December 2024

Tim Kahl

Drips, Spills, Bursts, Tangles, & Washes
Cold River Press, 2024
Book & Enclosed CD $20

Playlist:

“The Body Forever"
-Tabla Pro for Jaunpuri in Teentaal Native American flute tuned to Jaunpuri in E

“The Earth's Song"
-Epiphone guitar w/ modified capo Tenor ukulele

“A Simple Gesture"
-Mid-East Drummer [Lumbeat] Native American flute tuned to Persian Dastgah Shur

“Dear If"
-Concert ukulele
Native American flute tuned to Kafi raga in G

“A Proud Standard"
-Janggu Native American flute tuned to Korean danso

“Mobility Drills"
-Classical guitar tuned to Kora tuning (with apologies to Derek Gripper)

Susan L. Leary

Dressing the Bear
Trio House Press, 2024
$18

Playlist:

Dressing the Bear is a book-length elegy to my brother who died by overdose in September 2020. Central to the collection are the themes of grief, loss, love, and addiction, though these poems especially seek to capture the distinctness of my brother's personality and perspective as well as my longing to communicate with him across our now two separate worlds.

Poems read:

“If, Elsewhere"
“Ice"
“Influencing the Angels"
“The Not-Yet Flowers"

Dawn Macdonald

Northerny
University of Alberta Press, 2024 $19.99

Playlist:

Dawn Macdonald grew up in a cabin in the Yukon without electricity or running water. Her debut collection, Northerny, explores the tensions and dislocations of being from a place that's often mythologized as a destination for adventure and self-discovery.

Poems read:
“Every Yukoner owns the 1979 Encyclopedia Britannica"
“Roadside Wildflowers of the Northwest"
“Wasp Summer"
“ONLY GENIUS CAN SOLVE THIS PUZZLE"

November 2024

Matthew E. Henry

said the Frog to the scorpion
Harbor Editions, 2024
$18

Playlist:

Matthew E. Henry is reading four poems from his latest collection said the Frog to the scorpion:

“pop quiz for March 19, 2018”
“what i learned during Black History Month”
“when asked why I don’t teach elementary school”
“the patron saint of suicide.”

said the Frog to the scorpion explores how being a Black teacher in a predominately white educational system and being in romantic relationships with unstable partners can exemplify having unrealistic expectations in toxic situations.

Megan Merchant

Hortensia, in winter
New American Press, 2024
$18

Playlist:

Hortensia, in winter transports readers on a powerful journey through the lives of women bound by blood, history, and the weight of silence. With her deft hand, Merchant weaves a rich tapestry of personal and collective histories, inviting us to linger in the quiet spaces between loss and discovery. Hortensia, in winter is a breathtaking exploration of what it means to seek and find oneself in the voices of those who came before.

Poems read:
“Invocation”
“Sealing”
“Nauvoo, Interior Temple Burned By An Arsonist-1846”
“Eye, Barb, Throat, Gap”

Kelly R. Samuels

Oblivescence
Red Sweater Press, 2024
$18

Playlist:

Oblivescence is a new collection of poetry by Kelly R. Samuels in which a daughter processes her relationship with her mother as the latter struggles with dementia due to Alzheimer's.

Poems read:
“The Alpha Privative”
“Misspoke”
“Oblivescence”
“Sugar, like the Delphinium”
“Deep Sleep” "

Samuels’ inquiries into accumulation and crumbling—as delicate as they are stoic—give these poems a hallowed feel. The collection serves as poet’s observation and daughter’s plea..." -Allison Adair

October 2024

Eleanor Kedney

Twelve Days From Transfer
3: A Taos Press, 2024
$26

Playlist:

Twelve Days From Transfer is about womanhood—how it is defined, celebrated, and feared. The book’s narrator teeters on a fulcrum between a desperate desire to give birth and the complex emotions surrounding the inability to do so. When she feels relief from a negative pregnancy test following infertility treatments, she looks closely at her childhood, uncovering inherited grief. Twelve Days From Transfer speaks to the universal experience of grief and loss. This is a generational book that wisely acknowledges the emotional pull of the past while also traversing the present.

