April 2023

Amy Barone

Defying Extinction
Broadstone Books, 2022
$18.50

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Defying Extinction is a collection of 61 poems that pay homage to survivors of all genres—animal, object, spirit, place, the arts, the human heart. Witty and colorful, the poems shine with hope and resignation, underscoring the essence of remembering and then moving on.

“The title of Amy Barone’s new collection of poems, Defying Extinction, is absolutely perfect! … This is a vital book in these harsh times. Please check it out.”
—Ron Kolm

Poems read:
“Survivors”
“Sanctum”
“Bearly”
“Island Exiles”
“Handkerchief”
“Defying Extinction”

Ronda Piszk Broatch

Chaos Theory for Beginners
MoonPath Press, 2023
$16.99

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As a kid I used to lie in bed at night and wonder what held the bag that contained all the stars, planets, and us? Now my nighttime reading is often focused on planets and Planck lengths, though my understanding of the math behind them lacks. I adore the scientists who do. Some of their beautiful equations are featured, over a backdrop of fractals, on the cover I created for this book, Chaos Theory for Beginners.

Poems read:
“The Photographer Who Made Sense of the Universe”
“Sonnet with General Relativity”
“It was the year of time travel”

Current and former DMQ Review contributor.

Molly Tenenbaum

The Arborists
MoonPath Press, 2023
$16.99

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The Arborists studies ephemera—notes, letters, and artwork that particular lives leave behind; and also sensory ephemera of a life—the taste of pie, the depths of flowers. The book visits with family and friends, some passed on, and wants to know what “map we would make / if you attached a flame to us and filmed us in the dark” (“Equation”). In The Arborists, hornets eat the wood of the house while the people in the house continue making themselves as best they can into mattering.

Poems read:
“There Will Be Beauty"
“A Cat Is Always in the Room"

Former DMQ Review contributor.

March 2023

Tim Hunt

Voice to Voice in the Dark
Broadstone Books, 2022
$18.50

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We often talk about the need to construct a usable past, but even more we need to discover a usable present, and that’s partly a matter of reimagining the past to understand how we lived it and how it lives in us. The poems in Voice to Voice in the Dark try to explore this dialogue.

Poems read:
“Song of the Open Road”
“A Grammar of Things”
“A Photo You Meant to Take”
“The Story”

Jessica Murray

Breakfast in Fur
Galileo Press, 2022
$16.42

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“Aristotle claimed learning gives the human animal the liveliest pleasure. Breakfast in Fur celebrates this strange gift. The pleasures of this book surprise and delight as they defy conventions of self-searching and introspection. Jessica Murray plumbs discordant sources in our strange world, from pornography to ceramic art, from marriage to childbirth to friendship to fleeting glance. A spiritual autobiography of great daring that celebrates the well-made mistake rather than protecting the untaken chance, at its best moments, it is coldly wild, and full of vivid experiment.”
–Katie Peterson

Poems read:
“The State With the Prettiest Name" “After Reading Sally Mann's Memoir"

Adam Scheffler

Heartworm
Moon City Press, 2023
$14.95

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“Adam Scheffler's addictively re-readable poems take us into the daily jumble of Walmarts, dogparks, and the alluring, dubious friendliness of the internet. The "heartworm" of this book's title solicits attention and, even, prescription for all that gnaws at you. These are poems to read when you can't tell excitement from agitation. You are not alone.”
–Elisa New, Director and Host of PBS’s Poetry in America

Poems read:
“I Want to be Jeff Goldblum”
“Dear Florida”
“Florence, Kentucky”

February 2023

E. Ethelbert Miller

How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask
City Point Press, 2022
$9.99

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I’m going to be reading from my book How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask. This collection of poems is the third book of my baseball trilogy. The titles of the first two books are- If God Invented Baseball and When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery. All three books are published by City Point Press.

These poems from How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask are not just about the American pastime, they are also about the human condition.

