Ask the River to Talk About the Horses
"In Ask the River to Talk About the Horses, Judith Waller Carroll shares beautifully written poems about growing up in Montana. Her poems travel in time, and as I read them, I feel like I'm walking through history. She skillfully takes you inside the physiology and the psyche of the horses she loves: "How their hoof beats scattered the leaves / that fell from the trees each autumn." Her poems reveal new ways of seeing, poems that move the way horses do, "their manes flowing like wind / each sigh and nicker echoing across the sky." -Diane Frank, author of While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems"Judith Waller Carroll's poems caught me from the first lines of the first poems. She encapsulates her stories in brief anecdotes, snatched moments, and does so brilliantly."-Joan Leotta, author of Feathers on Stone
Pelican's Daughter
Reading Pelican's Daughter felt like stepping into the very "cathedral with wings" Stockton yearningly summons. This book is an intimate, attentive, and coasting exploration (like the central pelican totem itself) of loss in many iterations-of parents, of selves, of obligation and posturing. In Stockton's deft and wondering hands, these poems have hollow-bones: the space for breath and questions to sing through, the structure capable and necessary to allow grief a graceful flight.-Lisbeth White, author of American Sycamore, winner of the Perugia Press Prize
Paper Crowns and the Shattered House
sometimes you need toShatter the Houseso you can rebuilda Home
Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters
A witty and searching collaborative poetic work composed during the pandemic. Let's go back far as we dareto go back to that land bridgemade of untrusting earth & ice, to a boorish faith in our rhythmof footsteps, the fleeting mantraof wordless dreams . . . So begins Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters, the collaborative work of an elder statesman of American poetry and a young emerging poet. In early 2020, Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung began a conversation in verse that carried them through the COVID pandemic. The result is a work that is at once a document of the poets' inner and outer worlds and also a single and singular vision of what it is to live now and to look back on the epic scale of human history and artistic expression that stretches over millennia.
The Planets
From Marginalian Editions comes a gorgeous reissue of celebrated poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman's debut: a soaring ode to our solar system, planet to planet, blending science and imagination, astronomy and cosmology, as well as fantasy, satire, myth, and confession. First published in 1973, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral introduced not only a splendid new poet but a whole new adventure in poetry. With bravura style, unbridled imagination, and a connoisseur's eye for precise scientific detail, Diane Ackerman's debut brought us an unforgettable ode to each planet in our solar system, not to mention the moon, the comet Kohoutek, and the asteroid belt, as well as strange voyages to the stars, the bottom of the sea, through the human body, and into the mind. Diane Ackerman herself says: "I've always been baffled by people who write about nature only in terms of, say, junipers and cornfields, eschewing all things so-called 'scientific, ' as if science were, per se, the spoil-sport of feeling. So wonderless a view of nature really doesn't appeal to me." The Planets is a rare fusion of art and science--one of the great poetic works of cosmic imagination.
The Gododdin of Aneirin
Three Hundred Warriors. One Survivor. An Ancient Song of Glory and Loss.One of Britain's oldest epic poems returns in this vivid and haunting new poetic version. The Gododdin is a song of courage and catastrophe-a lament for three hundred warriors who rode out from the Old North to face overwhelming odds at the Battle of Catraeth, and never returned. Attributed to the early medieval bard Aneirin, this stark and beautiful work stands alongside Beowulf and The Iliad as a foundational text of heroic literature.In this powerful new rendering, mythologist and poet John Matthews approaches The Gododdin not as a literal translator, but as a poet listening for the living voice behind the ancient words. Drawing on decades of study and immersion in early British and Celtic tradition, Matthews reshapes the fragmented original into a sequence of lucid, emotionally charged poems that speak directly to modern readers-without sacrificing the gravity or mythic force of the source.This is not simply a battle poem. It is a threnody: a roll call of names and deeds, a meditation on loyalty, honor, intoxication, and loss, and a bard's act of remembrance for friends who fell and a world already passing away.The book is richly illustrated with evocative paintings by Meg Falconer, created in the landscape where the battle is believed to have taken place, deepening the atmosphere of violence, beauty, and sorrow that permeates the poem.For readers of Celtic mythology, early medieval poetry, and heroic epics, The Gododdin of Aneirin offers a rare encounter with one of the earliest voices of the British imagination-still singing across fifteen centuries of time.
balloons
In Balloons, Alex Innocent writes into the body's most private rooms and the world's most public violences. These poems move through harm and aftermath, through desire and dread, through the absurd theatre of modern life, with a voice that is at once forensic and ferociously alive. A North Sea undertow runs beneath hospital language, domestic spaces, religion, schoolrooms, news bulletins, and the algorithmic present, where power keeps shifting its mask and the self must keep learning how to survive it. Urgent, darkly inventive, and startlingly tender in its refusal to look away, Balloons is a collection of pressure and release, of what swells, what ruptures, and what refuses to go back to its original shape.
Hoosier Land
This book of poetry is a collection meant to be wandered through-picked up, set down, and returned to again, and again. Its poems are gathered into sections that reflect the many moods and moments of everyday life, from quiet reflection to lighthearted humor.In the Nature section, readers will find poems inspired by changing seasons, familiar landscapes, and the simple beauty found outdoors. The Humorous section offers playful observations and gentle wit, while the Proverbs and Words of Wisdom section share thoughtful insights shaped by experience and time.The Memories section looks back with warmth and honesty, capturing moments that linger long after they've passed. In the Romance section, poems explore love in its many forms-tender, complicated, enduring. The Worship section turns toward faith, gratitude, and reflection, offering poems meant for stillness and contemplation. A final Miscellaneous section brings together pieces that don't fit neatly anywhere else but belong just the same.Whether read straight through or opened at random, this collection invites readers to pause, smile, reflect, and perhaps see a piece of their own story within the lines.