Poems read:
“Imagine”
“The Wielding”
“Women Pruning Pear Trees”

Alysse Kathleen

McCanna

FishWife
Black Lawrence Press, 2024
$16.95

Playlist:

I’m a sucker for magic, for sleight-of-hand, for surprise and bafflement and wonder. That’s what poetry is: a gesture that appears effortless, but isn’t. It’s curated, often with an absurd amount of calculation, and yet still comes from the impulsive, the involuntary–the difficult, the necessary. This book grew from my desire, an innate need, to reconcile dictionary and cultural definition and language with my own experience of wifehood and womanhood.

Poems read:
“The [ ] Wife”
“The Soldier”
“For Burning”
“Heat”
“The Houses”

Lee Rossi

Say Anything
Plain View Press, 2024
$17.99

Playlist:

Say Anything, Lee Rossi’s 5th book, finds him in an uncharacteristically expansive mood. Typically, he prefers delving into the deep, dark, and dire. Of course, he’s always liked the occasional laugh, but here laughter is closer to the surface, whether he’s bemoaning a mythical parent or chastising his own penchant for gloom. Now in his 8th decade, he chooses to ignore the approaching darkness and instead celebrate the beauties and oddities of this life.

Poems read:
“Instructions to My Teenage Self” “Not Brave, Not Free”
“The Angel Angle”

September 2024

John Amen

Dark Souvenirs
New York Quarterly Books, 2024 $16.95

Playlist:

John Amen's Dark Souvenirs was prompted by the suicide of his uncle, Richard Sassoon. Amen seeks clarity around Sassoon's death while expressing grief over the sudden and violent loss. The poems, however, quickly expand to include imaginative leaps, Amen recasting Sassoon as his brother, his son, a stranger he meets in random places, and a teacher who graced the world with a unique brand of wisdom, madness, and humor. Throughout his sixth collection, Amen navigates stunning imagery, memorable declarations, and language that shimmers with signature musicality.

Poems read:
“Family Systems”
“Apprenticeship”
“Dark Souvenirs”
“Recovery”

Robin Michel

Beneath a Strawberry Night Sky
Raven & Wren Press, 2023
$15

Playlist:

“Neither a reproach nor a celebration, [this collection] is a look at the underside of the known world, where everyone is at fault, there are no clear solutions, and the painful beauty of the search is all that is left.”
—Indigo Moor

“…poems that seek redemption in their honest examinations of a life. They speak not only to poetry but to domesticity, motherhood, and marriage—squarely facing the limits and ends of love.” —Shara McCallum

“…spare and beautiful…wise and powerful.” —Lynne Kaufman

“These poems recognize the shape-shifting nature of love and the way poetry saves us.” —Angie Minkin

Anne F. Walker

Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length
The Black Spring Press Group, 2024
$16

Playlist:

Most of these poems began on a train from Emeryville to Toronto. Most are 100-word prose poems where different shapes, colors, and textures fly over and in multiple same-sized square boxes. They reflect landscapes, bodies, travel, time, and rooted memories. Precision of image, narrative, and language are aesthetic goals, as are storylines that deepen with rereading.

Poems read:
“Warm Springs"
“Beating Heart of the Track"
“Beating Heart of the Track"
“Good Use of Beautiful Light (on Clinton Street)"
“Glutted on a Morning Rose"

August 2024

Laura Isabela Amsel

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet
Brick Road Poetry Press, 2024
$17.95

Playlist:

By the time I came to poetry in 2016, my study of the Spanish language had already awakened in me a love of the sounds of words, of how they feel in your mouth when spoken aloud, and of the nuances of meaning that change and grow richer over time. Words also afforded me the power to manage the unmanageable, to reimagine endings, to make of the chaotic and the ugly beautiful arrangements.

Poems read:
“Father"
“Cain"
“Black Fox"

Katie Berta

retribution forthcoming
Ohio University Press, 2024
$17.95

Playlist:

In the lineage of New York School poets like Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, retribution forthcoming does its exploratory work through narrative and lyric modes, by simile and catalogue. Katie Berta’s poems look vulnerably and honestly at sexual coercion and the psychological fallout of assault. The world of these poems and their trauma narrative is deepened by the heartful speaker’s sense of humor and eagerness to love and trust.

