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”