love. Hard truths come through the past, radio interviews, zoo animals, neighbors, personas, and pop songs. Brian Broduer’s poetry has insistence and morality, inclusivity and beauty. Local Fauna is terrific.”
—Denise Duhamel

“These nineteen supple poems have both a strong sense of unity and a wide spectrum of forms, themes, and moods. Virtuosic writing combines with jagged feeling, and the end result is engaging, dramatic, and unpredictable.”—Henri Cole

“These poems have a strong voice and a bold reach: they turn outwards, finding big subjects and solid narratives. They seek to make a world: and then they persuade the reader to live in it.”—Eavan Boland

“When the wire man in love with the boiled wool woman imagines himself making love with her under the emerald tree and then making her a mouth, is he desiring to make for her a mouth, or to make of her a mouth? Such questions charge Karen Schubert’s off-kilter worlds with a force less like gravity than like Brownian movement: the poems in I Left My Wings on a Chair don’t orbit, they careen.”—H. L. Hix

“Karen Schubert’s latest collection, I Left My Wings on a Chair, reminds me why I love prose poetry. These are beautiful prose poems; each one is a gem; each one is sublime, witty, and surprising. It’s as if she has taken the world that we see and experience every day and given it back again, refreshed, alive, and shimmering. Reading her poems reminds me of reading William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye, poets who let you see the mystical and the absurd in the everyday, who make you feel a little better about being alive.” —Nin Andrews

Daniel Carter’s Here Both Sweeter is a book in which you “have a seedling in each pocket,” a “body bodies,” and words are something you “carve out” so as to make a home. The poems are stories, are seeds, are secret messages cast and sent across the natural world to a reader, where they blossom in the imagination. The plot is “scatter-wild,” the lyrics “all willful and fallow.” Carter’s language serves as a garden, rich and strange, full of acorns and ink and ash, and in it the green world (of nature, of the heart and body, of words and ideas) is overturned, recycled, and remade.

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis’s Poppy Seeds creates an “immaculate atlas.” Here language is “broken. . . against the margin of the sea,” and a word is a thing that can be “wash[ed] away.” Here the body is both a lesson and a place with an edge you can drive to. The book “longs[s] for as long as Ohio rivers.” Tangled between worlds and languages both old and new, our deepest emotions search for their roots, hoping to find a place to call home.

“Heather Lanier’s The Story You Tell Yourself may be a first book, but Lanier’s firm intelligence and lyrical artistry make poems that are clearly the confident work of an extraordinarily accomplished, even thrilling, poet. Lanier isn’t kidding when she says, auda- ciously, ‘I found a shape and made a world,/then crawled inside. Where else was […]