The Story Teller
A cri de coeur as a woman searches for her identity in a storm of uncertainty and fear. Exploring her innermost emotions through powerful metaphors and raw expression, the author carries us with her on the long and difficult road to self-acceptance.
Gina
Jesse Millner's Gina is a fever dream of poems that ricochet from the speaker's childhood to adulthood, from Florida to New Mexico, from earth to space, from hunger to pizza, from Chicago taverns to the foamy Pacific--all beginning with the memory of Gina and a moment of dizzying, transcendent grace.In these beautifully-modulated, tender and terrifying poems, Jesse Millner challenges us to feel more acutely, to see more viscerally, and to honor the vicissitudes and confusions of the inner life without pretense or self-inflation. Wildly imagined and solidly grounded, the poems in Gina feel simultaneously brand-new and ancient, like half-remembered dreams or our own half-forgotten lives. That is to say, they have the feeling of brand-new ancient memories. When this poet says he is "hungry for more constant light," we believe him, and grow hungry ourselves. He's not playing games. This is real. --Michael Hettich, author of A Sharper Silence
The Stars, Your Eyes
These poems explore a couple's love for each other in the face of the challenging diagnosis of an incurable disease. The speaker attempts to "practice" grief and prepare herself for a future alone. Readers will find support as they deal with the challenges of aging, caretaking, and grieving.
These Garden Nights
Hafez, a 14th century Sufi Master, is Iran's most beloved poet, one who has touched millions of readers and listeners through-out the world for centuries. Roger Sedarat captures in his translations the many dimensions of Hafez's poems. As an Iranian-American poet, translator, and scholar, Sedarat's sensibility is clearly at one with Hafez. Both Hafez and Sedarat admonish themselves not to take themselves too seriously; yet each is "deadly" serious in his desire for enlightenment. Hafez commits himself to the way of the heart, his journey is that of the lover returning to the arms of the Beloved. He speaks passionately and evocatively of his "beloved." But are the words directed to a flesh and blood woman or to the Divine? Sedarat's translations are unique in that they capture these multiple features in Hafez's poems. Sedarat shares how embarking on this mystic and poetic path to wisdom can be fun.
The Ghost-Star King
Poetry. Timeless, teasing, mock-magnificent, and yet dead serious, Tavel's collection of prose poems about the tangled life of the contemporary American male pulls the reader (amazed, dazed, delighted) from page to page at high speed. It's true: you'll laugh, you'll cry, and on every page your mind will bind with his as he howls the questions: how where when why and who are we?Says Hadara Bar-Nadav: "Adam Tavel's The Ghost-Star King is part apocalyptical landscape, part fantastical romp through classrooms and the ruined empires of capitalism. While each poem begins in mock-epic style announcing 'I, Oedipus, ' this book's Oedipus is plural, playful, and elliptical. Tavel's innovative collection is made of verse blocks arranged as a kind of play in three-parts: critique of America, the plague, and the aftermath. With sonic verve and swelling syntax, these poems invite us to frolic and rage alongside Oedipus, who palpably longs for Thebes, and states: 'I'd like to be that storm, that sand on sand, your little hand in mine, a partial rhyme.' This is a raucous and dazzling book."Jaswinder Bolina elaborates: "In The Ghost-Star King, Adam Tavel brings Oedipus into the modern American moment, replete with companions as likely and unlikely as Darth Vader, Kanye West, Glenn Beck, and Caspar David Friedrich. Tavel's monologues assemble into a jangly symphony connecting contemporary pandemics, climate catastrophes, and political strife with the myths of history. The result is a rich and soulful collection for an era that desperately needs it."D, Nurske concludes: "We all know we will understand contemporary America through tragedy, not through podcasts. Adam Tavel takes us on a Sophoclean vision quest into our frozen present. His book is wildly original, traumatized, and funky. It's an act of exorcism, necessary and unforgettable."
Ethnology
Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language, creating a bridge between our own times and a Connemara community on the margins of Europe.Drawing on classic forms within literary and oral traditions, Ethnology becomes a love song for Connemara, witness to vivid encounters: between the living and the dead and between the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agendas. In her first full-length book of poetry, fragility and strength are finely balanced, focused on the ruins of an island cottage built by her great-grandfather. Here, Cathy Galvin locates both mourning, humour and joy. The poems give a vivid, original voice to the tradition of keening, of honouring the loss of those we love.
Beautiful Late Bloomer
"In the tradition of Rumi and Hafiz, each piece ignites a sacred aliveness deep within us.The entire collection invites us to open our hearts more fully, join the divine stage, and whirl again. This book is a jewel." Chelan Harkin, The Prophetess: The Return of the Prophet from the Voice of the Divine FeminineIn Beautiful Late Bloomer: Passionate Poetry and Mystic Musings, poetess Sage Taylor Kingsley delights awakening souls of all ages with an enticing collection of mystic and ecstatic poems designed to open your heart and attune to your spirit's inner wisdom. This is sacred poetry that will enchant and entrance, empower and enlighten, reminding all of us that: "It's never too late to bloom and to shine!"After writing poems for half a century and editorially helping over a hundred authors birth their own books, finally, at age 60, Sage presents these mystic poems of mystery and magic on themes of embodied self-love; creativity; love, bliss, and passion; motherhood and divine feminine energy-and aging with feist and fabulousness.This collection honors the healing power of words as portals that carry us home to ourselves. Every page invites you to open the petals of your heart and kiss the beauty you find there. "If you wish to be spun in rhythm with the heartbeat of the universe, dance with Sage's words. They will dervish you into the sky, into your own inner sanctuary, inviting a deep remembering." Cit Ananda, DDiv., When Silence Speaks: Messages from the Heart Beautiful Late Bloomer is the first volume in the Yoni-VerseTM poetry book series.