Poems read:
“Every Buddhist Is A Baseball Player”
“Radio”
“How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask”
“The Change UP”
“Beer”
“The Slump”
“The Shooting”
“Just Be Young For Me”

former DMQ Review Featured Poet

Margaret R. Sáraco

If There Is No Wind
Human Error Publishing, 2022
$15.00

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In If There Is No Wind, I explore themes of family, love, and activism by unearthing grief and exploring beauty. The randomness of human brutality can be overwhelming. “Quiet Moment" and “Invocation" offer ways to get through the day.

Poems Read:
“Unleash the Trauma of Our Lives” “Love Valley”
“The Venetian Blinds”
“Canadian Immigration Site Crashed”
“Living in an Age of Fear”
“Invocation”

Jessica L. Walsh

Book of Gods and Grudges
Glass Lyre Press, 2022
$16.00

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I wanted to share poems that mark the property of this book: restlessness, anger, survival, fear. What I created in writing this book was a space for all my battles to play out, a dingy basement for a bare-knuckle fight between all the versions of myself who have allowed me to be here. I'm endlessly grateful that I'm able to share Book of Gods and Grudges with readers, and I thank you.

Poems read:
“On the Pere Marquette”
“No Trees For Shade”
“You'll Be Disappointed”
“When my daughter tells me I was never punk”

January 2023

Joanne Durham

To Drink from a Wider Bowl
Evening Street Press, 2022
$15

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James Crews writes about To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize: “What she has drawn for us here is nothing less than a map of how to navigate our days with honesty, grace, and a deep mindfulness that leaves nothing unnoticed. Her richly layered and musical poems bear the contours of every phase of life… This is a beautiful, timely book you’ll want to pick up again and again.”

Poems read:
“Old Folks”
“Reset”
“Brothers in Arms Valentine’s Day Gun Sale”
“Where They Go”
“Maps”

Kashiana Singh

Woman by the Door
Apprentice House Press, 2022
$12.99

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Playlist:

“For Kabir”
“How a woman delivers hope” “Finding Prayer”

Richard Tillinghast

Blue If Only I Could Tell You
White Pine Press, 2022
$17.00

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Playlist:

“The Boar": Inter-species communications fascinate me. The challenge here was to try and comprehend the thinking of this wild boar, and how to translate his squeals and roars—and even his thoughts!— into English. It's all whimsical, of course; but I relished the attempt. “Boat": weather and how a Taoist understanding fits into everyday life. “Blue If Only I Could Tell You": I went to art school when I was younger, my girlfriend is a painter, and the meanings of colors play an important part in my understanding of things.

December 2022

Rebecca Foust

Only
Four Way Books, 2022
$17.95

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“Only relishes in the daily discoveries that make life endlessly mysterious. The author has a gift for rhythmic imagery in poems finely weaving contrasting subjects, sensually recollecting earlier life while casting a hard, penetrating look at identity, politics, family, and the climate crisis. In these beautifully crafted and ecstatic pages, Foust celebrates the strength of memory and the interconnectedness of all people.” –Starred review in Publisher’s Weekly

“Music made from the gifts and griefs of a life.” —David Baker

“Richly imagistic and achingly lyrical.” —Ellen Bass

“Foust is writing some of the most important poems of our day.”—Peter Campion

Current DMQ Review contributor

Dewitt henry

Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose
Gazebo Books, 2022,
$19.99 (plus S&H from Australia)

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“These are truly original and often ludic works that gesture honourably and sometimes insouciantly toward the literary traditions that Henry both refers to and shrewdly recasts. Even as Henry acknowledges that many of his words originated with others, he demonstrates the extraordinary alchemy that engaged and creative intertextual gestures allow—and the wonderful way in which fresh and beguiling contemporary poetry may emerge through inventive acts of homage.” —Cassandra Atherton

Poems read:
“Home Birth"
“Such A Thing"
“Hospice Visit"

Babo Kamel

What The Days Wanted
Broadstone Books, 2022
$18.50

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“This is an extraordinary collection of poetry: Kamel enters, without flinching, the myths and tales that govern women’s life patterns—and changes them, not by rewriting but by re-living, allowing the story to enter, then leave her, and us, changed. She goes further, takes us into contemporary America, sidewalks, streets, borders, encompasses the political while never leaving the poetry.” —E. Alex Pierce

“Babo Kamel’s new book sparkles with purity of feeling, ‘like pieces of a brilliant glass bird, falling from a whitening sky.’ Here are poems drawn from grief and dreams and the extraordinary daily.” —Deena Linett

November 2022

Susan Cohen

Democracy of Fire
Broadstone Books, 2022
$16.50/$22.50

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Ellen Bass writes: “A thread of elegy runs through Democracy of Fire, Susan Cohen’s wise and wonderful new poetry collection....Cohen shows us our interconnectedness, a reminder of both the beauty and value of what’s at stake. Yet, paradoxically, this vision makes Democracy of Fire a deeply comforting book.”

