Leah

In Conversations with Trees, Susan Dambroff examines the dualities hidden deep within the human heart and how those dualities are in dialogue with one another. These are tender poems which stand as witness to the passions of both pain and beauty. The poet wants us to see clearly and love deeply—even though we might “...watch smoke rise/talk about how a heart/can speak into the air.” Ultimately, she concludes “…insisting on love’s bravery/we go on.” Lois Roma-Deeley, author of four poetry collections; winner of the Jacapone da Todi Book Prize for her book The Short List of Certainties Grounded in detail, yet expansively philosophical, these poems riffle shuffle, leafing cards of time, family, memory and nature so “even the past can be rearranged.” Fall into a dreamlike trance with equal parts clarity and slippage. A merging with earth: “if you lean against a tree/and breathe it/into your back/it brings your two lives/together.” These poems pull the bobbin thread, gathering together families and strangers, the past and the future, the internal and the external: “This house with its red door and everything it opens into, cut flowers on the kitchen table and the field that grew them…a staircase walk to a full moon.” Deceptively simple and spare, Dambroff’s deliberate arrangements and surprising word pairings crack us open to “wide delights.” Here, time is liquid: “to fall into the future/the best unknown.” Hardly a period appears in this collection, leaving us breathless, rock-tumbling along, shaping us along the way. Kendra Tanacea , author of A Filament Burns in Blue Degrees, Lost Horse Press Susan Dambroff’s poems illuminate the small moments in our day-to-day lives that profoundly alter our perceptions--moments that without careful observation, might go unnoticed. Excavating these moments with vivid images, Dambroff allows us to enter her inner world of memories and discoveries. Each poem embodies an experience that is familiar, universal, and infinitely precious. Kimi Sugioka, author of The Language of Birds, Manic D Press

Aaron Dargis’s first collection takes us, as the title promises, on an interior journey, one of loss, rediscovery, and promise. The plain speech, the frank exploration of sometimes barren emotional landscapes, will remind some readers of Richard Hugo and Raymond Carver, worthy forerunners for this fine poet’s courageous undertakings. –Richard Tillinghast To speak of the haunted clarities in Mourning an Interior Country that Dargis deftly draws into the light of his (and our) insight, I turn to Rosalyn Diprose as she quotes Nietzsche: …in assuming the other is the same as the self, one reduces the other, one takes from the other, “deliberately and recklessly brush[ing] the dust off the wings of the butterfly that is called the moment.” Dargis avoids the ensnarement of such reduction by advancing word by word, in language attuned, with almost extra-sensory attention, to receive the moment as it is given. He relies on no normative representations of experience, even as he mourns the loss of those too-easily-believed precepts regarding who and what we are as humans in relation to each other and to the natural world. Read Dargis if you have the courage to let “mourning” awaken the unpredictability of this moment. –Rusty Morrison, author of the true keeps calm biding its story which won the James Laughlin Award, Academy of American Poets in 2009

In the tradition of Carolyn Forche and Yusef Komunyakaa, Brian Burmeister‘s first collection of poems, The Things We Did, All the Things that We Do, asks us to attend to the suffering of our fellow human beings and be present to the brutal realities of genocide and war, but also to bear witness to the persistent and insistent promises of hope survivors carry with them. The poems in this collection force a reckoning with our individual and political refusals – refusals to act on behalf of others or even to acknowledge their suffering: The president wrote, “Not on my watch,” / In the margins of a memo, / Then proceeded not to look. The poet insists that we must not only look, but asks of us, as the victims ask of those who seek to destroy their lives: But do you know our names?… But do you know our names? And in that unbearable question the distance between us and the perpetrators begins to vanish. In naming, we bear witness to the violence of our indifference and to our own responsibility to co-create a world with survivors where the promise of comfort and welcome is honored, the Promise / of something, somewhere. –Heather Derr-Smith, Author of Thrust and Human Rights Advocate This collection is breathtaking, an intensely haunted account (in part) of life in and around warring Eastern Africa nations. –Bola Opaleke, Author of BrOkEn GhAzAl fOr AfRiKa Brian Burmeister makes a bold poetic debut with his book, The Things We Did, All the Things that We Do. Here’s a young poet stepping up to address a world issue, writing a book of witness, drawing on documentary materials of war and the tragedies in Sudan and the Congo. The result is straight-forward, hard-hitting, and far reaching in its search for global peace and social justice. –Mary Swander, Author of The Girls on the Roof and Poet Laureate of Iowa

