Ava Leavell Haymon – författare

On a pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Nepal, a group of American women trek into the Himalayas, beginning and ending in Kathmandu. They ascend, turn back just short of reaching their destination because of impassable snow, and descend. ""Say what you see,"" smoke rising on a distant mountain seems to command, and Ava Leavell Haymon responds with language that strives to reconcile the extremes of this exotic place- danger and awesome beauty, community and abandonment, death and life, flame's heat and altitude's cold, an alien landscape and the poet's own deep memories. Fires- of cooking, festivals, cremation, deforestation, and starvation- rage through the poems; like the name of the Hindu goddess Kali, fire is ""destruction and creation / in one word."" An exacting yet exhilarating poetry collection, The Strict Economy of Fire asks what we can know and what we can never know ""on this far side of the earth.

Kitchen Heat records in woman's language the charm and bite of domestic life. Ava Leavell Haymon's poems form a collection of Household Tales, unswerving and unsentimental, serving up the strenuous intimacies, children, meals, pets, roused memories, outrages, and solaces of marriage and family. Some of the poems are comic, such as Conjugal Love Poem, about a wife who resists giving her husband the pity he seeks when complaining about a cold. Others find myth and fairy tale lived out in contemporary setting, with ironic result. Others rename the cast of characters: husband and wife become rhinoceros and ox; a carpool driver, the ominous figure Denmother. An elderly female is Old Grandmother, who creates time and granddaughters from oyster stew. The humidity of Deep South summers and steam from Louisiana recipes contribute to a simmering language, out of which people and images emerge and into which they dissolve again.""Denmother went to college in the 60s, // could pin your ears back at a cocktail party. // Her laugh had an edge to it, // and her yard was always cut. // She grew twisted herbs in the flower beds, // hid them like weeks among dumpy marigolds. // The wolfsbane killed the pansies // before they bloomed much. // She'd look at you real straight and talk // about nuclear power plants or abortion. At home // alone she boiled red potatoes all night // to make the primitive starch that holds up the clouds.""- Denmother's Conversation

In Ava Leavell Haymon's third collection, an unremarkable, harried, contemporary woman named Gretel finds herself at midlife overtaken by the Grimms' household tale Hansel and Gretel. The violence and terror in that story supplant the memory of her own childhood, and the fairy tale retells itself in a sharp succession of surprising poems. The witch, the sugar house, Gretel's brother, her passive father, his cruel second wife, the sinister forest -- all these and more rise like jazz motifs to play themselves in the present. Addressing themes such as hunger, child abuse, betrayal, cannibalism, and murder in a tone by turns disturbing and humorous, Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread is most certainly not a book for children.

Mouths Open to Name Her, Katie Bickham's dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or ""a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget, / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge."" Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these finely wrought poems grapple with how war, violence, and enslavement can disrupt our innocence. Bickham emphasises the power of creation in spite of this: ""Just picture them all,"" she writes, ""350,000 babies, together at once, / a city's worth of them in a row or a circle or wrapped / in an acres-wide blanket, an army of innocence yawning / their first breaths over the globe, and the promise / that it will all happen again, just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, …/ …tomorrow."" Mouths Open to Name Her calls forth a global sisterhood that extends from Charleston, South Carolina, and Shreveport, Louisiana, to Nice, France; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Serengeti District, Tanzania.

In The Grace of Distance, his poignant, far-traveling new collection of poems, Matthew Thorburn explores the ways in which we try to close the distances we experience in modern life, between doubt and faith, between cultures, between ourselves and those we love. He seeks to name, and find, that elusive, essential sense of connection humanity hungers for. In one poem, a boy places a bell in the hollow of a tree so someone might find it. In others, an overworked baker wishes for an annunciation of her own, while a man calls down into a well until another voice calls back. Set in China and America, in the present and the distant past, Thorburn's poems examine both Eastern and Western ideas of spirituality, looking closely at the ways we can lose faith, then sometimes find it again. The poems also confront the unbridgeable distances we must live with and the perhaps surprising grace they can provide, a greater sense of perspective, understanding, and peace, even as our lives move in the only direction they can, away from the past.

Martha Serpas's Double Effect reimagines Saint Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of that name, which governs whether an action is morally permissible despite a foreseeable evil result. In lush verse pointed by Cajun language, these poems measure the good that can result from destructive situations, encompassing ecological devastation, maternal deprivation, spiritual poverty, and mania. Time in this collection is kept by the feast days, hurricanes, celebrations, accidents, and rescues along southern Louisiana's disappearing bayous and eroding coasts. In the end, the question remains: Is there a good that can redeem suffering and loss?

Struggling to accept her impending blindness, the speaker in Julia B. Levine's fifth collection of poetry, Ordinary Psalms, asks everyday life to help her learn how to see beyond appearances into fundamental truths. As she contemplates the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide, along with her own visual impairment, Levine holds the world "close as I needed / to see." Imagistic, lyrical, and at times imploring divine intervention from a god she does not know or trust, these poems curse and praise the extraordinary place we live in and are in danger of losing. Lamenting that "this world is a mortal affliction / with wounds in the beautiful," Ordinary Psalms provides a seductive and lyric rumination on radiance, loss, and grief.

Whether by way of visitations from secular saints, hauntings from childhood, or back talk from "indelicate broads," a complicated world speaks to and through Alison Pelegrin in Our Lady of Bewilderment. An unusual blend of mystic-comedian, Pelegrin explores physical and psychic beauty and terror without losing sight of wonder. Drawing on the aid of beings real and imaginary, Our Lady of Bewilderment offers humorous, honest, and intimate poems contemplating life's traumas and joys, filtered through the religion-infused secular traditions of Louisiana.

A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn's 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.