Poems read:
“Science News: Dogs Were Domesticated Once from a Lost Population of Wolves”
“Science News: Dung Beetles Navigate by Storing Star Maps in Their Brains”*
“Report on the State of the World’s Children”
“Fire Season with Rolling Blackouts at the Bodega Bar & Grill”

former DMQ Review Contributor*

David Ebenbach

What's Left to Us by Evening
Orison Books, 2022
$16

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This reading features the following election-focused poems, all from my new book What’s Left to Us by Evening which is fundamentally about the simultaneous beauty and brokenness of our world.

Poems read:
“City of Sides”
“Election Day”
“Election Night”
“November Shabbat Morning”

And that mural behind me is by the great artist David Guinn.

former DMQ Review Contributor

Jenna Le

Manatee Lagoon
Acre Books, 2022
$16

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The third full-length collection from physician and poet Jenna Le blends traditional form and the current moment. In Manatee Lagoon, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a “failed georgic” weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence. A recurring motif throughout the collection, manatees become a symbol with meanings as wide-ranging as the book itself.

Poems read:
“November"
“Dispatch From Hanover, New Hampshire"
“Patti Smith, 1976"
“Purses"
“The Reader"

october 2022

Adam J. Gellings

Little Palace
TAMU Press, 2022
$18.00

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This metropolitan yet nostalgic collection brings the reader into new places and experiences while reminding them of familiar truths about human connection, the fugitive feeling of travel, and the universality of art.

Poems read:
“Prompt”
“Airplane Mode”
“Fillet -Le caquet”
“Past Life”
“Chemin Vert”
“Impression I (In lieu of)” “Impression III”
“Back to Life”

former DMQ Review Contributor

Sharon suzuki-martinez

The Loneliest Whale Blues
The Word Works, 2022
$18.00

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The poems I will read from my new book find enlightenment in taco shops, gather seaweed within striking range of Moray eels, and long for the company of only the Sun.

Poems read:
“Taco Shop Haibun"
“The Beach Recollects the Crunch"
“The Loneliest Whale Blues"

pamela Wax

Walking the Labyrinth
Main Street Rag, 2022
$15.00

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Walking the Labyrinth was a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Poet Jessica Greenbaum wrote, “If you want to know the powers of poetry to transform experience—and how a rabbi transforms grief—follow the thread of Wax’s revelatory intellect through this accomplished, complex, and spiritual book.” In it, Wax confronts her own mortality as she explores the death of her brother by suicide, as well as the death of her parents and other family members.

Poems read:
“Howard”
“Approaching Zeal: A Run-On Abecedarian”
“In the Background”
“The Woman Who: a found poem”

September 2022

paul hetherington

Her One Hundred and Seven Words
MadHat Press, 2021
$21.95

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“A 107-course meal that speaks our bittersweet limits and our sweetbitter need to live intensely before the end of the feast. It’s a gorgeous book.”—Professor Tony Barnstone

“The reader is held rapt in the to-and-fro … it is a gorgeous labyrinth of love, allusion, and absolutely luscious language.” —Moira Egan

 Poems read:
“Ballet”
“Lepidopterist”
“Keats”
“Griffin”
“Bed”
“Popinjay”
“Bibliophile”
“Lollapalooza”

former DMQ Review Contibutor

wayne koestenbaum

Ultramarine
Nightboat Books, 2022
$19.95

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Ultramarine is the third volume of my trance poem trilogy. The first two volumes, also published by Nightboat, are The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018). In this video, I read the final five pages of Ultramarine.

Daniel Swain, in the American Poetry Review, summarizes my book: “The real political stakes of the text...are the way Koestenbaum uses aesthetic play to disturb given orders and hierarchies. When we join him in his trance state, snap judgments give way to free association, commodified logic to the pleasure principle...exploring the hysterical drives of our culture in their most distillate form."

Leonora simonovis

Study of the Raft
The Center for Literary Publishing, 2021
$16.95

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Study of the Raft explores the consequences of colonization in today's world, and in particular, the capacity of language to represent the complexity of lived experience when it involves more than one language and culture. The poems in this book wrestle with questions of life and death, with what remains after the loss of land, stories, and loved ones, and with how we as humans, constantly change and adjust in the face of uncertainty.

Poems Read:
“Water Rituals"
“Coup de Folie 2"
“Arches"
“What Happens When We Die" “Bedtime Stories"

(Winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry)

August 2022

Rebecca van Laer

How to Adjust to the Dark
Long Day Press, 2022
$16.00

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How to Adjust to the Dark is a prose-and-poetry novella that follows narrator Charlotte as she looks back on the poems from her early 20s to dismantle her young adult belief that falling in love and making art have to hurt. In this video, Rebecca reads from the chapter “Fisheyes."

former DMQ Review Contributor

Kathleen winter

Cat's Tongue
Texas Review Press, 2022
$16.95

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Welcome to this short reading of three poems from my 2022 chapbook, Cat's Tongue.

Poems read:
“Force of Habit"
“Cat's Tongue"
“Memory Fruit"

The book is a trajectory of a woman's early life in Texas, laden with plenty of mixed feelings and delivered in a variety of poetic modes and voices. The title poem is a prose poem, surreal, and as feline as I could make it. Vivas to DMQ Review and Texas Review Press.

Richard Wollman

Changeable Gods
Slate Roof Press, 2022
$17

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Changeable Gods is a remarkable book in which Wollman creates poems at once complex and intimate. The gods he speaks of don't always inspire trust, but do, however, inspire lyric poetry of sheer beauty.
–Alfred Nicol

Poetry that soars. Vast, varied, ever-shifting, creating its own world, our world…Wollman…is deeply attuned to the colors, cloudscapes, streaks, and nightdomes…. A depth of love and connection, and the gaping void of loss, is implicit, and… it makes sense that Wollman’s attention is aimed at the sky—its endlessness the only place vast enough to house the feeling of what’s gone.
–Nina McLaughlin, Boston Globe

July 2022

A. Molotkov

Future Symptoms
The Word Works, 2022
$20

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Playlist:

“Blood Exercise”
“Optimism”
“First”

Former DMQ Review Contributor

amanda moore

Requeening
Ecco, 2021
$16.99

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Engaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, Requeening explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, the book brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love.

Poems read:

“Opening the Hive"
“Domestic Short Hair"
“Afterswarm"

daniel nester

Harsh Realm: My 1990s
Indolent Books, 2022
$18

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This is a reading from my new book, Harsh Realm: My 1990s. This book collects poems and prose poems that center on the decade of fax machines and grunge through the lens of a speaker coming to terms with young adulthood and trying to make their way as a writer in New York City.

Poems read:

“I met Liz Phair once"
“The Drummer in Our Band Tells Us He's a Virgin"
“On Realizing the Chords to Poison's ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn' is the Same as the Replacements' ‘Here Comes a Regular'"

June 2022

Rajiv Mohabir

Cutlish
Four Way Books, 2021
$16.95

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These are mostly chutney poems based on chutney music from the Indo-Caribbean communities of Trinidad and Guyana, specifically Sundar Popo's “Kaise Bani" and
“Scorpion Gyul."

