For 20 years, the New York City-based spoken word group Poetic People Power has creatively explored social and political topics, offering insights and solutions to issues that affect our everyday lives and the world around us. This debut anthology invites readers to explore three of their shows about environmental heroes, women's voices, and human rights abuses.
Listening to Mars serves as a record of our national transit, one a journey from there-before the Covid-19 pandemic-to here-a new now. Our microscopes pinpoint a virus; our telescopes search the edges of the Universe; we look, as we always have, to the heavens for comfort and clarity. Underlying our global social turmoil is the environmental emergency we find ourselves facing, and the irony of seeking new worlds while degrading if not destroying our own. With empathy and precision, Sally Ashton moves through the time of our confinement and an increasingly fractured world, trying to tell the story, to bear witness, to find a way through. Trying to find the glints of light in the journey we are still traveling.
With poems that glow with energy, humor, heartbreak, and risk, Do Not Feed the Animal, the astonishing debut from Hikari Leilani Miya, breaks molds and reshapes expectations. Food, culture, behavior, voice, and self-portraits-Miya confidently paints her canvas with the shades of her Japanese-Filipina identity. Innovative in approach and moving in message, Do Not Feed the Animal soars by way of the ingenuity and heart of its storyteller.
Like glitter-tiny, precision-cut, reflective particles-the poems in Glitter City shine by reflection with flashes of light. Narrative, cinematic, and at times trance-like, the poems trace their way back in time. From Fulton Street, Brooklyn to Detroit's Woodward Avenue, over city scaffolds and rural fields, across graveyards and weedy highways, Emanuel's debut collection grieves and loves, glittering fiercely.
The beauty and danger of an isolated family compound, the corruption that privilege can bring, an extensive burn injury that interrupts a girl's life, and the many predators who swoop in when the scarred woman is loosed, again, into the world-all of this is woven throughout Sadness of the Apex Predator, a collection of poems that studies both the way Sapiens feed on one another and also the redemption our hungers can bring.
The rocks of the Niagara Escarpment were formed in the middle of the Silurian Period (c. 443 to c. 412 million years ago) and were exposed during periods of glaciation that prevented and removed subsequent geologic depositions as recently as 11,000 years ago in the northern Midwest. The Arc of the Escarpment invites us to discover nearly hidden evidence of the Escarpment, ascend to cliff tops, descend to the base of cliffs, crawl into sinkhole-formed caverns, walk the woodlands that surround the cliffs, learn the changes that industry and commerce made to the landscape, and discover the sites that ecologists and conservationists have explored and preserved. With great detail and a sincere dedication to place, Robert Root encourages us to pay attention to the land beneath our feet, appreciate its changes, and value its preservation as we travel back through time and appreciate the scale of the history of the landscape around us.
"More than any living poet I know, Russell Thorburn invites us into the company of recurring characters inhabiting a fully-formed world of the imagination. His work reads, collectively, like a vast, ongoing novel in which we join personalities from John Keats to John Lennon to Marilyn Monroe and get to discover what they are up to these days. In this new book, for example, I was delighted to learn that Keats and his gal Fanny are hiding out in the cold north, safe in an old hotel overlooking Lake Superior. And Thorburn and his readers get to play too, as he has the generosity and talent to write himself and us into this irresistible poetic Elysium (and sometimes Underworld) of his."-Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island
I'm emotionally not in a good place. So begins Yolanda DeLoach's raw and redemptive Squatter, a tale of trails, trekking, and overcoming trauma. Between heartache and the realization that a relationship was never as it seemed, DeLoach pushes herself toward Wisconsin's historic Ice Age Trail, a place of friendship and, ultimately, forgiveness. But the forgiving starts from within, as she makes her way, section by section, along the trail's storied footways. Honest, heartfelt, and told with a survivor's grace, Squatter inspires, encourages, and listens, like a good friend on the trail.
In Lake, River, Mountain, Mark B. Hamilton follows the Lewis and Clark route on a physical journey paddling a kayak westward on the Missouri River, across the Great Plains. Immersed in a natural world, the environment is ever-present. The weather, the water, the habitats and fauna, and the lands of Native Americans all merge to conjoin or confront, as they in turn influence beliefs, emotions, and hopes for the future. Hamilton crafts poems both intimate and sweeping, with time and history merging into a confluence of friendship, family, and finding one's place in the world.
Dear Lo captures the difficulty and raw emotion of moving to a new place and struggling to form meaningful relationships. Highlighting the change of mindset needed to confront the loneliness, find peace, and continue putting yourself out there, Brady Bove delivers a personal series of modern epistles, like prayers in the dark. But being alone, she ultimately discovers, does not have to mean being lonely, as hope leads to healing and community.