Bury My Heart Under the Martian Sky
spotted near Saturnthe feathered-serpent starshipAztec god of oldFrom award-winning Mexican-American and Indigenous Texas poet Juan Manuel P矇rez comes a scifaiku collection of haiku crowns-linked haiku sequences-exploring identity, indigeneity, and the fantastic. In another world where Aztec gods walk the stars, mermaloids whisper from ocean trenches, and chupacabras roam starlit deserts, BURY MY HEART UNDER THE MARTIAN SKY reimagines the future through the past. With his signature style, P矇rez captures the tension between colonization and cosmic conquest, humor and horror, and myth and memory.
Soul Recognition
Soul Recognition is a collection of poems representing the plight of Animals, written by Flavia Ursino Coleman featuring a poem by Susan Sorensen.Flavia's voice is a call for reflection and responsibility. Through her poetry, she encourages us to question assumptions, to feel more deeply, and to act with kindness. This is literature that matters - writing that seeks not only to touch us, but to transform us.As you turn the pages, allow yourself to be unsettled, inspired, and awakened. Let these words guide you towards a world where respect and compassion extend to all living beings.
There Is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated
Steeped in Rilke, attuned to Whitman, Mary Buchinger has written a Book of Hours chronicling moments that mesh the physical with the spiritual. Her openness to the world causes worlds to open within her. She penetrates the growth of a tree in good years and hard years by reading the formation of its rings as readily as she reaches into the life of Francis of Assisi, illuminating his understanding of the sacred, his ailments, and his love for and ministering to animals as well as people. We, her readers, partake of the joy that arises from her encounters with what she sees and feels. And when she pulls aside a curtain to show us a scene remembered from many years earlier, lodged next to the "left ventricle" of her heart, we learn the heart of the matter: art thrives on conjuring the real. -Jennifer Barber, author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made
The Half That Runs
The poems in this debut collection are strung together by an eventful survival narrative that resists assimilation and draws from Indigenous roots and nostalgia for place. Set in Mexico-Tenochtitlan and border towns, these poems address the lingering effects of historical invasions and displacement from one's homeland through the intimate lens of family estrangement, fragmentation and the resultant grief. Luz Schweig negotiates the tension between native and immigrant experiences by weaving Spanish and Nahuatl words into English verse that, ultimately and joyfully, celebrates identity complexities and ancestry beyond generational trauma.
Sonnet Station
Sonnet Station puts classical sonnet forms, Shakespearean, Petrarchan, Pushkin, to mischievous use, colliding tradition with time-travel paradoxes, noir riffs, prayers, mythology, jokes, poetry commentary, and even the occasional letter to the editor. Love poems abound. So does the occasional, well-placed F-bomb.
Threads of a Life
This poetry collection is an intimate and evocative journey through the landscapes of the heart and mind, where emotion, memory, and reflection converge to tell stories both deeply personal and profoundly universal. Moving fluidly across themes of womanhood, love, loss, resilience, nature, and inner conflict, the poems unfold as quiet yet powerful conversations between the self and the world.Each verse captures a moment of stillness or rupture-silence that speaks, pain that transforms, hope that persists even in uncertainty. The poems dwell in the spaces between anguish and healing, vulnerability and strength, questioning and acceptance. With lyrical sensitivity, the collection explores how time reshapes memory, how identity is forged through experience, and how the inner self constantly negotiates with the outer world.The voice of the poet is contemplative and honest, unafraid to confront social realities while remaining rooted in emotional truth. Gentle introspection coexists with bold social commentary, allowing the poems to reflect not only private struggles but also collective experiences of longing, resistance, and becoming. Nature emerges as both witness and metaphor, mirroring the cycles of growth, decay, and renewal that define human life.Though grounded in personal experience, the poems resonate far beyond the individual, offering readers a mirror for their own thoughts, silences, and unanswered questions. This collection does not rush for resolution; instead, it invites the reader to pause, to feel deeply, and to sit with complexity. In doing so, it reveals beauty in brokenness, clarity in confusion, and meaning in moments often overlooked.Thoughtful, layered, and emotionally rich, this book is a companion for anyone who turns to poetry for understanding, solace, and connection. It is a gentle yet stirring reminder that within life's contradictions and quiet struggles lies the enduring power of expression-and the transformative grace of words.
Bare Skinned
Poetry about love, loss, grief, darkness, healing, spirit, belonging, remembering, awakening, exploration, sensuality, travel, hope and light. Allow it to help you process, reflect, heal your spirit and nourish your soul.