The resonant poems of Navigation have their compass set on the heart’s true north and, as they move through even the darkest times, appear lit from within, “like the body interrupted/ by love becomes bright.” With a sensuous imagination (“my body voiced into life”), a stalwart spirit, a consent to life’s clamor, a fine ear–these poems make emotion intelligible; they distill and illuminate experience–its splendor, suffering, “sudden grace.” An eloquent collection, a lasting pleasure to read. –Eleanor Wilner What is navigated in Linda Elkin’s graceful and moving first book? Nothing less than the enormity of the human heart. These poems, with their luminous surfaces and resonant depths, forge meaning from mystery, difficulty, and silence as much as from Eros, art, ripe peaches, and the sea. Though “we know the story is mostly about suffering,” as Elkin writes, her words help to map a way through. “Love gave me an island to keep in sight,” she says in a different poem. Reading Navigation, I feel blessed to be traveling toward that place with her. –Kasey Jueds

Dawn Paul indulges in the poet’s art of classification through her illumination of the life of Carl Linnaeus, known in his time as “The Second Adam.” What We Still Don’t Know is an unflinching look at this early scientist and his “first rough cut, that separates Eve from the apple” more than 100 years before Darwin. Paul does not shy away from Linnaeus’s prejudices, instead gives us insights into the West’s racist history while, at the same time, highlighting the scientist’s revealing work on a nature that “does not bend itself to systems” and the sexuality of flowers “who would queer his tidy marriages.” In this necessary collection, Paul reexamines a significant piece of history with fresh eyes and meticulous detail. –Susan Edwards Richmond, Before We Were Birds Dawn Paul is in her element in her new collection, What We Still Don’t Know. In her examination of Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, these poems reach across time to embrace the natural world. These poems are well-crafted, steeped in detail, and are profound in their insights regarding power, order, relationships and spirituality. Illuminating and questioning, spirited and detailed, they reflect Paul’s insatiable, tender and wry imagination. –January Gill O’Neil, author of Rewilding, Misery Islands and Underlife

Blake has written a book about the horrid, beautiful moments when men realize they are no longer the pleasant, humane people they used to be. It is a kind book, even if much of what happens isn’t kind. What matters most is that it’s honest. –Chris Lyke Author of Chicago East India Company

Brian Cordell has a rock and roll heart. This means, among other things, that his pantheon makes room for the likes of David Bowie as well as John Berryman, Townes Van Zandt as well as Larry Levis, and Jason Molina–who is the inspiration for a marvelous and bittersweet sequence of poems—as well as James Wright. He remembers, during a time when many of us forget such things, that the lyric poem originally arose as a form of song. And Cordell sings with passion, with elegiac ruefulness, and with an easy certainty of craft. IN THEIR FINAL PERFORMANCE is a quietly haunting collection. –David Wojahn This book is Brian Cordell’s tribute album to the musicians he loves among others, Jason Molina, Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain whose music he hears playing “underneath all this existence.” The poems in In Their Final Performance capture the way music can empty, decimate and heal all at the same time. Throughout these poems, but especially in the sequence, “Fading Trails,” Cordell makes a brilliant music of his own using a range of forms with great dexterity, vivid details, strong feeling. This book becomes his playlist for a road trip with those “blues burned souls” who both inspire and haunt him, a trip that takes us through edgy, compelling landscapes. “Oh, grace where have you gone?” the poet at one point asks, and the answer is: Here. Grace is right here, in these poems. –Betsy Sholl “It’s a long way between horizons,” Cordell writes, and indeed, this volume reads like a Rock ’n’ Roll steeped road trip wherein resonant human landscapes are glimpsed from a moving car. There is something ragged and groping about many of these poems that feels exactly right. Even the repetitive traditional forms he skillfully turns to here offer no neat, satisfying sense of closure. These are intelligent, carefully made, ambitious efforts from a serious poet. I’m delighted to see them in print. –Mark Cox

I love Tricia Coscia’s poems, her details of common lives both tragic and uplifting, skillfully relying on precise imagery rather than emotion. A master of line breaks, Coscia constructs turn after turn like the track of a roller coaster. You trust her to hold you in your seat but you’re in for an awakening. Brava! –Skye Van Saun, Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet and Director of the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival