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Please thank you but why is a collection of poems about how we navigate sacred spaces, how we discover what's true, and how the gods might answer our prayers, even as they whisper their own.

Evasion Therapy is the evolution of unresolved grief. It is a toppling collection of avoidance. A bewildered assembly of one foot out the door. Each poem serves as a pawn in pursuit of eluding darkness-of always keeping the light on. Circumventing governance with a zoom in button. The flaw in evasion is its root in running. Eventually, your feet forget. Eventually, the bulb burns out.

This collection will be of interest to those who care for family members with dementia and other debilitating conditions. It grapples with the complexities of being a family caregiver to a spouse with Lewy Body Dementia as he slowly loses autonomy and experiences problems with thinking, movement, memory and hallucinations. It details love and loss in the voices of both the wife and husband.

"Mixing magic and street smarts as easily as English and Spanish, Michelle Lizet Flores gifts us with an intimate but unflinching exploration of the self and the many pasts that shape it. Her Cuban roots and female ancestors imbue her American life and children with a dense, palpable other-worldliness we are the richer for. These poems don't simply celebrate: they show us how to conjure and animate into being a life fully present in all its timelessness."-Andres Rojas, author of Third Winter in our Second Country (Trio House Press, 2021)"Invasive Species plants the reader like a frog on a Florida porch as the sky oranges, time passes, a mother passes, children are born, people pass, hurricanes come and go, the sky goes violet and days become many nights. How much peace we make in all that change depends on the type of lessons we gleaned and the character we were fortunate enough to forge over the fires of hard lessons. Flores teaches us 'how to heal with words rather than herbs.' If not handled correctly, the act of growing can feel invasive and chaotic. However, there is a calm and understood feeling of necessity in the pain that guides Flores' words from poem to poem to beat to story to song. Invasive Species doesn't capture a place, time, history, culture, and simply present it; it captures you, collects you, and keeps you in a jar with these places, people, times, etc. Flores presents Gothic Florida in a Cuban dress, says: 'y que?', and confirms 'It's a verifiable fact / that whiskey tastes best / when you drink it on your porch / while staring at an orange sky.'"-C.L. "Rooster" Martinez, a San Antonio poet and author of A Saint for Lost Things (Alabrava Press, 2020), As it is in Heaven (Kissing Dynamite Press, 2020), and Mexican Dinosaur (Write About Now Press, 2023)"Michelle Lizet Flores' Invasive Species contains the expansive magic required to dress the wounds of heartbreak and survival. Part vexed, Floridian pastoral, part ode to diasporic selfhood, this book enthralled me with its vivid voice, its persistent attention to a self always at odds with geography, familial inheritance, and grief's long tenure. Rooted in hurricanes and heat, Flores invades a southern stillness-she runs the page. And in that surge, this book will upend how you look at the miracle of our temporary bodies, of motherhood and the fleeting moments that compose an undying kind of love. For me, Invasive Species illuminates the dark hallways of life-death and its inevitable lessons-and the conjuro needed to remake the world and to carry on. I invite you to encounter the exposed nerve of these deep roots; "the kind our abuelas taught us to boil, / the kind our children consume."-Jessica Q. Stark, author of Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020) and Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023)

What does it mean to provide hope, encouragement, solace and joy to a dear friend who is staying with you during a clinical trial for pancreatic cancer? My faith informs me that no love is greater than friendship; to lay down one's life for a friend. And yet, I think the power of friendship is generally undervalued by our culture. These poems arose from that context, both personal and societal, as I nurtured plants in my summer garden, ran daily errands in the car, and shared meals and laughter with our friend and her husband, always looking for signs of strength and hope for our days together.

These poems speak to us like a best friend will over a reasonably priced brunch, and we've all got a little less serotonin than we need, so if we hear the perfect combination of words before the eggs arrive, we'll cry right there in front of the whole gorgeous, horrible earth. And these poems are the perfect combination of words. Morgan's voice is that of a friend we know we don't deserve, but desperately, unabashedly adore.-Patrick Whitfill These poems are rapid-pulsed and expansive, littered with art, grit, belly and loss. They're also about the tight little worlds we make between each other-shaded and crosshatched, valued such they hold everything you'll ever need.-Ashley Warlick My Husband is Learning to Draw reminds us that upheaval precedes creation. Like kintsugi, these poems embrace breakage, and Mamie Morgan's lyric voice - generous, nimble, and illimitable - is the gold. To read Morgan is to be cracked open and then repaired: "half filled with sand, half somehow filled with delight."-Kirby Knowlton

Rooted and Reduced to Dust, Ivy Raff's debut poetry collection plumbs the depths of movement, of growth: from one generation to the next, from sickness to health, from Eastern Europe across America. The poems bridge the past with today's heartbreaking tenderness, braiding bravery and vulnerability."These poems are alive," writes Bruce Smith, author of seven poetry collections and finalist for a Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award. In Rooted and Reduced to Dust, Smith says, Raff's work is "lacerating, honest, an inquest, finally, into the strength of love as it is conducted through the body into the poem."Jimmy Santiago Baca, winner of the American Book Award for poetry, calls Rooted and Reduced to Dust "observant, challenging, sensuous, glowing with an undercarriage of mystique." Baca hails the reverent physicality of Raff's poems: "[They] are torsos that twist to embrace the universe. Every muscled line is taut, knowing its desire and how to hold what it loves in its arms."