Starlight Afore the Dew
STARLIGHT AFORE THE DEW is a bumper collection of the finest of contemporary poems composed by Poet and writer Ray Wills (known affectionately as The Gypsy Poet).Ray is a poet, writer and social historian. He has been a member of numerous poetry groups as well as being an authority on the history of the Gypsy community, and is at present a member of Kushti Bok, the Gypsy Roma Traveller welfare organisation.In this large collection of Ray's verse are old favourites as well as new compositions. There are the familiar poems of the Romany Travellers as well as those of Countryside rambles, village life, and people. Here you will discover the influences of Hardy, Barnes, Stevenson, and Whitman. There is romantic verse amongst wit, humour, and futuristic fantasies, along with more serious concerns.Ray lives within a community of artists, writers, and musicians in the village of Bere Regis in Dorset, where he continues to give talks on local history and poetry readings throughout Dorset. He regularly contributes articles for both the Traveller Times and Play and Playground magazines.
Prayer to the Invisible
In her luminous 9th collection, Prayer to the Invisible, poet Diane Frank fully unmasks her wild and loving imagination. With a river-deep range in subject matter and voice, Frank guides us through terrains both difficult and joyous - her Jewish mother's love of Christmas carols, a grace-filled visitation from a victim of ethnic violence, a ballerina-in-disguise on public transit, and many transcendent visions from dreams. Diane Frank is the wise and wonder-struck, barefoot-dancing companion we all long for in these precarious times."- Prartho Sereno, Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, California Author of Starfall in the Temple Diane Frank is a poet and musician, author of nine books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. She is editor of three bestselling anthologies: River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-First Century; Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here; and Pandemic Puzzle Poems. Her first novel, Blackberries in the Dream House, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.Editoral Reviews: "In her luminous 9th collection, Prayer to the Invisible, poet Diane Frank fully unmasks her wild and loving imagination. With a river-deep range in subject matter and voice, Frank guides us through terrains both difficult and joyous - her Jewish mother's love of Christmas carols, a grace-filled visitation from a victim of ethnic violence, a ballerina-in-disguise on public transit, and many transcendent visions from dreams. Diane Frank is the wise and wonder-struck, barefoot-dancing companion we all long for in these precarious times."- Prartho Sereno, Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, CaliforniaAuthor of Starfall in the Temple "Diane Frank's Prayer to the Invisible is a gorgeous book of poems that rings with truth and beauty. Frank weaves together dreamscape and imagination, earthly treasures and astronomical principles. Accompanied throughout by music as metaphor, these poems invite us to find solace and remind us that wonder exists alongside grief. Prayer to the Invisible reveals maps in the stars, helps us navigate tragedy, and invites us to find home within ourselves."- Emilie Lygren, Poet & Outdoor EducatorAuthor of What We Were Born For "In her new collection, Diane Frank relies on two of her most beloved motifs: dreams and music. She employs them as talismans against what her mother, a marvelous singer, calls (in my favorite poem) the mishegas - the craziness - of the world. In a touching tribute to her friend who was killed in the Tree of Life shooting, Frank says, 'Our prayers grow out of the shadow / of necessity.' The shadow where, as Jung reminds us, the affirmations of dreams and music and poetry can contend against ever-impending doom.- Thomas Centolella, Author of Almost Human"
In Between Keep Moving
Until now, there has been no single published volume where one might encounter Pierre Joris' writings in all its variegated forms and styles. This reader contains a diverse selection of his work spanning more than a half-century across poetry and prose, poetics, translation and collaboration. Working at the tenuous thresholds of writing and translation, Joris navigates the seismic ebb and tide of languages' winding relations in wide constellations of intersecting streams. A translingual writer, Joris cares for and nurtures, nourishes and tends to those precarious word-worlds surrounding us on all sides, which are conditioned by a constant and ongoing translingual flux: the crisscrossing languages that flicker before our ears if only we are listening for them. Published following the one year anniversary of his death, In Between, Keep Moving: The Pierre Joris Reader stands as an opening toward the continuing life of Joris' work.
Whispers of the Soul
Whispers of the Soul is an intimate and raw collection of poetry by Lydia Hawke, crafted for the "quiet heart that feels deeply but speaks softly". Within these pages, the author gives a voice to the hidden emotions, swallowed words, and silent feelings that linger in the human experience. Spanning themes from the ethereal to the visceral, the collection serves as a poignant reminder that even in our most isolated moments, the soul is never truly alone.The journey begins with reflections on the "connecting link between heaven and earth"-love-and moves through the stygian depths of the "Crimson Comtesse of Cruelty". Hawke masterfully balances the light and the dark, exploring the fragility of existence in "Don't Believe Everything You Breathe" and the heavy permanence of loss in "A Memory Storm Flickers On".Readers will encounter a diverse landscape of internal and external worlds: The Weight of Mortality: Raw accounts of illness and grief in poems like "Chemotherapy" and "The Intimacy of Death".Nature's Power: From the fierce lashing of a "Tornado" to the quiet "Dusk Of Coral Jasmines" and the rhythmic "Lanterns On The Beach".Human Resilience: The enduring spirit found in "Bent, But Not Broken" and the pursuit of a "Better Life".Spiritual Discovery: A concluding "Walk With Jesus" that explores healing through faith and the realization that the divine is present in every bird, tree, and whisper of the wind.
Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide
GRAND PRIZE WINNER, THE POETRY BOX CHAPBOOK PRIZE 2025AS SELECTED BY GEORGE BILGEREBeing alive is strange. Growing up a few miles from a giant elephant that was a hotel and is now a National Historic Landmark can help put things into perspective. Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide is a coming-of-age story for the deeply perplexed. It is a love letter to New Jersey from someone who has lived and worked all over the Garden State. It is an abandoned Ferris Wheel overlooking a run-down casino. It is a seagull stealing what you thought was your last cheese fry, until you look in the bucket and find with great joy there's still one more.---Review Excerpts---"...these poems are spoken in one of the freshest, most compelling voices I have encountered in years. He manages the difficult trick of being both funny and deeply serious in the same poem. It's like he peeled off layers of old paint from the English language to discover a long-lost masterpiece."-GEORGE BILGERE, contest judge, author of Cheap Motels of My Youth"John Arthur keeps us firmly grounded in the state of New Jersey....The environment breeds both fantasy and cynicism with poems bringing us past the top of the Ferris wheel to the moon or using the implosion of a casino to explain gravity to a child."-DEBORAH BAYER, author of Rope Made of Bandages"John Arthur writes from the quiet fault lines between urgency and inaction, compassion and self-preservation...a mash up between craft and the everyday colloquial speech of the playground. These poems refuse easy consolations, instead they live and linger..." -MATTHEW LIPPMAN, author of We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On
All That Glitter
Editor's Choice Winner, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2025All That Glitter is a treasure hunt through the everyday-a collection of poems that takes you on a journey from the quiet of an empty house to dancing with the wild sequins of childhood. It's about finding the magic in seemingly small moments-from messy craft projects to a spectacular double rainbow on a Tuesday afternoon. With poems that explore both the sweet and the challenging side of mothering two young daughters after a divorce, this chapbook invites you to uncover some of life's most moving moments. You'll want to stick around to rediscover what it really means to sparkle.---Review Excerpts---All That Glitter is a delightful book about childhood-and the way that daughters can pull a mother into play and wonder and doubt.... As kids learn their ABCs..., their mother invents sophisticated formal poetic challenges and the girls in these poems keep up with their witty observations-"Why are we never running early?" ... Dozier's verse about parenting and neurodiversity, shared custody and making a new home, sparkle.-DENISE DUHAMEL, author of Pink LadyKatie Dozier writes with remarkable lyrical dexterity....In these intimate and powerful poems, things aren't always what they seem. Fireworks pose as flowers, eyes are filled with drought, choosing a clove of garlic becomes a morality tale, reach for what/ is heavy for its size, tightly packed and ugly.... Every poem pulses with maternal devotion. All That Glitter is a spellbinding collection. Once read, these poems will take up permanent residence in your heart.-NANCY MILLER GOMEZ, author of Inconsolable ObjectsAll That Glitter is an ode to "otherness" and a peephole into parenting and the heaviness of the world, via singing into hairbrushes and slamming doors.... Oh, the liberties she takes, her words a series of brushstroke swirls, her intentions a daffodil facing the sun, x-ing out the answers from yesterday. Truth be told (or tattled), this life is short. We could all use a little more glitter and Dozier brings it!-KARI GUNTER-SEYMOUR, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of Dirt Songs
No Lightsabers in the Kitchen
Designer's Choice Winner, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2025No Lightsabers in the Kitchen explores the humor, strangeness, and gravity of parenting, partnership, and the small, meaningful rituals of everyday life. This collection is about trying to stay present, screw up a little less, and pay attention to the moments that might matter most. It's about what happens when a dad with a soft spot for ghosts, flowering shrubs, hitchhikers, and reptiles starts writing poems instead of fixing the bathroom door.---Review Excerpts---"... In a world that can be confusing and difficult, Wojtowicz gives himself, his wife, his children, and you, dear reader, permission to wonder, laugh, love, explore, and imagine. You are encouraged to be followed by the moon, romance beaches, condition doorknobs, and nurse turtles, but please, no lightsabers in the kitchen- leave the ghost of you in peace."-DIMITRI REYES, author of Papi Pich籀n"... There may not be a Jedi in his kitchen or a Millennium Falcon in his garage, but there is so much joy in the wild domesticity of these poems, you'll want to slow down from hyperdrive to enjoy them."-PETER E. MURPHY, author of You Too Were Once on Fire"Full of humor and surprise, John Wojtowicz's No Lightsabers in the Kitchen humanizes the speaker by showing his loving side as a father, despite his struggles in other areas of life.... Ultimately, John's poetry invites us to reexamine our own relationships and listen and respond to the smaller voices in our circle who have the power to lift us up and keep us there."-SHAWN R. JONES, author of Date of Birth
Oracular Maladies
A book of curses, Oracular Maladies summons an ecstatic performance of divas arriving in glamorous form. The backdrop: Vietnamese tonality, displacement, and reclamation. Cicadas arrive onstage. Cows arrive onstage. An odyssey of someone walking on her knees across an entire country makes a video onstage. This is Terazawa's third poetry collection, a wonder of light upon diacritic marks, layers of breathless music uneasy with its hybrid nature.Contemplating fraught intersections between a mother's language of Vietnamese and craft considerations of Japanese-English meter, Oracular Maladies forms a series of six spoken "scores" mirroring the tonal arc of a musical variety show familiar to the Vietnamese diaspora, "Paris by Night." These poems are like a VHS box set dusted off for the first time after decades. Projective verse and prayers flash across the page. The melodrama receives respect.