Poems read:
“The Rattlesnakes
They Keep in the Life Sciences Building Remind Me of My Dog”
“I Realized Skincare Would Not Save My Life”
“Will I Survive This New Season?”

former DMQ Review contributor

James gering

Tickets to the Fall of Icarus
Interactice Press, 2023
$18

Playlist:

Tickets to the Fall of Icarus charts the flight of two flamboyant characters, Icarus and Audrey, as they navigate their way through the maelstrom of modern life amidst natural disasters, pandemics, online dating and even a little self-sabotage.

“Gering achieves artistic flair through deft control of language and shots of Kafkaesque absurdism.” —Daniel Ionita

“Full of literary references, puns and wit, this collection is a waterfall of mordant humour, note-perfect and a mirror to our post-pandemic selves.” —Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

Poems read:
“Icarus”
“Companionship Comes Sailing” “Sublime Old Fig”

July 2024

Nancy Miller Gomez

Inconsolable Objects
YesYes Books, 2024
$18.00

Playlist:

Nancy Miller Gomez’s debut poetry collection, Inconsolable Objects, is part cautionary tale and part love letter to the broken objects and people of this world. Driven by the search for beauty in the forsaken, Gomez offers fetal mice floating in a snow globe, soldiers marching past a disembodied heart, birds that have learned to imitate the sound of an AK47. A compassionate homage to the humanity tucked away in unexpected places, these poems seek to offer a hopeful glimpse into the mysteries of our shared experience.

Poems read:
“Lost”
“The Invisible Mother”
“Why I Tie My Hair to Trees.”

John Linstrom

To Leave for Our Own Country
Black Lawrence Press, 2024
$17.95

Playlist:

“Wise, clear-eyed, and exquisitely musical, John Linstrom’s assured debut creates its own weather. Reading To Leave for Our Own Country, I felt the snow and rain, the welcome sun at the storm’s end, the long dark and the long day, the endings that lead—always—to new beginnings, the pure, bright, melodic holiness of the moment and what it might teach us.” —Joe Wilkins

“[...] a fine, uncommonly absorbing book, one that tilts the somber toward affection and the grave toward delight.” —Maurice Manning

Poems read:
“Thunder and Lilies”
“Ungathered Words”
“Another Small Town Drowning”

Cintia Santana

The Disordered Alphabet
Four Way Books, 2023
$17.95

Playlist:

The Disordered Alphabet contains letter-poems written to the letters of the Roman alphabet as the speaker attempts to find voice in the wake of grief. References to the atom and the atom bomb are interwoven throughout . Like atoms, letters hold the potential to gather, create, destroy, and be destroyed. In the wake of loss, the fission and fusion of language enacts the ways language births itself anew, foregrounding its role in our quest to make meaning.

Poems read:
“Inherit"
“Word"
“Dear B"
“Hum"

June 2024

Lisa Collyer

How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up
Gazebo Books, 2023
$19.97

Playlist:

How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is a conversation in poems on the taboo and abject bodies of women. Collyer disrupts selflessness, tackling the disquieting dilemmas of feminine space with erotic and comic freedom.

‘Searing poetry of feminine experience, How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is unashamedly visceral and lights up with flashes of literary incandescence. Formally inventive, bleakly comic, slyly erotic – these are poems which bristle with edges and glint like cut gems. Each poem arrives like a dare, refusing euphemism or domestication.’

Darren C. Demaree

neverwell
Harbor Editions, 2023
$18

Playlist:

This reading is of the opening arc of neverwell, my nineteenth full-length collection, which deals with my own history of alcohol addiction. The goal of this book was to write a collection of poetry that was stark, with as little metaphor as possible, and to show in full that time just before sobriety, new sobriety, and the ramifications of what is carried deeper into sobriety.

former DMQ Review contributor

V.C. Myers

Ophelia
Femme Salve Books, 2023
$20

Playlist:

V.C. Myers's new gothic poetry collection, Ophelia, intertwines erasures of Shakespeare's Hamlet with original poems to explore allegories of sexual assault, domestic violence, and death, spanning the centuries from classic mythology to the #metoo movement.

May 2024

Grace Cavalieri

The Long Game: Poems Selected & New The Word Works, 2024
$28.00

Playlist:

Grace Cavalieri reads from her new book The Long Game: Poems Selected & New. The book contains parts of 20 previously published books of poems. Today you will hear poems “Grandmother” and “The First,” characters from childhood who helped form poetic memories/visions in one section of The Long Game. “Grandmother” is about a strong individual who started the first Italian restaurant in Trenton N.J., the early part of the 20th century. “The First” depicts a recognition of feminism (age 5).

