Böcker av Julie Kim Shavin

Set in a world in which pop culture and nature coexist, Never Be the Same features poems of movement and adaptation. Anxiety is personified throughout the collection and embarks on a journey of self-discovery. She re-imagines herself alongside the cast of Saturday Night Live, Donald Sutherland, and Liam Neeson. Meanwhile, a woman inspired by a rare white deer abandons her work colleagues at a rest stop, story problems and hiking intersect, horses may or may not be a form of advertising, and the fox-that ultimate shapeshifter-illuminates a path to escape from the everyday world.

In I Think I Know You, Julie Gard explores the ways we struggle to understand each other's hearts and histories, along with our own. These prose poems speak of deep connection and tragicomic gaps in understanding, as life's pedantic, transcendent rhythms are mined for revealing moments and messages. Elements include dialogue overheard in northern Minnesota coffee shops and at the Jersey shore, personal crashes and landings in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, and queer identity in middle age. The final section of the book is a series of text messages sent by the poet to herself during a crucial election season, examining daily life, dreamscape, and the collective psyche in a time of political upheaval. Gard attempts to map out, complicate, and bridge divides, concluding that a sense of belonging, and a shared sense of home, may be the most important thing we have to offer each other.

Adrienne Rich's poem "What Kind of Times Are These" says in these times "it's necessary to talk about trees." These times are hard for many living creatures, including trees. One Bent Twig collects love poems for trees including first-loved tree, sequoias, ancient trees, towering sugar maples, Douglas firs, and red oaks. Tricia Knoll has hugged some of the best, planted dozens in her lifetime, and feels intuitively what scientists have discovered about tree sentiency and communication. As an Oregonian for over 40 years, she witnessed the decline of old-growth forest and breathed the smoke of wildfires. Now, in Vermont, ash borers threaten the trees that the first people knew as the heart of their creation story. As an eco-poet, Tricia Knoll sings tree-praises for thrivers and survivors, knowing full well how climate change endangers so many.

Bearing the Body of Hector Home is the story of how King Priam of Troy fetched his son's corpse from the grief-striken, vengeance-mad Achilles, the subsequent preparations for and completion of Hector's funeral rites. The collection consists of a series of dramatic monologues from the points of view of Greek and Trojan warriors and also the citizens of Troy, that besieged, doomed city. Poems show us the grieving of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, the cynical takes of Paris and Helen (who caused the War), and the reactions of a gallery of Troy's ordinary subjects: wood cutters, prostitutes, butchers, tavern owners, beggars, pickpockets, tax collectors, security men, deserters-the whole panoply of Trojan society. The collection ends with Hector speaking one last time, bidding the only life he'll ever know goodbye