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"