Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series – serie

Long’s work begs to be read aloud in order to savor the rich language and rhythm she instills in each poem. She explores the beauty of specific bridges while employing them as a metaphor for crossings to death (a sister’s suicide), eros, and art. Part elegy, the book also explores living, remembering, and celebrating.

Through familiar details - leaking faucets and lowriders, chicharrones and chicken coops - Levi Romero remembers familia, comunidad, and tradiciones from his upbringing in northern New Mexico's Embudo Valley. Alongside his training and jobs in the building trades and the architectural profession, and now a teacher, his writing has maintained and nurtured his connection to the unique people and land he knows so well and that have seldom been represented in American poetry.

This poetry collection showcases all the features of Joan Logghe’s work that have attracted so many readers: her attention to detail, her warmth, humour, and passionate and inclusive social conscience. At once postmodern and deeply rooted in her adopted northern New Mexico home, Logghe’s work connects disparate events and objects.

In this stunning first collection of poems, Noah Blaustein’s narrators face the complexities that shape a life: adolescence, fatherhood, our responsibility for the lives of others, the exhilaration of romantic love, and memory. These anxious, frequently witty poems flirt with physical danger, with grief and happiness, and with mortality as a means to transcend the mundane in our day-to-day lives. As the parent narrator says at the end of “Rave On”: “This / life of mine I now know / is no longer mine to take away.” While the narrator believes that there’s no person “that doesn’t benefit from some pain,” this evocative collection proves that life is both pain and comfort, and ends on a prayer of hope for the speaker’s children: “This is a prayer / for my children asleep in their bunk beds. . . . / May they never acquire / death’s thin cello wire, / what connects my cortex to my toes, what plays / memory’s midnight wrong song. . . . / There is beautiful music / out there. There is beautiful music.”

Constructed as a series of reports to the Department of the Interior, these poems of grief, anger, defiance, and resistance focus on the oppressive educational system adopted by Indian boarding schools and the struggle Native Americans experienced to retain and honour traditional ways of life and culture.

Winner of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry, Midge deftly weaves Plains Indian myths into the present day and seeks to define love, the nature of desire, and identity in the twenty-first century. The book includes a series of poems, each titled “Considering Wakatanka,” that weave together the themes throughout the book. The Woman Who Married a Bear showcases the wholly individual voice of a talented poet.

Stewart-Nuñez draws upon a number of styles - persona, ekphrastic, lyrical, formal - to create a collection that explores the promises of love and loss. Among Untrussed's many delights is a series of Wonder Woman poems that reveal a heroine who is as human as she is superhuman. From pleasure to pain to hope of new love, this collection draws readers into the everyday magic of the world.

In this dynamic debut collection, Fernando Pérez employs lyric and nonce forms to interrogate identity politics and piece together a complex family history. The book embodies fragmentation in form and story, exploring how migration affects relationships between people of different generations. Pérez invites readers on the journey as his family story unfolds over time and distance.

In this innovative debut collection, Tacey M. Atsitty employs traditional, lyric, and experimental verse to create an intricate landscape she invites readers to explore. Presented in three sections, Tséyi’, Gorge Dweller, and Tóhee’, the poems negotiate between belief and doubt, self and family, and interior and exterior landscapes.

With technical mastery and remarkable empathy, Canaday introduces readers to the people involved in the creation and testing of the first atomic bomb, from initial theoretical conversations to the secretive work at Los Alamos. Critical Assembly also includes brief biographies, notes, and a bibliography for further exploration about this critical event in world history.

This debut collection reads like an elegy, not just for the author's brother Lou, stricken with schizophrenia, but for all families affected by mental illness. Through multiple personae and a variety of styles, Seluja offers a gritty authenticity and empathy to the subjects and themes. These poems grieve for a world of the lost while extending solace to those who remain and remember.

In Morales's newest collection, an imagined zombie apocalypse intertwines with personal narrative. From zombie dating to the sin of popcorn ceilings, these poems investigate the nature of impermanence while celebrating the complexities of life.

The geography of After Party includes married life and fatherhood, a childhood survived if not fully understood, the transition from youth to an adulthood filled with responsibilities, and the dangers of our current world and culture-on a personal and global scale-that can distract and disrupt life and our idea of home. By turns funny and heartbreaking, flirtatious and frank, Blaustein never lets his aggravation or confusion overwhelm his sense of gratitude for the life he leads and those he loves.

Full of sensory detail and written with astute observation, to cleave searches for and lays bare the mythic moments one finds even in the most ordinary life. In this stunning collection Rockman explores the themes of aging; our relationships to our bodies; marriage; and the surprises, griefs, and joys of motherhood. Each of the seven sections urges readers to view their daily lives with renewed curiosity and wonder.

The Music of Her Rivers pays homage to the rivers that taught the poet--the Rio Grande and the Chicago and Illinois Rivers. Sharp-eyed and empathetic, Golden serves as a witness, documenting place, history, and people, especially those left voiceless due to violence or discrimination--from the refugee border crossers of the Rio Grande to the Irish immigrants and former slaves struggling to build lives in Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each poem captures the enduring challenges of Native peoples, laborers, naturalists, and immigrants through its haunting and consuming verse. Throughout the collection the nuanced representation of the landscape allows the rivers to become witnesses and actors themselves.

Sean Prentiss takes readers into what it means to be a rookie trail-crew leader guiding a motley collection of at-risk teens for five months of backbreaking work in the Pacific Northwest. It is a world where the sounds of trail tools - Pulaskis, McLeods, and hazel hoes - filter into dreams and set the rhythm of each day. In this memoir-in-poems, Prentiss shares a music most of us will never experience, set to tools swung and sharpened, backdropped by rain and snow and sun, as individuals transform into crew.