Love Loss Lessons
LOVE LOSS LESSONS is a poetry collection about intimacy without illusion, heartbreak without spectacle, and healing without erasure. These poems sit in the quiet spaces after love changes shape, after something ends, after you realize you cannot return to who you were before.The collection moves through three sections. LOVE explores the way we reach for one another, the way we confuse longing with safety, the way desire teaches us who we are. It examines attraction and recognition, the awkwardness of intimacy, and what love reveals about ourselves. LOSS addresses the endings we see coming and the ones that split us open. It explores grief for people, versions of ourselves, and futures that never arrive-grief that doesn't follow rules or timelines. The section holds space for anger, bargaining, and the quiet brutality of moving through loss. LESSONS confronts the reckoning with our own patterns, how love exposes what we weren't ready to see, and the slow work of reimagining love with boundaries intact.Written in plainspoken language grounded in the body and the ordinary-kitchens, cars, late nights, waiting rooms-these poems refuse to romanticize pain or perform healing. They avoid spiritual platitudes and forced metaphors, letting one strong image do the work of five weak ones.For anyone who has loved deeply, lost honestly, and kept going anyway.
Little Good Wolf
Little Good Wolf wants to be liked and to have friends. He wants to belong. But Little Good Wolf has one HUGE problem. His dad is the Big Bad Wolf, the most feared villain in all of Fairytale Land. The Big Bad Wolf scares girls in red capes. He chases grannies in their nighties. He blows houses down and frightens little pigs. No wonder no one will play with Little! Determined to gain acceptance at school, Little begs Dad to find a new job. What follows are some rather hilarious, and hair-raising, adventures. Will the Big Bad Wolf ever find a new job? One that will help Little finally make friends? Featuring familiar, well-loved, fairytale characters, this rib-tickling story about a Little Wolf searching for identity and acceptance - and a few good friends - will have you howling with laughter.
The Ravens Will Arrive Later
This lush collection of poems explore the contours of the human heart and the turning of the world. From the introspection of quiet moments to the busy thrum of every day life, Yungkans finds the beauty or absurbity inherent in every moment.
Born Hopeless with All the Answers
A powerful blend of political protest and personal confession, offering a brutally honest look at what it means to live through America's unraveling.Poetry that refuses to look away.A generation's rage, grief, and stubborn hope-captured in verse.Born Hopeless with All the Answers: Songs for a Dying Generation is a fierce and unflinching poetry collection that speaks directly to the tension, trauma, and transformation of living in modern America. James F. Miller II writes with the urgency of someone who has seen the world collapse more than once-and still insists on singing through the rubble.Born Hopeless with All the Answers: Songs for a Dying Generation is a blistering, unfiltered collection of poems that captures what it feels like to come of age in a world on fire.In these pages, James F. Miller II confronts the loneliness, fury, humor, tenderness, and stubborn hope of a generation raised on broken promises and taught to survive on its own.With razor-sharp honesty and a voice forged from the backroads of the Midwest, Miller delivers poems that hit like protest slogans and confessionals at the same time-songs for the outsiders, the bruised, the politically aware, and the spiritually exhausted.This is poetry that refuses to look away: from the collapse of culture, the failures of government, the ghosts of trauma, and the quiet moments of beauty that insist on living anyway.Raw, defiant, and unforgettable, this collection is both a warning and a love letter-a testament to the ones still standing in a world that tells them not to.If you've ever felt hopeless, furious, misunderstood, or painfully alive, these poems were written for you.
![Mystery of Misery [Ladies' Edition]](https://cdn.kingstone.com.tw/english/images/product/3023/9789819453023m.webp?Q=174eb "Mystery of Misery [Ladies' Edition]")
Mystery of Misery [Ladies' Edition]
Mystery of Misery is a long form confessional written by a fragmented boy with the mind of a middle aged man. Consummated in abandonment, addiction, faith, and masculine fracture, moving from family wounds to social collapse to metaphysical questioning. Misery is treated as discipline, survival as testimony, and belief as something argued with rather than inherited.
Tender Hearts Club
We are making this book now because the world is asking us-over and over-to harden. To look away. To shrink our circles of care. To treat love as private, sentimental, optional.This anthology gathers love in all its forms. Erotic love and everyday love. Revolutionary love and quiet love. The love that aches, that longs, that wallows. Love lost and love found. Love as an opening. Love as an ending.Because love is what apathy cannot touch. Love is what hate has never understood.Tender Hearts Club: Volume One is a gathering of voices that refuse to let love be diminished. These poems do not ask love to be easy. They let love be honest, messy, radiant, and real.May these poems remind you what you already know: love is not a soft afterthought. Love is a force. Love is a practice. Love is a way forward.
Roumanian Fairy Tales
First published in 1885, Roumanian Fairy Tales opens a door into a world shaped by oral tradition, ancient beliefs, and the enduring imagination of the Romanian people. Giants, enchanted emperors, brave princes, and mysterious stars populate these stories, where courage, loyalty, and wisdom are tested against magic and fate.Collected by Mite Kremnitz-a key cultural mediator between Romania and Western Europe-this volume preserves tales once told by village storytellers and passed from generation to generation. Stories such as The Pea Emperor, The Princess and the Fisherman, and The Morning Star and the Evening Star reveal a folklore rich in symbolism, moral complexity, and poetic wonder.More than a simple anthology, Roumanian Fairy Tales is a work of cultural preservation, capturing the spirit of a nation at a moment when its traditions were first being introduced to an international readership. An essential volume for lovers of fairy tales, mythology, and world folklore.
