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Once Upon a Time . . . A Spy Was Born Convinced his actions will save countless lives by shortening the war, Union doctor Ethan Walsh agrees to share with his government what he learns while working undercover in Chimborazo Hospital, deep in the heart of Dixie. Confederate nurse Annabeth Phelan lost her entire family, save one brother, to the war. When that brother goes missing due to information gleaned by a spy, she swears to discover the culprit. But spying is a dangerous game. Lives change, lives end once the truth is discovered, and falling in love amid the chaos of conflict doesn't stand the test of time. Separated by tragedy, the two fall down rabbit holes they never could have imagined. Reunited years later, now an outlaw and healer, Ethan and Annabeth must ask themselves . . . Can a love born amid desperation and lies survive?

Over the course of the eighty-one poems that make up Bowed As If Laden With Snow, Megan Wildhood considers humanity's climate crisis in parallel with the personal experience of divorce from the perspective of someone who has felt alienated and abandoned by the environmental movement. Still as madly in love with nature as she is with human beings, Wildhood showcases incredible range with heart, humanity, and hope.

Silent Letter, the masterful full-length debut from Gail Hanlon, centers around the idea of learning to navigate desire, uncertainty, and grief. In part through art and literature, and in part through alternative ways of knowing, divination, I Ching, Tarot, dreams, meditation, and ritual, Hanlon's poems explore the natural world and the edges of memory, language, and consciousness. Breathtaking in its concision and stirring in its empathy, Silent Letter soars.

Rather than seeking answers, Molly Fuller's Always a Body calls into question the goal of answers, of the idea of linear and logical paths to answers; her poems seek, instead, to replace static answers with a desire to discover meaning through the dynamic of poetic searching. The poems work toward a language that can be used to come to terms with loss through the exploding and re-making of metaphor and what is expected from formal structures of languaging/poetics. Fuller pushes at the confines both of language and the themes of loss, so that the individual and the cosmos converge, creating tensions between what is unified and what is divergent, between other and self, and about the pains and the pleasures of the body, always the body.

Linda Nemec Foster's collection of prose poems is a reflection of the world before COVID. All of the pieces are inspired by other parts of the world-Istanbul, Rome, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Seville-not the familiar landscape of the United States. But, the narrator is definitely not a native of these countries; they are "the other," "the foreigner," the American with a distinct Midwest sensibility who is trying to make sense of a world on the brink of an unforeseen catastrophe. The world as we used to know it.

New Wilderness takes readers through the nuances of raising a mentally ill child whose young adult brain cancer experiences transport this daughter and mother into an uncharted wilderness. With little more than a demagnetized compass and crayon-drawn treasure map, the daughter travels deeper into wastelands. Four states away, her mom charts a new topography to smuggle her back to civilization. The poems in this collection build on a triangulated path that moves between life before, during, and after cancer. Despite compounding loss, disappointment, and destruction, Jenifer DeBellis's versified narratives reveal that paths forged with love can lead even the wildest creatures out of bewildering terrain.

At the intersection of poetry and prose, Sharon White's The Body Is Burden and Delight examines ecological communities in fragile northern landscapes, and in the geography of the poet's daily life. Moving from Denmark and Sweden, to Lithuania, Shetland, and Wales, White explores the inner landscape of myth and dreams inspired by a deep connection to the earth, and the beauty and loss inherent in those ecosystems.

In her powerful debut, R.B. Simon confronts subjects that we often dare not talk about in our daily lives, topics we shy away from in our water-cooler conversations. From miscarriage to addiction and overdose, and from bullying and racism to mental illness and eating disorders, nothing is off limits. Ultimately, Not Just the Fire is a story of resiliency. Weaving a narrative of overcoming in a world often harsh and unfair, the narrator returns again and again to the hope of "the blessed new day."

During his 30+ year career in wildlife management, Jeff Wilson found himself atopeagle nests, deep in bear dens, tracking furbearers on snow covered forest roads, andspending nights under the stars banding loons. His adventures (or misadventures) inwildlife biology, are incredibly informative, entertaining, and occasionally hilarious.These stories communicate a deep passion for wildlife and its future in a changingworld.

