Western Michigan University, New Issues Press – förlag

“The shape-shifting realms of longing are fitful setting for local genius. But here, in Lisa Fishman’s beautiful first collection of poems, is where for the love of the world we find ourselves. As a reader, I could say I see in these poems a devotion approaching to love, if love ever stayed still enough to take a linguistic reading of. The poet sees much more, though. There’s possibly no harder stance for the young poet to take up than one of love and longing. . .”—William Olsen, from the foreword

“Whether her subject is mental illness, the oppression of one human being by another, or the constantly-cast shadow of our mortality, Marsha de la O’s resilient, unpretentious, sharply intelligent and unsentimental voice speaks to us of what we need to know. This is a disturbing and memorable book.”—Chase Twichell, from the foreword

This book represents a mental construct of salvation. It portrays the individual way in which a person saves the psyche. Fifth Season is an amalgamation of losses transformed into a state of serenity for the individual. The fifth season is that imaginary place where time becomes less relevant, where the poet attempts to make sense of the tangible world around him. The fifth season represents a unique path, one which may not be traveled twice. It is the imaginary construct of a season of hope.

This book represents a mental construct of salvation. It portrays the individual way in which a person saves the psyche. Fifth Season is an amalgamation of losses transformed into a state of serenity for the individual. The fifth season is that imaginary place where time becomes less relevant, where the poet attempts to make sense of the tangible world around him. The fifth season represents a unique path, one which may not be traveled twice. It is the imaginary construct of a season of hope.

In Greatest Hits, Marc Sheehan tells the story of the dispossessed better than anyone since Raymond Carver, with a lyrical élan that seems to reveal––like a brushing away of light snowfall––those things in our lives we hold most dear, whether it’s an old stolen fiddle, a recycled Xmas tree, or the Portable Nietzsche one reads while on break at the factory. In a voice that is gentle yet honest, Sheehan is able to lay bare our most desperate moments and to leave in the stillness a redemption offered up by something as simple and beautiful as a blue snake gliding over stones at the edge of a grassy quarry.

In Before the Palm Could Bloom, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley writes poems of the Liberian civil war and of the devastation it has wrought: 2000,000 dead including 50,000 children and 750,000 citizens forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries. And in poems of village life and customs, the city life of Monrovia, the rites of childhood and adolescence, Wesley records for the reader a world that has been forever changed. Wesley's poems incorporate many African voices, and range in tone from sorrow and longing, to humour and ironic wit.

With these dark, triumphant poems, Diane Seuss takes us on a journey through the landscape of the soul––and it’s a world full of beauty and violence in equal parts. Relentless and incantatory, these poems are charged with an almost religious intensity as Seuss looks for God’s presence in nature and sexuality. Again and again the poet confronts whatever it is that guides us through a life that is sensuous, yet exacting in its terrible cost.Nothing is solved by the end of this book, but much is gained as the quest itself has become a victory of perfectly pitched and furious language. God’s still hidden away, but by now the natural world has evolved to replace the absence Seuss feels. In the book’s erotically charged universe, one paradoxically begins to feel a calm settle over the burned-up panorama of the soul. It Blows You Hollow is a book, rare these days, that feels as if it had to be written. Diane Seuss goes for broke.

Poet Julie Moulds has battled non-Hodgkins lymphoma for years, through remissions, recurrences, and a bone marrow transplant. In The Woman with a Cubed Head, Moulds summons up an exotic band of kindred spirits to accompany her as she engages the forces of darkness. Here are the loves of her life, from Mary, Mother of God, to Baba Yaga, the evil Russian witch. More like the Monty Python Flying Circus than the Knights of the Round Table, assembled here are characters from folk tales, myth, Moulds’ favorite childhood books, icons of her Catholic upbringing, as well as her personae––Iva with steel-toed boots on, and the indefatigable Dog. In poems of wit, spirit, and attitude; in language that is sensual, fresh, and unabashed, Julie Moulds goes forth, tilting with real windmills.

In James Armstrong’s pellucid poetry the drifting of autumn leaves shares space with the baroque architecture of nineteenth century England. A woman peruses a book of pharmaceuticals in a coffee shop looking for hints of happiness. And a naked woman wearing hip boots stares out of the 1940s in a photograph hung in a Michigan bar. Twilight is always moving the shadows of our urban lives out toward the country, our inherited past, where a deer or a heron waits like an angel glimpsed through the fog. Armstrong’s poems elucidate the mystery and beauty of borders– temporal and historical, as well as geographical– while his pastoral sensibility floods our senses with images of the natural world, seemingly stopping time, edifying us, and helping us–for a few moments anyway–to transcend our enervated contemporary lives. Reading this book is like diving into a deep lake. It cleanses the soul.

Alicia Ostriker writes that poet Mark Scott "is a delicious love poet...a moving and painful elegist.". Scott writes of human feelings, human touch, in poems about the deaths of two brothers, and in poems of love and friendship. There has been no more tender, intelligent, and compelling debut collection in the last twenty years.

Of Sterling's poetry, Richard Howard says, "The gravity of these poems, their responsibility to feeling as to form, never precludes the possibility of humour, even hilarity." These poems elucidate Sterling's kinship not only with the coasts of Michigan, but with other, more distant and exotic shores, including those in America and abroad.

In these haunting and haunted poems, suddenly the world is rendered unstable. We encounter a sense of jeopardy. Rhodes enters new realms of the darkly erotic with the liberated sensibility of a survivor.

These poems say that the world is one fire, but only the steadiest and most masterful hand can show us the burning. Kevin Cantwell's poems blend poise and intimacy in a style that is his own and built for the ages.