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"Cynthia Manick's BLUE HALLELUJAHS bring us to a broil like Koko Taylor's 'white-toothed love coils on repeat.' Here, we have a gospel of womanly sharpness, a kitchen sinked and hot combed diary of the way Blues grinds into the 21st century. Gifted with the ability to smolder into surprise and swelter, Manick's reflections on discovery and loss will bring you to a 'slow applause under the skin.' Thank you for this bouquet of sheet music filled with church organ and pistol smoke, Ms. Manick. We gone need it to get to the other side."-Tyehimba Jess"What we remember is what we become. Rocking chairs holding mothers and 'animals that root the ground for peaches, bones and stars.' In BLUE HALLELUJAHS Cynthia Manick holds fast to what brought us across. These are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need what we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful to this sweet box of sacred words."-Nikky Finney"The speaker of Cynthia Manick's haunted debut collection admits 'a love for surgery porn at 1 a.m.' And one early poem begins, 'Today I am elbow deep / in some animal's belly // pulling out the heart and stomach / for my mother's table.' Throughout, BLUE HALLELUJAHS approaches aspects of a woman's development-from 'feet first' Caesarean delivery to a grandmother's admonition 'to pull flesh / from the throat not the belly'-blade at the ready, moving from slaughter to surgery to a kind of deep southern haruspication. At the center of girlhood we find The Shop with its inventory of inherited hungers. 'Is this what the heart eats?' Manick renders visceral a longing to avoid extinction, to escape the museum, to live fully embodying one's identity as a woman who 'knows / how to wield a knife.'-Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

A new collection from poet Lisa Hiton.Arriving to the pastoral happens repeatedly and full of worry in THE CLEARING. For the pastoral stands for the fields of the Holocaust, of the imagination, of the Midwest, of the body, and even the empty field of the blank page. In the absence of knowing how to properly bury our inheritances of the 20th century, Hiton turns to fictive spectacle--to narrative invention, sensory desires, and malleable landscapes--as a last gesture toward hope. As the intellectual ambitions and fears ramp up, the urgency of the body (and the refusal to look at it) does too."Erotic and liturgical, the poems in Lisa Hiton's chapbook The Clearing summon a Jewish North Shore of Chicago that shifts under iterative, imagined futures and pasts. Here, we continually mourn the speaker's living father, who dies in several different Jewish histories; we reach past simple desire all the way inside the speaker's lover to 'turn [her] heart over.' Hiton's evoked intimacies in The Clearing are precarious, dangerous, and heartbreakingly beautiful; in this, they match the world's. In this dazzling chapbook (and all of Hiton's oeuvre), I remain grateful for the poet's commitment to capturing the ongoing instability of our safety--as Jews, as queer women, as daughters--alongside the blessed, profound joys of Jewish queer womanhood."--Rachel Mennies"Lisa Hiton's poems bring me in close, then hurt me. To heal, to recover, to touch truths that have been denied, she reimagines a family's history. 'Obsessed with death, but having no desire to die, ' her speaker pushes herself to see a super bloom out of ash filled ground. This sequence moves through tundra, heat, grief, and the surreal. It celebrates love, across painful expanses, that she will not let go. It's a celebratory, queer collection. I am grateful for the way mourning rituals, in Hiton's voice, become chants of persistence."--Dan KrainesPoetry.