The urge to create beauty and be beautiful haunts Happy Everything, Caitlin Cowan's powerful celebration of feminine resilience. The materiality of marriage and divorce abound in the postnuptial ghost stories Cowan tells with no-nonsense, Midwestern frankness and the intimacy of an afterparty conversation in a corner booth. Happy Everything is a deranged wedding registry of various poetic forms which highlight the perverse tenacity of ancestral traumas and the paradoxes inherent to women's relationships with men. These poems are a collage of traditions from a past that women are continually attempting to escape.
Stirring landscapes and a searching heart inform The Watching Sky, the vibrant and compassionate full-length debut from award-winning poet Judy Brackett Crowe. Both a probing exploration of the natural world by various, mostly anonymous, speakers, focusing on intimate encounters and interactions, and a questioning and celebration of identity, Crowe's astute sense of place grounds her work in fields and mountains, soft light and small roads, stories and sounds. With wonder and hope, The Watching Sky proves that there is always another chance, and plenty of stars to follow.
Written after the unexpected death of her mother, Michelle Meyer's The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child takes root in the body, exploring loss and trauma along with the sexual and social dynamics of one woman's place among men. Part epistolary and part memoir, Meyer questions her own role in creating the boundaries that defined her mother's life while reaching, often in vain, for clarity through the fog of loss. Serving as both tribute and penance, each poem is a funeral song versed with longing, and ultimately hope, for spiritual release.
It takes years to learn the art of seeing, of expecting to see nature's gifts. In Soul of the Outdoors, Dave Greschner passes that art along. He tells how little that chickadee at the feeder weighs, how tree buds survive in winter, how far a fisher leaps, and what the six blobs of shadows are on the creek bed below a water strider. He traces the cycle of seasons, immersing us in spring hikes to the marshes of emerging frogs and returning birds, summer's coolness along the trout stream, a forgotten apple tree in autumn, and a full moon snowshoe hike in winter. With humor and heart, Soul of the Outdoors treks along the trails of one's outdoor adventures and, ultimately, the trails of our lives.
"A humanist at heart, Linda Nemec Foster has demanded from her poetry an artfulness that engages ordinary life. With each new book her work has continued to mature, deepen, console, surprise, and Talking Diamonds is as wise as it is lovely."-Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern
Eleanor, a strong woman who pours disastrous relationships into writing stories; Amy, radicalized by racist interactions directed toward her daughter; Maddy, taken to writing the lyrics to her own sad songs; and Louise, who is saved from despondency by her vegetable garden. Four women living in Madison, Wisconsin. Four lives woven together by Jane Curtis, in her vibrant and explorative debut. Told with flashes of song, sensuality, and sincerity, Reach Her in This Light unfolds as a fiery and empathetic mosaic of lives lived, as four women each search for their own kind of freedom.
In 1974, nine musicians came together in Appleton, Wisconsin, to form Matrix, a jazz fusion ensemble. Led by composer and keyboardist John Harmon, the group rose to prominence on the festival circuit before recording six acclaimed albums. Follow Harmon as he tells the story of the band, from their beginnings on the road in the Midwest to their greatest successes to their reunion tours that brought them back together. From the Heart brings you into the inner workings of a highly influential music group, as well as closer to the man who made it all happen.
Blending elements of fiction and nonfiction, Fugitive Daydreams dares to challenge the boundaries of the short story by blurring the lines between convention and experimentation. Leah McCormack's debut collection features a house as alive as its inhabitants, a mother dealing with multiple sclerosis and dementia, a pair of conjoined twins getting separated, dysfunctional families struggling with expectations and middle-class realities, and a writer pushing against gendered aggression. With power and stylistic inventiveness, McCormack embraces the absurd while refusing to look away from painful truths.
Featuring twenty-three stories, John Michael Cummings's debut story collection brims with the vitality and complexity of our shared humanity. In tales that conjure comparisons to John Updike, Raymond Carver, and William Gay, Cummings tells the truth about loneliness, relationships, and the common struggles we all face with prose both precise and vibrant. Cummings's voice, assured yet questioning, will stay with you long after you've finished The Spirit in My Shoes.
Like Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kevin Clouther's Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth's aftershocks. The unifying presence in three characters' lives is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared secret of their past.
The last good time in the Great Lakes region, the so-called Third Coast gouged into the Upper Midwest of America, was in the shipbuilding era of the two world wars. But even in 1941, in Port Nicollet, Wisconsin, a certain taint grew and spread. It was a port city: sketchy men; fresh-faced boys; salesmen with their sample cases; able-bodied seamen. Always passing through. Occasionally, the locals glimpsed opportunity, but, just as quickly, it was gone. The prospect of something better could not gain purchase on the south shore of Lake Superior. It was as if the people and region, an area in the distant past promoted by developers as the next Chicago, had slipped the moorings and drifted, minus captain and crew, on the waters of Lake Superior. In The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Crime Stories, Jeff Esterholm explores what happens when people slip their moorings and are set adrift.