God's Grace, God's Wrath
We live in a fallen, broken world. We're living at a time that some would say is more divisive than the Civil War. I would love to know if I prayed hard enough, everything would magically become better. But some of us know that isn't true. This world won't be able to change until the people themselves change first. The only thing worse than ignorance is arrogance and without looking at ourselves first and realizing we don't know everything we think we do, then the cancer of false pride will continue to spread and divide our society even worse than it is now.As someone who's been canceled by a loved one and who has grandchildren he most likely will never meet, I know what it's like to live with a broken heart every day. But I still have to move forward with faith, dignity and purpose of carrying The Message and doing God's Work. What I've come to realize is that my family members who divorced me and chose politics over family never really loved me. I've admitted this fact, have looked at my own part in the matter and know I must accept it on a daily basis.A friend asked me recently, "what gives you the right to tell us what to do?". That's a valid question which I had to reflect on, pray about and honestly evaluate my own motives for everything I write, say and do. Today, more than ever, I know what my purpose is on this planet. I know that helping others find their own way is God's mission is for me. And I'm done fighting the battle between my will and God's Will. My life is continuously better when I put my life in His Hands. This collection of poems helped me get through the last few years of personal challenges while enforcing my resolve to become a better person. My hope is that they help motivate you to find your own purpose and reason for being here. If we all change ourselves then the world will change with us. We are all believers, disciples, and preachers. To help others find their way to God's doorstep should be our primary duty, mission and reason for living. May God Bless You All and I pray for this world to get better, one day at a time.
The Pain of the World
The book "The pain of the world" by Sasa Milivojev is a poetic masterpiece that delves into the essence of human suffering and trauma worldwide. Through verses in English, Serbian and Arabic, Milivojev explores not only the pain of individuals but also the collective suffering of humanity. His poetry is not just a reflection of reality but also a catalyst for change - a call for empathy, understanding, and action in creating a better world. Through this collection, Milivojev reminds us of our common humanity and responsibility towards all who suffer, emphasizing the importance of dialogue and solidarity as a path to true understanding and healing.Sasa Milivojev is a famous writer, poet, journalist, columnist, and political analyst. One of the most read columnists in Serbia, he is the author of seven books and numerous columns published in various daily newspapers. He is the author of the novels "The Boy from the Yellow House", "Echo of a Nuclear Bomb", "Love and Death in Dubai", and the collection of columns "Journalist of Resistance", as well as political speeches. His work has been translated into around twenty languages across the world.In an interview with the weekly "Express," Sasa Milivojev reveals details of the themes in "The Pain of the World" "A poet has no right to beautify reality but to be an honest witness of the times. It is easy to write about beautiful nature, the sound of the sea, birds on the branch, fairy-tale beaches, and violets, but... Life is not a fairy tale. If we keep silent about horrific crimes, they will be repeated in the future. As a poet, I feel obliged to explore and express reality as it is, without beautifying or avoiding those parts that are painful or unpleasant. My poetry is not just a reflection of reality, but a call to action - a call for compassion, understanding, and engagement in creating a better world for all of us.Although it is depressing, terrifying, heavy, a horror story, I hope that readers will find their place in these verses, that they will be emotionally struck and inspired to think about broader social and philosophical issues, to think about what each of us can do to change the world we live in. 'The Pain of the World' is a work that strives to connect people and encourage dialogue about universal themes that affect us all, regardless of our different life circumstances. I want 'The Pain of the World' to be an experience that will leave a lasting impression and inspire people to view the world from different perspectives.People need to be served all these images of a terrible world, in the hope that by observing such images we will want to change something, to become better people. This is a way to evoke empathy and compassion for all people going through difficult times. The concept of Weltschmerz denotes a feeling of melancholy and sadness that arises from the awareness of the world's imperfections and the incompatibility between reality and idealism. The title 'The Pain of the World' reflects a sense of deep suffering and disappointment about the state of the world. My poetry is not just a personal cry, a personal pain, but a collective one, a cry of all people on the planet who feel sorrow, helplessness, and anger because of the injustice or suffering that the world experiences. This is a universal human epic about the sufferings of people."
Bottle Flute
This collection of poetry ponders a question that has been plaguing humanity for centuries.The love we pursue is it an overwhelming sentiment or illness manifesting itself? This book is a cautionary tale using love testimonies as entrails.
Women's Live`s
Women's Lives by Ellis Janzon tells the quiet, powerful story of two women-Nelly and Mina-through a series of poems that cross generations. Their voices rise from the past, speaking of hardship, strength, and choices made in silence. What did they carry? What did they lose? And what do their lives reveal about our own? As filtered images shape the world today, Ellis Janzon gently turns our gaze backward-toward real women, real work, and the deep roots of progress. Women's Lives is both a remembrance and a mirror, inviting us to listen closely to the ones who came before... and to find something unique in what they left behind.
Songs From A Broken Heart
These poems carry the weight of heartbreak and the lightness of hope, woven into a love that feels eternal. They speak of scars healed, promises reborn, and the strength found in another's embrace.Every word is a reflection of pain turned into beauty. This is not just love-it's salvation.
Pie recipes
Content warnings are rarely needed in cookbooks, but in this case, they might be worth considering. This is not a traditional cookbook, even though it desperately tries to be one. The moment a person starts collecting cookbooks, life must be going pretty well but this cookbook is actually perfect for those whose lives are a complete mess. Moreover, it focuses solely on blueberry pie recipes, with little success. However, these blueberry pie recipes manage to capture something about humanity, loneliness, the journey of becoming a person, and occasionally, with a subtle flirting with occultism.