Poems read:
“Grandmother”
“The First”

Sarah Kain Gutowski

The Familiar
TTRP: The University Press of SHSU, 2024
$21.95

Playlist:

A book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar explores female existential crisis through two characters, the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self, who send a single household into chaos as they vacillate between the siren call of ambition, the necessity of the workplace, and responsibility to love and family. Engaging with philosophy and pop culture, bouncing between high and low diction, The Familiar considers the effects of second and third-wave feminism through an absurdist and fabulist lens, wrestling with the notion women can truly “have it all.”

Poems read:
“Climate of Destruction”
“Torn and Useless”
“A True Believer”
“We Must Be Ruthless”

Sarah MaClay

Nightfall Marginalia
What Books Press, 2023
$17.00

Playlist:

“A Breathing Lake” is a response, in part, to a photo of a Sankai Juku dance-theatre performance. “The Hidden Springs” is initially situated in a dream I had right after seeing Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. “Before Us” explodes a constraint exercise initially based, at her encouragement, on the syntax of a poem by Kathy Fagan Grandinetti. Weaving through these poems: the navigation of and shocked gratitude for a renewed and impossible desire. Nightfall Marginalia, a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Poetry, is a collection of nocturnes and ekphrastics, constraint-based experiments, prose poems, and poems of the dream.

Poems read:
“A Breathing Lake”
“The Hidden Springs”
“Before Us”

April 2024

Willa Carroll

Demolition Suite
Split Rock Press, 2023
$12

Playlist:

Demolition Suite engages climate change, environmental degradation, and hazardous exposure with unexpected poetics. From contaminated sites to troubled bodies of water, forest fires to rewilding zones, this innovative sequence covers wide ground. Fluid tones shift between grief, wit, intimacy, and beyond. With kinetic diction, these pages stage embodied responses to our imperiled planet. Out of crisis, Carroll forges strange radiance, envisioning ecological restoration.

Poems read:
“Score for the Body with Bioaccumulation”
“Score for the Body as Fire Season”
“Score for the Body as Calving Glacier”
“Score for Sovereign Body”
“Score for Bodies Dressed in Pollen”

former DMQ Review contributor

David Denny

Angel of the Waters
Shanti Arts, 2023
$18.95

Playlist:

In his third full-length collection, Angel of the Waters, David Denny sings a variety of odes to rescue pups and window spiders, angels and freight trains, Starbucks and The Beatles, film noir actors and post-impressionist painters. In a world besieged by bullies and braggarts, Denny's poetry creates a refuge for the meek. Unique among North American writers, he makes his gentle stand in the heart of the suburban wilderness, excavating the extraordinary within the ordinary, holding up shiny bits of treasure among the expansive hodgepodge of invasive junk.

Poems read:
“Open Letter to the Watchers"
“Man Beneath a Tree"
“Aubade"

Ken Weisner

Songs for the Great Horned
Shanti Arts, 2024
$18.95

Playlist:

Songs for the Great Horned casts every poem in the second person (every “you” is the great horned owl), so the poems necessarily break into rapture, lament, and other rhythms of thought to meet the moment. Beneath the surface, the reader encounters grief, personal loss, sober reckonings with mankind and history, but also love, fervor, always awe—for this creature.

Poems read:
“Independence Day"
“How You Come for Us"
“Incident Report"

March 2024

Sally Ashton

Listening to Mars
University of Wisconsin Cornerstone Press, 2024
$21.95

Playlist:

Listening to Mars begins with the pandemic’s first year. I attempt to recreate the shocks to “normal” beforetimes life and preserve the disruption of that experience, a surreal journey (lockdown, social distancing, the displacement of time, the social fractures, etc). We became strangers in the strange land of our own homes seemingly overnight. Truth seemed stranger than fiction.

The bewildered speaker in Listening to Mars moves through those years in an increasingly fractured world, trying to tell the story, to bear witness. Hoping to find a way through.