With his sixth poetry collection, The Green Vault Heist, David Salner assumes a strong voice, with a unique moral vision. In poems covering artistic, literary, social, and autobiographical themes, Salner writes as a poet awed by the sweep of human culture, deeply concerned by the unfolding shambles. Evocative and reflective, Salner's poems honor the diversity and depth of human resilience and put forward a concerned optimism, even as we yearn for something better.
There is a Corner of Someplace Else is a tapestry of Camden Michael Jones's life as a wildland firefighter, high school teacher, life-long student, and human living in the 21st century. There are moments of reflection on philosophy and history, moments of panic and fear, of calm, of peace in nature, and throughout there is a constant underlying praise of sweat and work. Taken together, Jones's spare yet soaring debut challenges readers to see beyond our own vision, to look farther along at what might be our better selves.
In his lyrical and expansive debut, Jonathan Graham highlights the natural world, the rugged beauty and kinship with a coal-mining region in Appalachia, the loud thunder when relatives and townspeople die in a devastating mine explosion - the yin and yang of love and death, remorse and longing. These poems are hungry, filled with vivid imagery. A quest for beauty in a world of chaos, Everything Waits travels an arc, moves from Appalachia to search the greater natural world beyond: the mountains of Alaska, islands of Lake Erie, beaches of the Carolinas and Gulf Coast, then circles back to the foothills of Ohio's Appalachia. As the poetry moves from darkness to light and back again into darkness with the promise of light, there exists the divining comfort of "words everywhere," where it is okay to move away from living.
In Christy Prahl's debut collection, her largely narrative-driven poems occupy the fissures of American life, whether exploring self, relationships, or the natural world. The poetic architecture acts as a kind of repair for the subjects themselves, who are often broken but striving. The result is Prahl's interrogation of the fragile hum of contemporary life as well as the brutalism that acts as its foil. Stirring, sensitive, and sincere, We Are Reckless helps lighten the weight of all we carry by breaking rules, stepping across boundaries, and risking pain for greater purpose
The grisly death of the hermit outsider in a tight-knit neighborhood prompts a young mom to yearn for solitude. A man wrestles with regrets from a 30-year-old affair while his wife hovers toward death in the ICU. An older, childless woman aches to rescue the seemingly mistreated child she observes in the grocery store. And a girl's desire to avoid the party her father dragged her to nearly gets her abducted. Told with restraint and deep compassion against the backdrop of Virginia back streets and small towns, Jody Hobbs Hesler's debut collection shines with its portraits of longing, disconnection, and the ache for renewal and redemption that comes from our own frailties.
Amidst the ruins of Detroit, two seekers question all that they thought they knew as they struggle to achieve spiritual awakening in this collaborative memoir. Guided by Ryan, an eccentric mystic from the suburbs, the pair explore a ramshackle city while running experiments on themselves in a bid for understanding who they are and what life means. But as the questions Ryan poses deepen, the two are left wondering what happens when you truly "kick out the bottom."
Anne-Marie Oomen's sixth essay collection, The Long Fields, celebrates rural life as she experienced it growing up on a farm and then into an adulthood marked by both wandering and homing. The three parts cover three phases of the author's life: moments of early farm life in "Childhood's Lamplight," building her own home (complete with Estwing hammer) in "The Heart of Place," and finally "Kuieren" (Dutch for "amble"), which delves into the wide swath of daily life. These three parts build a world that offers the vitality of living country. At its heart, The Long Fields voices the best of Midwestern rural living: a relationship to land, stewarding a place, and honoring the sacred quotidian.
They say a mother will do anything for her child ... I'm living proof. This nightmare began when I got the call every parent dreads. My daughter, Jenna, was missing from her college campus. Of course, my mind went to the worst place. After all, my late husband was a powerful senator. Was this some political payback? I call in a favor and soon I'm partnered with an FBI sex trafficking agent. He tells me local girls have been disappearing for some time now, and he finally has a lead. But what we find at that abandoned warehouse is something out of a horror movie. Werewolves! Two rival packs, their alphas fighting, winner take all--the pack and the trafficked girls. The werewolves must replenish their breeders, recently decimated by a virus that killed only the females. But Jenna's been keeping a secret, which only makes two of us. Though I should be angry, I know the lies I've told play a huge role in why we're here. I'll do anything to make it right. No way is my girl going to become a sacrificial mate for the greater good--even if she is the 'chosen one.' So, I do what any mother would do, I take her place, offering myself to Gideon, the winning alpha, as his mate. Gideon's goal is to live in harmony with the human world, but there are others who exist for the power, for the violence, and they don't plan to let peace prevail. There's a civil werewolf war brewing and I am right in the middle of it.
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