The Negroes Send Their Love
An extraordinary new work, epic in scale and lyrical in flight, by the award-winning author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. "How big is a home?" "What is space without reaching?" "You ever think about being remembered?"Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill's new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity's seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as "arboreal miners" with "a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns" that the speaker observes and "can't help but see blood." This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart. Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.
The Song of the Cosmos
These translations by Piette and Leh籀czky form a five-year long project with an ambition to translate a significant selection of the poems of the modernist, socialist, working-class Hungarian poet, Attila J籀zsef (1905-1937), one of the most celebrated and loved poets of the 20th century in Hungary. He lived a poverty-stricken, passionate and unstable life as a wanderer, a bohemian, a poet, a thinker, a non-conformist, a hobo and a lover until his untimely death by suicide, struck by a train, in Balatonsz獺rsz籀 on Lake Balaton, aged only 32. His poetry is surrealist, existentialist, Villonesque, tough-minded, quasi anarchist, deeply drenched in Hungarian folklore and the folk song, passionate, lyrical, elegiac, marked by his solitary wandering, his keen observation of the lives of the people, by his psychoanalytically inflected gaze into the unconscious, into the mind and body of lovers, his philosophical focus on dialectic and social injustice. The lyrics, free verse and formal, in an astonishing number of experimental forms, range from the metaphysical to the memoir, have filiations to French medieval, post-symbolist and surrealist poetry, fuse Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel and Freud in daring raids on the inarticulate, sing with haunting vernacular and ancient beauty and rise to extraordinary heights and flights of the imagination, yet are always grounded in the real, in the concrete particulars of the metropolis, the dark streets of the underclasses of this world.This bilingual volume presents a chronological selection of Attila J籀zsef's poetry, featuring both English translations and the original Hungarian texts from B矇la Stoll's 2005 edition. It provides crucial context for readers. With introductions by George Szirtes, Gy繹rgy Tverdota, and Aranka Kem矇ny, the collection aims to recreate 'The Song of the Cosmos', an unpublished collection J籀zsef envisioned in the early 1920s. What does the song of the cosmos refer to? Who sings to whom and about what? 'Cosmos' here isn't the physical universe but rather the soul expanded to cosmic proportions, a 'universe imbued with a political subject'. In the sonnet cycle, J籀zsef thus wanted to sing the song of the cosmic soul, as a lyrical outpouring of the cosmos and as a song of the human species, channelling cosmic forces and singing as global collective, as global consciousness, a planetary cosmos speaking about and for itself. The volume incorporates a faithful and playful reconstruction of the original graphic design, conceived by J籀zsef's artist friend Gy繹rgy B矇keffi in the 1920s. Mikl籀s Ferencz executed the reconstruction of the original book design specifically for this edition. The final section of the book includes ekphrastic 'guest poems' by George Szirtes, Istv獺n V繹r繹s, Adam Piette and ?gnes Leh籀czky, each creating an imaginary account exploring different possibilities and scenarios of what ifs each playing on one of J籀zsef's final poem 'There, I've found my home at last...'. What if Attila J籀zsef had not met his own tragic end in December 1937, Balatonsz獺rsz籀? I generate my brand of lovefeet they stand on strange planetsfrom all the gods I take my leavemy heart is steadfast & alivehere I in my light white shirt(from 'light white shirt', 1937)
Keeping Room
I was left breathless time and again by the wisdom and breadth of the hard-won, deftly crafted poetry in Ann Wallace's Keeping Room. By turns harrowing and heartening, her poems of illness and recovery urge us toward nature and our own human nature of resilience and renewal. Keeping Room invites us all to open a little more than is comfortable to the pull of this difficult world, holding space for the paradox that "disruption and love equal joy."- James Crews, author of Turning Toward Grief and Breathing Room
Remember the Good
In these honest and tender poems, Felicia Zuniga traces the moments that shape a life-girlhood in the '90s, adolescence in the 2000s, the sweetness and sting of first love, the ache of heartbreak, the wonder of new beginnings, and the joys and struggles of marriage and motherhood. With sharp detail and quiet vulnerability, she invites readers to find reflections of their own stories within these pages. This debut poetry collection is a reminder to remember the good, carry the hard and hold close the memories that make us who we are.Felicia Zuniga was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, where she now lives with her husband and two young sons. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Carleton University and a Bachelor of Arts in Honours English with a Creative Writing Concentration from the University of Calgary. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals across Canada, and Remember the Good is her debut collection. When she's not writing, working as a communications director, or spending time with family and friends, she can be found on her Peloton, planning her next trip, or reminiscing over old photos while early 2000s music plays in the background.Poignant and relatable, the poems in Remember the Good evoke the experiences of growing up. From first kiss to first heartbreak, from family dinners to creepy dates, from the isolation of pregnancy to the birth of a baby that "naps like a grenade," Zuniga recalls moments of passage in a "blur / of broken rainbows." These are raw poems that question "the new ways our old words / would be used" and celebrate "the days / we'll look back on."- Kat Cameron, author of Ghosts Still Linger, winner of the High Plains Award for poetry
The Pickle in the Middle Presents
Somedays the priority is only getting out of bed at some point. Other days, you are on fire! This is the book for anyone who has things go off the rails and sideways in their lives, for those who have experienced the never ending barrage, or what the author likes to call "the inevitable shit sandwich with glittery jam."This book is for anyone who is ready to give up and shut down AND, is thriving in their lives or is learning a new way of being. This is for those who are on their own hero's journey, for those who need to live their lives in the throes of chaos and disruption. And as they live their lives, they also find clarity, purpose, joy and healing.