Poems read:
“California, April”
“This Is What It Looked Like When We Got There”
“The Still Center of the Galaxy”
“Terra Incognita, September”
“Winter Rhetoric #21”
“Quantum Migration”

Editor in Chief, DMQ Review

Francesca Bell

Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner
Red Hen Press, 2023
$21

Playlist:

Whoever Drowned Here is a collection of new and selected poems by Max Sessner translated from German by Francesca Bell. Born in 1959 in Germany, Sessner is beloved by readers in the German-speaking world. This book includes poems from Sessner’s three full-length collections plus ten new, uncollected poems. In it, Sessner plays with our perceptions of time and reality and shines a light on the strange, spectral lives of inanimate objects and the misadventures of humans who live, lonely, among them.

Poems read:
“A Dry Cleaner’s”
“Swimming Ghost”
“Table”
“While Leaving the Café”

Dion O’Reilly

Sadness of the Apex Predator
University of Wisconsin Cornerstone Press, 2024
$20

Playlist:

Many readers comment on the predation in my books— even if every poem faces difficulties and moves beyond them into presence. The speaker learns to love her dark angels, for they have protected her, and now they can fly away. So I have emphasized, in this reading, the speaker’s found wholeness. “The man who bathed me in the burn ward,” however, shows what she endured. That being said, even in the burn ward, the speaker finds companions. Guardian angels if you will.

Poems read:
“World Books”
“The man who bathed me in the burn ward”
“Dear Tongue”
“How to Dress Wounds”

February 2024

Lynn Domina

Inland Sea
Kelsay Books, 2023
$20.00

Playlist:

Inland Sea is Lynn Domina's third collection of poems. Many of the poems here focus on place, especially Lake Superior and Michigan’s upper peninsula where Lynn lives, but also the Catskill region of New York, the plains of Nebraska, and one famous bridge in California. They’re filled with water, sometimes in the form of snow and ice, and they’re populated by dragonflies, white deer, and black bears. The book is a celebration of the earth and everything that dwells there.

Poems read:
“Do Carnivorous Plants Experience Hunger?"
“Burned"

Jeff Friedman

Ashes in Paradise
Madhat Press, 2023
$19.95

Playlist:

Ashes in Paradise, my tenth book, blends surrealism, dark comedy, fable, hyperbole, history, and reinvented myth to target what it means to survive and live in our troubled times. Surreal and wildy humorous, the prose poems in this collection glow with the intensity of heaven—and hell.

Poems read:
“Lost Memory”
“Not Everything Was in My Father’s Will”
“Boy with Holes”
“Last Truth”

Former DMQ Review contributor

Karen Poppy

Diving At The Lip Of The Water
Beltway Editions, 2023
$20.00

Playlist:

Special thanks to my publisher Beltway Editions, DMQ Virtual Salon, my dog Kitty, and all you viewers!

Poems read:
“Standing in the Kitchen”
“Concho”
“The Pot”
“The Flower”

January 2024!

Susana H. Case

If This Isn’t Love
Broadstone Books, 2023
$18.50

Playlist:

If This Isn't Love suggests we're all on television, themes and plots from an Italian soap opera overlapping with themes and plots from “real-life" relationships. This is a book of lovers, betrayals, sleaze, violence, and comedy, all within the organizing framework of thirteen telenovelas. Meanwhile, Elvis, Zorro, Goya, Cezanne, Einstein, and others, including the poet's parents, make guest appearances.

Poems read:
“Brothel”
“Telenovela 7”
“Something Amiss”
“Fallen”

J. Michael Martinez

Tarta Americana
Penguin Press, 2023
$19.99

Playlist:

Ragged and raging across the spectrums of cognition, race, and desire, Tarta Americana envisions forms of survival outside neuronormative perceptions and histories. Against the recent tide of white nationalism in the United States, Tarta Americana finds a rhinestone in Ritchie Valens, the rock and roll legend, surfacing across time and bodies, genders and sounds, displacing the linear unfolding of desire and biography. Valens, the embodiment of corporeal transcendence, guides Martinez as he expresses his neurodiversity, his struggles and triumphs, interrogating memory, gender, and race, traversing pain in search of compassion and joy.

