“With devastating wit and keen wordplay, Hannah Loeb’s poems ‘burrow in the question of love,’ finding new language to excavate intimacy, personal identity, heartbreak, and existential absurdity. Impeccably constructed, these poems move with quick humor and fierce intelligence as they unearth the ‘jumbo crumbs’ of truth behind our couches and squeeze past paddock fences into new landscapes of awareness. These are poems to savor and learn from, brought to us by an important new voice.”
—Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

“Brad Kavo’s Butterflied is a wonderfully memorable volume, rife with wit and innovation, yearning narrative, and chiseled imagery and distinctively textured, often haunting, language. At this award-winning chapbook’s heart is the speaker’s butterflied vacillation between past and present, above which hovers, at every turn, the imaginative, yet precarious, promise of a future that could at any moment ‘shift / and move on beneath [the speaker], leaving [him] unsteady / and alone with broken wings …’ Butterflied is a terrific debut. Kavo is the real thing.”
— Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) and author of Light at the Seam

“Grief is Pink requires us to face death’s finality at the same time that it puts us in touch with The Eternal. This poetry collection moves beyond the realm of emotion and memory, and into the spaces where we are broken by grief. Jessica Niles DeHoff speaks directly to our own hearts, bones, and blood about the mystery and certainty of death, as well as the beauty and brutality of life. Her readers will find themselves held and understood in their own experiences of grieving.”
— Ly Vick Johnson, MSW, co-author of Understanding the Paradox of Surviving Childhood Trauma

“In the quietly stunning poems of The Quarry, Joellen Craft mines the liminal spaces between words, gesturing toward the unsayable and ‘unseeable parts’ of encounters with dead deer, felled trees, and distanced beloveds. Craft’s is a relational poetics that stretches syntax across loaded fields of white space, teasing meaning from momentary glances, pauses, and shifts of mood or light. As she tests cracks in our perception of the natural world, each unassuming line breaks the next open like a geode, dazzling with sudden clarity.”
— Rochelle Hurt, author of In Which I Play the Runaway and The Rusted City

“Under Greenlaw’s hawk eye, all detail is material: fruit and decay, the domestic and the feral, and the wild current that runs through all of it. With animal wisdom and scientific precision, in poems saturated with lush emotion and incantatory music, her work is a naming, an act of power, and a spell that evokes from the detail of the ordinary world the mystery of the mind and its dreams, love, wonder, and flashes of brilliance.”
— Renée Alberts, author of No Water

“Carnivores reads like a world unto itself — a world alive to salsa dances and middle-aged boricuas; to Madrid and Valencia; to Pablo Escobar’s hacienda between Medellin and Bogota; to the burial boys of Ebola in Monrovia, Liberia. This is a collection that is beautiful and engaged, distilled, and effusing with humor, imagination, a keen perception, and range.”
— Abayomi Animashaun, Author, Sailing for Ithaca and The Giving of Pears

“Reading Jonathan Lewis’s new book of poems is like spending a year in the company of a very observant and literate friend. A chance encounter on a glacier in Iceland, an injured sea turtle dying on a beach in Kona, a group of students caught in a monsoon, a woman feeding pigeons in London after a terrorist bombing: each perfectly captures a moment, as if you’d cupped it in your hands like one of his ‘green will o’ the wisps’ to admire its glow.”
— Karen Lyon, Hill Rag

Just Universes is both broad and intimate in scope: Its poems take us from the sun-warmed gravel of a Mississippi driveway to the fountains of Barcelona; to the lonely, sea-like landscape of the Alps seen from above; to dark bars and darker autumns; to the strangeness and closeness between lovers. In her first collection of poetry, Diana Smith Bolton offers us a far-reaching and inward-reaching travel journal, a meditation on time, youth, and self-awareness that shines.

The poems in Jessica Lynn Dotson’s debut chapbook Time Trials are observant, incisive forays into family, love, and disconnectedness. They speak in a low pitch, with a voice that both coolly scrutinizes pain and wholly understands its lasting power, teaching us that “The heart is a widow several times over, / but the lungs have each other. / No wonder it’s so hard to voluntarily / hold one’s breath.”

Philadelphia writer Iris McCloughan’s collection No Harbor is a collection of quiet yet pointed meditations on the self’s relationship to the other; to the multifarious, tactile world that alternately soothes and invades; and to the task of producing and living with poetry. No Harbor speaks to the murmuring undercurrents of human feeling, in which all “things perfect, precise, seemed / to fix and overwhelm, to parcel / to part all the misty, braided / longings of my heart.”