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In The Poet & The Architect, Christine Stewart-Nunez explores how the disciplines we devote our lives to influence how we view the world and, subsequently, interact with each other. If, as Louis Sullivan says in the book's epigraph, an architect must possess "e;the intuition of a poet,"e; the poet/speaker in this collection must also learn to construct her own body of work "e;using the material / one has."e; That material includes the relationship the poet and the architect build from their pasts and the blended family they create and nurture together. "e;My husband writes shelter,"e; Stewart-Nunez says, "e;I architect spells."e; They are spells she invites us to enter and take shelter in.-Grace Bauer

In this extraordinary collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In "Wooden Comb," Fisher-Wirth writes, "I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning." Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do. -Catherine Pierce, Danger Days, 2021-2025 Mississippi Poet Laureate

In beautifully lyrical language, Heather Swan evokes both the broken human world of self-inflicted damage (pesticides, herbicides, "the noise of industry and ego") and the healing natural world of replenishment and repair (rock, bird, water, animal, plant, air). If, for Swan, the human body is "a desert drilled for petroleum," "a trout stream dying," "a splinter pulled from a tree," it is also "an astral body," "a celestial body," "a body of light." Whether lamenting the death of a beloved father or the loss of an endangered species; meditating speculatively on the post-apocalyptic thoughts of Noah's wife; riffing on the likes of Kermit the Frog, Wile E. Coyote, or Piglet and Winnie the Pooh; or simply delighting in the freshness and vividness of experience, Swan illuminates the depths of our daily lives. For a reader, gifted with such honest, clear-eyed, evocative and restorative poems as these, there is "Nothing left to say but,/ thank you./ Thank you." -Ron Wallace, For a Limited Time Only