Kristen Staby Rembold

The Harvesters
FutureCycle Press, 2023
$15.95

Playlist:

The memorable poems of The Harvesters pay close attention to the seasonal miseries and mercies, rigors and rejoicings of rural America.  In a feast of sonnet forms, Kristen Staby Rembold culls through the homesteads and farmlands as an anthropologist might sift through a kitchen midden to bring to light the essence of a life that has almost disappeared.  With a voice and tone characterized by resonant detail, subtle metaphor, colloquial phrasing, and quiet understatement, this collection marks a significant variant in the pastoral tradition: it strips away the romance as it retrieves the timeless worth. —J.C. Todd

Poems read:
“Carpenter’s Lace”
“What Didn’t Last”
“Grandmother”
“Junk Trees”
“Lament”
“Vacancy”

December 2023

Lauren Crux

Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants, and Intimate Conversations
Many Names Press, 2023
$25

Watch here:

Playlist:

Difficult Beauty is a collection of prose poems, reveries, and images: delicate renderings of passion, kindness, beauty, inquisitiveness, and humor. They are public conversations with the self and the reader about love, life, death, transitions, time, and (oh why not) life's absurdities.

Jodie Hollander

Nocturne
Liverpool University Press, Pavilion Poetry, 2023
$24.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

Set in a technicolour world of dreams, ghosts, classical music, and Key West storms, Jodie Hollander’s compelling second collection, Nocturne, charts the emotional journey of the daughter of a professional classical pianist. These bold and arresting poems, rich with musicality, and fierce in their emotional honesty, chart the complicated repercussions of family dysfunction and musical obsession while traversing the landscape of the human condition and exploring the need for refuge in the natural world.

Linda Ravenswood

Cantadora — Letters from California
Eyewear London/ The Black Spring Press Group, 2023
$19.95

Video Unavailable

Playlist:

“Hymnal”
“Bus Lady”

November 2023

Carol V. Davis

Below Zero
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023
$18

Watch here:

Playlist:

Below Zero is centered on poems about Siberia, an ethnic minority region of Russia where I was teaching in 2017 and 2018, both times in winter. Poems in this collection explore place, not just Russia, but Nebraska, the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, posing the question, where do we belong? Other poems delve into folk traditions, faith and doubt, superstition, the nature of belief and the natural world.

Poems read:
“On Flying to Siberia for the First Time”
“January”
“Driving on Hwy. 31”
“Russian Chocolates”

Lisa Dordal

Next Time You Come Home
Black Lawrence Press, 2023
$19.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

In Next Time You Come Home, Lisa Dordal distills one hundred eighty letters she received from her mother over a seventeen-year period (1983-2001) into short, meditative entries that reflect upon motherhood, marriage, grief, the beauty of the natural world, same-sex relationships, and the passage of time. The entries—which are something between letters and poems—portray a mother who, despite her alcoholism, maintains an engaged and compassionate presence in the world, one nourished by intellectual curiosity, life-long relationships with family and friends, and active involvement in the larger world.

Former DMQ Review contributor

Brian turner

The Dead Peasant's Handbook
Alice James Books, 2023
$17.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

“Brian Turner possesses the extraordinary capacity to transform grief into art, whether intimate or collective, immediate or historical, illuminating that anguish so that we may learn, survive, even flourish in its wake.” —Martín Espada

Poems read:
“On This Harvest Moon”
“The Drive”
“Central Park in the Spring”

October 2023

Annis Cassells

What the Country Wrought
Purple Door Press, 2023
$15.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

“In her beautiful and bracing second collection of poems, Annis Cassells traverses time, geography, and generations to bring us poems that are at once personal and political, both historical and immediate. In fact, almost alchemically, they manage to be all those things at once." –Catherine Abbey Hodges

Poems read:
“Five & Dime Memories"
“Thank You for Your Service" “Sorority"
“Mayday in May 2020"
“Resilience"

Brittney Corrigan

Solastalgia
JackLeg Press, 2023
$18

Watch here:

Playlist:

The word solastalgia is a neologism that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. The poems in this collection explore issues of climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age.

“These poems are a requiem for what is lost and what we’re losing. They are also a rallying cry, refusing to erase the efforts of the many cries for climate justice ringing around the world.” —Camille Dungy

Poems read:
“The Strip Mall Changes Its Mind” “Elegy for One Billion Animals” “Anthropocene Blessing: California Condor”
“Miraculous”

Linda Nemec Foster

Bone Country
Cornerstone Press, 2023
$21.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

Linda Nemec Foster's acclaimed new book, Bone Country, is a stunning collection of prose poems that reflects the world before COVID: a world on the brink of an unforeseen catastrophe–the world as we used to know it.

