The speakers in these poems suggest – through the relationships they build and the natural miracles they witness – that the often unsettling, muddy act of living our lives is worthwhile. This book asks us to see the world through knowing eyes: nothing is off-limits and nothing is forgotten.

Inventive, beautiful, and deep, the poems of Time Peels All to Original White muse on subjects of perennial relevance in fresh, literary ways. -Foreword Clarion Reviews

Every Transmission is about the erosion of our mechanical relationships and the movement to natural forms. Any attempts to escape the cycle only help to complete the circuits through which we flow. There are the places we create, drive toward, and rest, and in between is a sky full of electrical storms and ground filling with water and ex-life, pushing up so much faith and wonder for us to climb around on. This book is not a linear narrative but a collection of moments in lyric that world-build, guided by inhabitable voices.

Three movements—philosophical, nostalgic, and romantic—shape this collection that paradoxically defies categories even while courting their overlapping edges. Ed Higgins’s writing reveals a bemused selfregard, the ordinariness of human experience, sacred ambiguity: remarkable observations topped off by a final thread of love poems. Ed Higgins is Professor Emeritus (English Dept.) and Writer-in-Residence at George Fox University. […]

The gift of these poems is in how Potos thoughtfully weighs what is given and what is taken, how life both fulfills and disappoints, and determines to let joy keep her. “Breathing deeply is simple, and hope is the natural choice.”

Since the 1970s, Norbert Krapf has been working on a collection of poems that tell the story of his stillborn sister and the effect she has had on him and on his family, as well as the spiritual journey he has been on since then. This book, Spirit Sister Dance, is that collection.

The poet Wallace Stevens said, “We live in the description of a place and not in the place itself.” I want my experience of the Ohio River Valley to be more than what I have read and been told. I want to live aware in this place. I want to see and smell spicebush. I want the pleasure of discovering in yet another spring Jack in his pulpit in the shadows of our yard. I want to see the profusion of spring white and the brilliance of autumn leaves on our dogwood. All of this roots me in place. It anchors me to Here and, therefore, also to Now.

With Extreme Prejudice: Lest We Forget is Emmett Wheatfall’s latest foray into observational truth-telling. This collection bears witness to the early arrival and historicity of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Wheatfall elegantly describes as The greatest hitchhiker on earth … / making its rounds (“Every Nation Under The Sun”). In poem after poem, he explores both the ongoing fear of a disease that has taken at least a million lives as well as the hope for that brighter future we all yearn for.

Enter River Skin, a collection that traverses a landscape of lilacs, switchblades, and creeks. These poems squeeze grief through a cider press and heap addiction high on a wood pile. Interrogating the domestic with a candor that evokes Sharon Olds, Smith’s debut returns us to the forest, where she unearths a tenderness that aches, splinters, and renews.

The collected poems in Royal Blue Shutters explore the pull and tug of language, the tin-like sounds, the careful alignment, and robust admiration of words. Stanzas are bulked up with their own musicality—songs that can’t be sung but only released from the lips in a prattle.