Cher Bebe manages the dance floor and flogs patrons at a nightclub while his estranged father takes his last breaths back home; a Michigan tornado spotter grieves the end of his marriage; Maggie Pancake returns to her Minnesota hometown, jilted by her fiancée, a professional clown; and the titularnovella follows fourteen-year-old Sadie and her Finnish immigrant mining family in Iron Range Minnesota in the months leading up to the Milford Mine disaster of 1924. With power and compassion, Jenny Robertson weaves tales that explore the precarity of immigrant life, worker exploitation, the tensions and dangers inherent in growing up, and the ephemeral nature of the American Dream.

Meet Giacomo Agostini, retired coal miner and first-generation American, a son of foreigners, a Depression kid who never got over it, the second-oldest living member of the St. Theresa's Knights of Columbus hall, and a pick-and-shovel man from Appalachian Ohio. Spanning ninety years, James B. De Monte's Where Are Your People From? explores the fellowship and hardship of Midwest Italian-Americans in the post-industrial Appalachian region of Ohio through the eyes of a son of immigrants. With authenticity, humor, and grace, De Monte delivers a truly American story.

A morally dubious chef reacts unconventionally when he comes to believe that his prized dog has killed the pet rabbit of the middle-school girl next door; an angry, second-rate actor seeks a life-affirming path in a place that offers only oddities and dreams; two gamblers descend into chaos and despair; and a love affair between an aging Texas wildcatter and a mercurial art teacher at his son's school goes tragically awry. Crackling with raw truths and lyrical prose, the twelve stories in Corey Mertes's Self-Defense follow their down-on-their luck protagonists through life's narrow passes to its isolated valleys below.

A father tries to explain to his daughter what Earth was like, a boy believes his mother has been abducted by aliens, a ghost hunter wonders if her absent father is a deceased serial killer, and in the near future the sun makes people go insane. Weaving science fiction, gothic storytelling, and paranormality into nine stories and a novella, Nikki Kallio establishes herself as a fresh, innovative, and compassionate voice in speculative fiction and magical realism.

Exploring histories forgotten or often overlooked, Heather Bourbeau's Monarch is a powerful poetic memoir of the American West. Focused on the people and events that shaped California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, Bourbeau crafts a regional history that counteracts the simple narratives we are told and taught. Epic, personal, and compelling, Monarch impacts how we see each other and how we see our shared environment.

The biblical plagues that overtook Egypt in the book of Exodus are transported into the twenty-first century in The Plagues, a collection of eleven stories that take place primarily in St. Louis, Missouri, and its surrounding suburban areas, and Lafayette, Louisiana. Frogs, flies, blood, and boils descend upon a cast of primarily young, LGBTQ+ characters, all searching in some way for love and acceptance amidst burgeoning sexual awakenings. Equal parts playful and personal, Joe Baumann's The Plagues does more than recast the past; it charts a way forward.

The seventeen unrelenting stories in Steve Fox's debut story collection, Sometimes Creek, traverse a sub-zero trail of plausible magic and grit from a kaleidoscope of broken ice at a hockey rink in Wisconsin that coils through haunted rivers and around dangling legs of jamón serrano in sweltering Spanish bars and back again to a place where Kafka and Carver meet up on the page. Fox's clean prose takes you by the hand and weaves a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm into that gauzy space that collectively takes shape in your hands as Sometimes Creek.

The essays in The In-Between State forward a compassionate analysis of bodies: queer bodies, bodies of water, bodies that are hated, and bodies that deserve love. Martha Lundin, in fifteen moving essays, attempts to understand the ways in which people try to shape landscapes-how this can be a violent act, even as it seeks to be loving in some ways, and that this violence is not so different from the ways in which queer people shape their bodies to fit in or live outside of a norm.With essays both personal and progressive, The In-Between State forms a love letter to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and, ultimately, a love letter to Lundin's queer body and queer bodies across the United States.

Reply hazy, try again. All the poems in After the 8-Ball want answers, and so have thrown themselves at the mercy of a black plastic 8-Ball filled with dark blue alcohol and a tiny twenty-sided die. Love, loss, and Lake Michigan feature prominently in this debut collection from Colleen Alles who examines everyday life in the Midwest with precision and depth. From the hound asleep in the sun to the pebbles lined up in the sill of a window facing west, these poems stand ready to accept whatever the 8-ball has in store, hoping, always, for, As I see it, yes.