Poems read:

“Conjuring Her Face"
“Arriving at the Train Station, the Last Place I Saw Lara Alive"
“Painted Toenails in Ukraine"
“On the Other Side of the World" (four short vignettes)
“After the Funeral in Seville"
“Statue of a Woman with Broken Serpents Embracing Her"
“The Train Station, Vienna"
“The Horseradish Dish"

Former DMQ Review contributor

September 2023

Gillian Conoley

Notes from the Passenger
Nightboat Books, 2023
$17.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

Gillian Conoley's Notes from the Passenger reads as if written “in an aura of intimacy," intimacy with the daughter, the lover, the reader, the dead, and with the spirit, sometimes called God, sometimes called “the messenger." In wide-open poems that expose the junk and the beauty of the material world, the violence and the grace within the social, Conoley embraces “mortality . . . with is rosy edge of want" while catapulting toward the infinite, what she calls the “next next world."
–Julie Carr

Conoley uncannily reveals our historic epoch: What is true? What is agency? What, in fact, constitutes the living?
–Rodrigo Toscano

Jessica Cuello

Yours, Creature
JackLeg Press, 2023
$18.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

Yours, Creature is a series of epistolary poems in the voice of Mary Shelley. Some are addressed to her mother, the feminist and activist Mary Wollstonecraft, others to her creature from Frankenstein.

Poems read:
“Dear Mother, [I had a dream]"
“Dear Creature, [The sea of ice]"
“Dear Creature, [After everyone forgot]"
“Dear Creature, [P. and I read]"
“Dear Creature, [Because of what I did]"

Sandra Marchetti

Aisle 228
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023
$18

Watch here:

Playlist:

Aisle 228 is a book of poems about the Chicago Cubs, listening to baseball on the radio, and going to games with my father.

“Sandra Marchetti writes like a poet who knows the strike zone. The poems are new and smooth like a ball ready to be rubbed by a pitcher. Sandra Marchetti writes from inside the ballpark, that holy sacred place. Let her poems guide you from the aisle to the altar.”
–E. Ethelbert Miller

Poems read:
“Arizona"
“Broadcast"
“Save"
“First Poem"
“Elysian Park"

August 2023

Mildred Kiconco Barya

The Animals of My Earth School
Terrapin Books, 2023
$17

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Playlist:

The Animals of My Earth School is structured in four parts of the Animal Kingdom: Insecta, Mammalia, Reptilia, and Aves. The poems explore relations between humans, animals, and their belonging in the natural world through contemporary issues of ecological balance, environmental harmony, social justice, and sustainability.

Poems read:
“Giant Stag Beetles”
“Creation”
“Dream of Lizard Solidarity”
“Falling in Love”

Tresha Faye Haefner

When the Moon Had Antlers
Pine Row Press, 2023
$20.00

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“I am blown away by Tresha Haefner’s collection, by her brave bolts of imagination and the forceful contretemps of her unexpected insights that range from personal confessional to environmental visionary. This poet interprets the world with sensitivity, joy, and a flair for invention.”
–Michelle Bitting

“These are poems we need to listen to, where ecopoetics, melancholy, and spirituality hold hands and connect us to a world where there are people who will hug us/then melt back into the night.”
–Kelli Russell Agodon

Poems read:
“Questions for a Search Engine"
“My New God Plays the Ukulele" “Let"
“How Animals Write Poetry"

Peter Johnson

While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
MadHat Press, 2023
Hardcover, $33.95
Paperback, $23.95

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“These are poems of everyday miracles. The excitement of prose poetry is that it transgresses the rules to let the reader catch a glimpse of what could be called the true life of the imagination. This is what Peter Johnson gives us. What more could we ask of a book of poems?"
–Charles Simic

“Johnson's prose poems are comic, sexual, and endlessly inventive. They are poems of appreciation and discovery; poems that prove there is such a thing as the American prose poem."
–Russell Edson

former DMQ Review contributor

July 2023

James Brasfield

Cove: Poems
Louisiana State University Press, 2023 $17.95

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“By exploring the translation of the sensory world into art, Brasfield faces the passage of time and the transitory nature of experience, thought, and memory. The poems find ‘angles of vision' to rescue a present instant in its essential fluidity, to go deep enough, without distraction, into the moment and reveal touchstones of being. Throughout Cove, Brasfield embraces the enduring effort to create an experience of language that is rich, lasting, and true, as life speeds into and through the future."

