Poetry. Jack Christian's charming follow-up to his debut Family System (2012, Colorado Poetry Prize) reads as if compiled of epiphanies had while vacuuming. Weird and profound, and often weirdly profound, these poems make delicate sculptures of the mind's daily work as Christian seeks to reconcile the sacred with the profane, the romantic with the banal, the public with the private self.

Domestic Yoga

Literature & Fiction

Christian, Jack

Poetry

Groundhog Poetry Press LLC

Poetry. The poems of Julia Johnson's third book, SUBSIDENCE, speak on personal, geological, and metaphysical levels about subsidence, both as a concept and as a fact of the slowly dissolving American Gulf Coast. Richly lyrical and deeply felt, Johnson's complex but utterly engaging poetry will open up new areas of imagination and understanding in its readers. In it, scientia and poesis join in a language of memory and loss, vision and understanding. One finds oneself profoundly moved even as one takes a profound delight in the rich play of Johnson's language, in the acuteness of her observing eye and the music of her attending ear as her poems move through time and space from the Holocene to Pointe-aux-Chenes in 1876 to Isle de Jean Charles in 1976 to the poetic now. Her voice is uniquely her own, but what it says is open and welcoming and deeply valuable to us all.

Subsidence

Johnson, Julia Mae

Poetry. AS A FLOCK OF GOATS, a collection of poems in miniature, negotiates the strange terrains of promise, space, longing, and origins. Using just a few painterly strokes, Quill culls images from the bank of mythological memory and arranges them in breathtaking compositions to an elusive, haunting effect. A pioneering force in poetry, Quill folds the slightest physical impressions to refract vatic proportions.

as a flock of goats

Quill, Liana

Poetry. 7,000 SPARROWS is a meditative long poem addressed to Rafał Lemkin, the Polish-born linguist and lawyer who gave name to the crime of "genocide" and assured its irrevocable place in the framework of international law. Divided into seven parts, the poem examines genocide both as a historical act and a linguistic concept, encompassing voices from the perpetrators, victims and bystanders of past genocides. More than 50 years after Lemkin's death ended his unceasing effort to prevent the reoccurrence of humanity's greatest crime, 7,000 SPARROWS resurrects the questions that his life strove to answer, the primary one being: Is it possible for language to preserve our humanity in the midst of its annihilation?

7,000 Sparrows

Taylor, Duffie

Poetry. In Susan Hankla's debut poetry collection, CLINCH RIVER, Appalachian women can dirt in Mason jars, push husbands down wishing wells, and try to read the signs on Hostess cupcakes. This landscapes is made of thorns, where the golden fleece of ambitions snag on troubles. A woman leaves town just so she can write a love letter to her husband. Another dispatches her man down the well. A real body of water in Appalachia, the Clinch is also a clenching river that baptizes souls as it takes them. Through lyrical narrative poems peopled by school friends, veterans, and ghosts, Hankla presents the poverty of the psychic wound, such as regret, as well as the wounds that poverty asserts, such as longing. The axe of fate chops off the tip of Junior's index finger, and we follow him till he is transparent. Some wounds heal over time and a narrator enters her doppelganger, Glenda, to give us that sturdy girl's one-eyed view. Following her into middle age, we'll hear her tell it like it is, when her friend can't. Wearing a red sweater, the narrator tries to leave the premises, but comes unravelled, as if it's Glenda who makes sure of her return, so that together, they bear witness to the issues of cooking with lard and slaughtering hogs, of crazy men and the deaths of them. "There ought to be some hoopla for Susan Hankla's CLINCH RIVER. Her pure Americana—ghosts, abandoned houses, unfinished dreams, and censored lives—conjures up Nick Cave and Bobbie Gentry (think 'Casket Vignette' or 'Niki Hoeky') at their finest, maybe collaborating on a southwestern Virginia version of Our Town, or else it's like Dorothy Allison writing a southern gothic Spoon River Anthology with Frank Stanford. Hankla can really move mountains and sing. Boy howdy can she sing."—Richard Peabody

Clinch River

Hankla, Susan

Poetry. Kelly Cherry's background in philosophy and classical music are the pillars of her poetry, although she seeks ways to keep them in the background. BEHOLDER'S EYE, her eleventh book of poetry, is a about where she went and what she saw, and that includes the States, Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, western Europe, Finland, and elsewhere. Her poems are clear and deftly crafted, and they are sometimes profound, and other times witty. She thinks politics are better dealt with in novels (or courts and conversation), yet she has written some poems about politics. Philosophic dilemmas are grist for her mill. But, like all poets, she is drawn to beauty, or to making beautiful poems out of what may not be, at first glance, beautiful. Her collection The Life and Death of Poetry is about language; her collection The Retreats of Thought is made up of sonnets about philosophy; her collection Rising Venus is about women and feminism. And the book at hand, BEHOLDER'S EYE, is about a significant chunk of our world. Minus, she adds sadly, Asia, China, Africa, and South America.

Beholder's Eye

CHERRY, Kelly

Poetry. LET'S SIT DOWN, FIGURE THIS OUT, Grant Kittrell's debut collection of poems, contains multitudes. From furry, whimsical fables of broken logic to personal meditations saddled tightly to failing metaphor, the worlds these poems inhabit, and the poems themselves- despite their tight prose-are falling apart. Humor and sadness are superimposed and sometimes indistinguishable. Calling from this collection is a voice, rarely of resolve, but often of curiosity or desperation, as characters struggle to locate an identity within a constantly shifting cultural, familial and metaphysical landscape. As a whole, this lively collection seeks to answer no questions and offers no conclusions-as a result, Kittrell's work leaves us instead in a perpetual and humbling state of wonder.

Let's Sit Down, Figure This Out

Kittrell, Grant

Poetry. In her stunning debut, ALMOND, EYELESS, Karen Meadows explores the complex interaction between internal and external landscapes, and the powerful influence of context on experience. Through rich sound and unexpected imagery, ALMOND, EYELESS confronts how the self is compromised by society, relationships or even brief, impersonal interactions, yet maintains the persistent, often desperate need to be understood by another. Meadows brings a distinct, original voice to invented and traditional poetic forms, guiding readers across the contours of boredom, guilt and misunderstanding to reveal the beauty that resides within our own vulnerabilities and starvations.

almond, eyeless

Meadows, Karen

Poetry. Music. The poems in Howard Nelson's new collection are often two or three pages long. They are meditative, digressive, and carefully crafted. The natural world and cultural history are equally interesting to him, and both are the subject matter of the poems: coyotes, James Brown, rattlesnakes, Godzilla, William Blake. Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus, Birdology, and many other books, says: "Reading a Howard Nelson poem feels like the best kind of woods-ramble. You start out curious and comfortable. You take some unexpected turns. You may encounter deep shade or blazing sun, water, rocks or moss, unexpected people and animals. And by the time you're at the end, you're a changed person. Often, his insights and language take my breath away."

That Was Really Something

Nelson, Howard

Poetry. BOOTLEG uses the life of North Carolina banjo revolutionary Charlie Poole as its organizing principle, both sonically and thematically. These are poems bound by familial roots to a geography and a culture that gives them both their accent and their song as well as their fatalism and their sorrow.

Bootleg

Woodford, Annie

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