In Grief Land Carrie Shipers explores the paradoxical nature of bereavement as both a universal human experience and an intensely personal one. The poems interrogate and dismiss common notions of loss and recovery through a series of letter-poems--to authors who have written about grief, to the speaker's dead husband, and to a society that believes it has the right to dictate how a widow should feel and act. The collection explores living with grief without being consumed by it and how to emerge into a new life.

In Feel Puma, Ray Gonzalez traces his love of reading, philosophy, and learning with poems constantly in conversation - with each other, with texts by other writers and the writers themselves, with world history and his personal history and people he has encountered. Woven over three sections, this unique collection is a complex and gorgeous dive into creativity and the inner life of a poet at the height of his craft.

Fractured storytelling for a fractured world, Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride draws readers into a world that appears eerily familiar but unsettling as well. Fierce, visceral, sometimes funny, and wholly original, Hoahwah's poems will linger in a reader's dreams long after she's closed the book.

The Definition of Empty is the story of a dedicated advocate trying to help adolescents facing incarceration and newly released parolees navigate imperfect and seemingly indifferent legal systems and societies. Told from the point of view of a public servant trying his best to work with people at various levels of brokenness, these poems are compassionate, heartbreaking, and even sometimes brutal while the voice is gentle, outraged, and naive in turns. With this collection O'Neill insists that readers bear witness to the struggles of disenfranchised people they might otherwise ignore.

A book of wild imagination and linguistic play, Nowhere begins by chronicling the pain that the speaker and her absent father endure during the years they are separated while he is in prison. The alternative universe the speaker builds in order to survive this complex loss and its aftermath sees her experimenting with her body to try to build connection, giving it away to careless and indifferent lovers as she dreams of consuming them in the search for a coherent self. But can the speaker voice her trauma and disjunction? Can anyone, or is suffering something that cannot be said, but only hinted at? Ultimately the book argues that the barest hour of suffering can be the source of immense creative power and energy, which is the speaker's highest form of consolation.This brilliant debut collection offers cohesive trauma narratives and essential counter-narratives to addiction stories, and it consistently complicates the stories told by the world about so-called fatherless girls and the bodies of women.

Who was more alone than Medusa? Raped in Athena's temple, transformed into a monster, and banished into a cave, Medusa may be the ultimate example of victim blaming. In The Loneliest Girl, Kate Gale creates a powerful alternative narrative for Medusa and for all women who have carried guilt and shame--for being a woman, for not being enough, for being a victim. She offers a narrative in which women are the makers of the world--in which women find their way out from the cave of the Cisthene and into a world where they determine their own destiny.

The poems in The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds expand the sacred within a baroque, magical-realist poetics that immerses itself in the flora and fauna of the Caribbean and the region's complex interplay of African, Judeo-Christian, and Taíno (Arawak) cultures. Menes engages with the Catholic sacraments, saints' lives, and the artistic heritage of this universal faith as well as Cuban art through the use of a variety of poetic styles across the collection. An established poet, he pays homage to those writers who have made him the Caribbean poet that he is, specifically Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and even Hart Crane. Readers will want to join Menes on this journey as he travels the globe to explore the fantastic and the marvelous while searching for faith and divine grace.

A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery gives voice to abused children, murdered women, research animals, war veterans, and even metronomes and lampshades. In poems inspired by Ovid, Tina Carlson explores the roots of voicelessness and journeys into metamorphosis, granting speech to those ignored or victimized and thereby allowing them to provide witness to their own lives.

Trials and Tribulations of Dirty Shame, Oklahoma beautifully showcases Comanche gothic literature, a new genre in Indigenous literature, at its creative best. In the tradition of The Iliad and Paradise Lost, this book is an epic poem of heroic and biblical proportions. Three Indigenous young people discover that the Holy Grail has been on the North American continent for centuries, and in Oklahoma for the last two. Battling both human and supernatural enemies, Velroy, Mia, and Stoney struggle to get the Holy Grail out of Indian Country to save their families and community and bring true peace back to their ordinary, Dirty Shame lives.

This haunting collection merges spirit and nature in a voice both elegiac and celebratory. Kotchian invites readers to explore our deep connection to the natural world, one increasingly at risk even as it continues to surprise and inspire. From meditations on the dangers of global warming to supporting a friend with cancer, from grieving the loss of her own mother to celebrating nature from New Mexico to a wild Scottish island, Kotchian helps readers catalog the consolations available to us in individual moments, offering us resilience, persistence, and hope.

Susan Aizenberg uses a range of techniques in her newest collection of poetry to explore contemporary daily life in a difficult world. She critiques gender, grief, culture, and the myriad experiences that define us. But even when grappling with old wounds, a strain of romance runs throughout the book, reminding readers that it's between the love and the grief that we'll find the moments worth being shared and savored.

The cryptic prompts - fragments, really - of Brian Eno's and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies unveiled themselves to Leslie Ullman as rough translations from an obscure language. As an experiment, Ullman used each one as a poem title, and in doing so she accessed a thrill of freedom, uncertainty, and propulsion beyond her own familiar patterns and landscapes. In the process, she found herself exploring the literary, visual, and musical arts from angles that had never occurred to her before.Unruly Tree showcases the most successful of Ullman's play, and the result is a marvelous work by a poet at the height of her craft. At its heart this book is about process itself - even when it applies to experiences outside the arts - and about reclaiming an inner freedom many of us lose in our lives as adults in these noisy, rancorous times.

Stacey Waite's newest collection of poems interrogates gender, sexuality, and parenthood. From a genderqueer perspective, the poems set their unflinching gaze on the habits and impacts of masculinity. Poignant, angry, heartfelt, and at times funny, this collection asks us, again and again: What kind of world do we make with gender?