Poems read:

“Cutlish”
“The Po-Co Kid”
“Indo-Queer I”
“Dove (or Tell Me the Number of Your Plane)”
“Dantaal, An Instrument”

former DMQ Review Contributor

Paul scully

The Fickle Pendulum
Interactive Press, 2021
Print AUD26; E-book AUD13

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The Fickle Pendulum assays belief and doubt through three historical figures —St Thomas the Apostle, Galileo Galilei, and Laura (Riding) Jackson, and uses them to pivot into wider worlds in langauge that is thoughtful, exploratory and never weighed down by its subject matter. The reader ineluctably mixes his or her own meditations with the poet's.

carol westberg

Ice Lands
David Robert Books, 2022
$19.00

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Former Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl calls Ice Lands “a luminous and stunning book, blending grief with wisdom and awe.” Says UVA professor Lisa Russ Spaar, this book “reads like a gathering of koans, a breviary for navigating the second decade of the twenty-first century. Whether confronting the imperiled planet, the eroding political landscape, the ambages of late middle-age…the poems move with an insomniacal attentiveness through all manner of ‘ambient threats too huge to take in.’”

Poems read:
“Once More with No Feeling”
“Bitter House”
“Inch by Inch”

former DMQ Review Contributor

May 2022

todd davis

Coffin Honey
Michigan State University Press, 2022 $19.95

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In Coffin Honey, Todd Davis explores the many violences we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named “Ursus” navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world.

lisa dordal

Water Lessons
Black Lawrence Press, 2022
$16.95

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Water Lessons addresses multiple dimensions of grief arising from my mother’s alcoholism and eventual death, my father’s deepening dementia, and my own childlessness. Against the backdrop of these personal griefs, I scrutinize the patriarchal underpinnings of the world I grew up in as well as my complicity in systemic racism as a white girl growing up in the 70’s and 80’s.

Poems read:
“My Mother Is a Peaceful Ghost” “Grief”
“Daughter Poem”
“I Love”

former DMQ Review Contributor

Jennifer martelli

The Queen of Queens
Bordighera Press, 2022
$18

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Just after I graduated from college in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro was nominated to the vice presidency. The Reagan administration was reveling in its greed and cruelty; the AIDS epidemic was being ignored; people were needlessly dying.

When I started writing The Queen of Queens, we had not yet been plunged into a pandemic, which would be ignored by another feckless administration, nor had Kamala Harris been nominated to the vice presidency (this is the good news).

If I were to give The Queen of Queens a shape, it would be circular, like the pearls Geraldine Ferraro wore at her nomination.

former DMQ Review Contributor

April 2022

Daniel biegelson

of being neighbors
Ricochet Editions, 2021
$15.00

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“The sheer velocity of the collection of being neighbors made me feel like I was riding a kayak on a tsunami. These poems charge forward, asking big questions and taking enormous risks, bringing together the ecstatic and the intimate, while remaining grounded in erudition and ethics. The book wants to know how to live in human community, how to commune with neighbors, how to return to the commons that have been privatized out of existence. It continuously opens up onto inquiry, rather than arriving at answers, and yet it is precisely the guide I need now.” — Jason Schneiderman

Caroline Goodwin

Matanuska
Aquifer Press, 2022
$20

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John Goodby writes, “This is a delicious, disturbing, and deliciously disturbing poetic sequence, that takes its name from the Matanuska River in south-central Alaska where Caroline Goodwin spent her childhood. Matanuska eschews sentimentality even as it champions sentiment, its melee of different threads encouraging the reader to work for sense (and senses) while relishing its sonic and paratactical dance, a dance with is often mesmerizing. It is precisely in not pulling its punches and in refusing to wallow in doom or bien-pensant piety that Caroline Goodwin manages to create the space for poetic invention.”

Jan LaPerle

Maybe The Land Sings Back
Galileo Books, 2022
$16.42

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These poems, some written in east Tennessee before moving to Kentucky in 2018, document the joy and pain of marriage and motherhood, separation and reconciliation, cancer, work-life (most of which was on active duty for the U.S. Army) and the domestic.

Poems read:
“This Thing Like That”
“Shiloh”
“Little Weeping Day With Trees Inside”

March 2022

jon davis

Above the Bejeweled City
Grid Books, 2021
$16.00

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Playlist:

“The Ghost of Denis Johnson” “Above the Bejeweled City”

For this reading, I decided to read two poems. I have no idea—beyond being in the grip of the pandemic—why I dreamed these particular dreams. Perhaps my obsessive reading of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Romance Sonambulo” informed the dreams. In both cases, I woke and scribbled notes, then went straight to the computer in the morning. Because writing a poem is like dreaming, I’m not sure, now, how much was dream, how much imagination.