Poems read:
“Etruscans at Monterchi”
“Amalgam”
“Winter Precipice”
“Founding Cities”
“The Ritual”

former DMQ Review contributor

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

REAP: a Flora
Shipwreckt Publishing, 2023
$18.95

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The poems in REAP straddle the global and the personal, emerging from research in the natural sciences, social histories, geology, biology, and horticulture, alongside the poet's fascination with remnants of material culture. An avocational naturalist Adamitz Scrupe utilizes her considerable experiences identifying, documenting, and drawing indigenous wildflowers to ground the collection: from birth references in the first section, to allusions of inevitable decay in the last grouping of poems, REAP expresses the poets’ devotion to the study of nature as a locus for human ecology, underpinning intimate linkages between people, plants and animals, and the interdependencies of all species.

Tracy Youngblom

Boy
CavanKerry Press, 2023
$18

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The death of a youngest sibling as a child, an alcoholic and distant father, a grief-stricken family, a tentative faith: these are the building blocks of the narrative of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history.

former DMQ Review contributor

June 2023

Doug Ramspeck

Blur
The Word Works, 2023
$19.00

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“The reader comes of age a hundred times in Doug Ramspeck’s poignant new book of poems. Mythic and elegiac, Ramspeck intertwines images from the natural world with familial and fraternal memories, with a haunting lyricism that hallows both past and present. ‘What we can’t see is everywhere,’ he reminds us: always precise, always moving, these poems are ‘epistles of moonlight’ from one of America’s most gifted and prolific poets.”
– Mark Wagenaar

Poems read:
“Divining the Mountain”
“dream of the ten rivers”
“Winter Trance”

former DMQ Review Contributor

Gemma White

Oh My Rapture
Interactive Press, 2022
AU$26

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“In Oh My Rapture, Gemma White stages the politics of fandom in percussive, edgy and unforgettable poems. White performs intense moments of intimacy and yearning against a backdrop of grief, so that lines such as ‘you dumped me in the psych ward’, ‘you kissed me in Dixons Recycled Music’, and ‘my madness is a burnt orange fox’ become deep entanglements of desire.”
– Cassandra Atherton

Poems read:
“Poem 9”
“Poem 26”
“Poem 25”
“Poem 2”

Megan Wildhood

Bowed As If Laden With Snow
Cornerstone Press, 2023
$23

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Playlist:

Poems read:

“Mystery Confirmed” (from the space in the Venn Diagram of my terror of the passing of time and my interests overlap)
“But I Am Still Connected To You” (a tribute to my late grandfather)
Birthday” (another reflection on the passing of time)
“We Are Not World Enders” (processing being told both that the world could end at any moment since we were children and that it was our oyster)
“How To Talk About The Weather” (an homage to my favorite section of the SAT before they changed it)

May 2023

Rosie Prohías driscoll

Poised for Flight
Finishing Line Press, 2022
$19.99

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“The poems in Rosie Prohías Driscoll’s debut collection are stepping stones through the liminal spaces which marry the past and present: dual heritages, bilingual explorations into the ways we carry our ancestors in language, memory, and faith. Through a language of her own belonging and with skillfully crafted images and metaphors, Prohías Driscoll fathoms the power of transience and inheritance, all of us pajaritos in flight."
– Richard Blanco,
2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet

Poems Read:
“Papá del Loro"
“Feathers"
“Diagramming Sentences"
“Word Blossoms"

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Flare, Corona
BOA Editions, 2023
$17.00

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Flare, Corona describes the last six years in which I was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, then multiple sclerosis, then the coronavirus pandemic happened. So it's a really upbeat book! Just kidding, but it is all about survival in a variety of circumstances.

Poems Read:
“In a Plague Year, I Found Foxes" “Irradiate"
“Calamity"

Matthew Thorburn

String
Louisiana State University Press, 2023 $18.95

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A book-length sequence of poems, String tells the story of a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy’s fractured, echoing voice—in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation—String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.

Poems read:
“Once”
“The Magician”
“Pale Stars”
“Shatterings”