I should say something more about “The Ghost of Denis Johnson.” I first met Denis in 1983 in Montana, and we remained friends until the end.

susan nguyen

Dear Diaspora
University of Nebraska Press, 2021
$17.95

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Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora introduces us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese diaspora.

Poems read:
“Letter to the Diaspora"
“Wish List"
“Suzi Searches for Ecstasy"
“Letter to the Diaspora"
“Unending"

julia wendell

The Art of Falling
FutureCycle Press, 2022
$15.95 paper $2.99 Kindle

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“ ‘Come off a horse enough times/and you learn how to fall.' With its crescendos and diminuendos, this book is concerned not just with falling but also art and its making, paying homage to persistence and survival through music and musicians, paintings and painters, books and their characters. . . The Art of Falling offers an enduring wisdom and reminds us that “Sometimes you just have to let things toughen.”

—Amanda Moore, National Poetry Series Winner, 2021

Poems read:
“First Tomato”
“My Never Ending Katzenjammer”
“The Anorexic Teaches Her Children”
“Dear Home”

February 2022

Jennifer jean

Object Lesson
Lily Press, 2021
$12

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Jennifer Jean reads from her poetry collection Object Lesson which explores sex-trafficking and objectification in America. She hopes to raise awareness about this persistent human problem. Some poems are based on interviews with survivors at a safe-house where Jennifer volunteered.

Poems read:
“When I taught poetry at the safe house”
“Bird”
“Dear Jasz”

james Gering

Staying Whole While Falling Apart
Interactive Press, 2021
$16 (U.S.)

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Staying Whole While Falling Apart is a playful yet serious exploration of loss and grief, of trying to find balance and stability amidst a giddying welter of experiences. You’ll laugh and cry with Aaron Auslander, a kind of everyman, as he tries to make sense of the flux and tumble of his life. The poetry is sharp and it cuts right to the bone, exposing the vulnerabilities and the precarious provisos under which we all can live. This is a potent book animated by courage and finely-honed craft.

—Judith Beveridge, Recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry 2019

John Sibley Williams

The Drowning House
Winner, Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2022
$17

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In The Drowning House, John Sibley Williams grapples with ghosts, the predators outside and in, those closer than our own hearts. In American landscapes haunted by nooses and wolves, burning crosses and floods, Williams holds a light before his path. These are keen-edged poems, kneeling before us, asking forgiveness for what our ancestors have done and have had to live through. He offers himself as a sacrifice for our sins: “here, love, is the tree of my body // to learn to climb. Far from here. From me. To touch / whatever's still up there, beautifully above us."

—Philip Metres

January 2022

Linda Nemec Foster

The Blue Divide
New Issues Press, 2021
$16.00

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I'll be reading from my new poetry book, The Blue Divide, which one reviewer described as a collection that “navigates the edges and depths of worlds both here and beyond--through currents of art, love, war, dreams, history, language, family--to map what flows between us." It pays close attention to what can heal and redeem our common journey-- “...pointing out the places where the heart breaks, and where it mends." Specifically, I'll read from a sequence of ekphrastic poems, "The Artist's Notebook," that was the first runner-up in New Letters' Poetry Award and was subsequently published in New Millennium Writings.

jae kim

Translator
Cold Candies: Selected Poems of Lee Young-Ju
Black Ocean, 2021
$16.00

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Playlist:

“Mooncoming”
“The Ritual to Come of Age”
“Nine Steps”

Jenny Qi

Focal Point
Steel Toe Books, 2021
$16.00

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Winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, Focal Point is a scientist’s unofficial dissertation, a daughter’s faithful correspondence, and a coming-of-age story. Written largely while Jenny Qi was a young Ph.D. student conducting cancer research after her beloved mother's death, the collection turns to “all the rituals of all the faiths,” invoking Western and Eastern mythology and history, metaphors from cell biology, and even Jimi Hendrix, as Qi searches for a container to hold grief.

Poems read:

“Point At Which Parallel Waves Converge & From Which Diverge” “Biology Lesson 1”
“Biology Lesson 2”
“Penelope Looks Back” “Contingencies”