In "Blood Lies: Race Trait(or)," Karla Brundage offers a thought-provoking journey through the intricate nuances of race, particularly the various facets of Blackness. This collection asks at what point does this mathematical inquiry become traitorous? She takes readers on an exploration of ancestry, unraveling the complex history behind terms like "mulatto," "octoroon," and "quadroon," while also delving into Brundage's personal experiences as a 21st-century woman.With rich, at times brutally honest, lyricism and clever wordplay, Brundage examines the multifaceted nature of race, viewing it through the lenses of history, culture, sexuality, and politics. By the book's conclusion, "Blood Lies" challenges the conventional notion of race, illustrating that it's not simply a matter of bloodlines but a global phenomenon that encompasses the diverse dimensions of blackness, whiteness, and womanness.

In a near-future world where extreme weather events blanket the earth, the remaining human population is forced to move and adapt, guided only by an automated radio weather transmission. The Places Between follows these scattered journeys of survival. Journeys impeded by darkness and cruelty, and driven by hope.Minasian writes with a lyricism and brutal clarity, rendering layered characters who must navigate the horrific manifestations of nature, and the wickedness and barbarity of humanity itself. With chapters that stand alone as their own short stories and also intertwine to create a larger overarching narrative, The Places Between explores the human condition when pushed toward annihilation.

The fierce women in Marie Gray Wise's family did not have to wait for Gloria Steinem to show them the way. These strong women were not afraid to work for what is precious to them and not afraid to speak their minds. These poems are full of their struggles, triumphs, losses, and misunderstandings. From her great-grandmother Anna down to her sister, she inspects and celebrates her family's different legacies.

Entangled is a collection of poems by visual artist and poet Emily Church that examines the in-between state of being a daughter and a mother while maintaining autonomy as an artist. Church utilizes metaphors from the natural world to guide us back and forth through time, recalling memories of growing up in Kentucky to raising children in present day post-Pandemic Brooklyn. The poems examine themes of loss, growth, change, and what it means to let go. We are consistently reminded, when reading these words, that the writer is a trained painter, accustomed to sensing the world in a heightened visual way. Color and light permeate the work, and interspersed within the poems are ink paintings created during the early months of pandemic isolation. The drawings of trees and roots enhance the idea that the author is both grounded in her past, while reaching toward a future.

To read Unfinished Spaces is to catch glimpses of a woman's life, seen through memories that are not always "stubborn puzzle pieces" refusing to fit together, but often full recollections of "mist painting hills on the river's far bank" or "the white birch scraping its branches across the wood." The book makes mention of such present-day events as the visit of Comet Neowise or the war in Ukraine, but usually sticks to the universal and the personal. The poems capture the author's interpretation of life's moments, and the reader may be sure to identify with Susan Hunter's depiction of children who grow and leave empty rooms behind . . . of grandchildren making sense of the world . . . of losses that carry their own poignant memories . . . of dreams that carry memory to another realm. Reading Hunter's book is like viewing the globe of the Earth from a distance and traveling toward the planet, with its landscape coming into sharper and sharper focus. We see a birds-eye view of "the thread of a road tied taut to a knob of land" and hear "the foghorn moaning out into the night ocean." But it's the smaller spaces that are just as meaningful -- A grandparent's bedroom, a room emptied of furniture after a move, a childhood home still filled with memories of a father's pipe smoke. As some doors close in anger and heartbreak, others open to views of a Caribbean sunrise and "a clear view of blue sky down to the harbor." The doors of memory are always open to creativity and imagination and to the phrase that can be pulled through the eye of a needle.

"Waking to Brevity" is Sarah W. Bartlett's poetic love-letter to her partner, moving from their later-life marriage through the debilitating challenges of his Parkinson's Disease. His personal story of courage, humor and determination to live and to die on his own terms, evokes the experience of many. Bartlett has laid their journey of love and loss onto the page with breathtaking honesty and beauty.

The Seed is Waiting in the Dark confronts the realities of ecological catastrophe with the lyric intensity of a life lived reckoning with questions of collective survival. Intimate poems about family give way to broader meditations on climate change, the Korean War, and growing food. Included within this debut collection are five of Goldberg's paintings, which poignantly illustrate these feral, visionary poems. Full of grief, grace, and lessons from the land, The Seed is Waiting in the Dark conjures ancestral instincts to claim belonging within the cycles of natural life.

Heading Out is filled with poems written from the urge to be out, moving on foot, in every weather, alone or with a friend, in town or rural settings. Body, mind, and spirit all contribute, as do ants, wet boots, a single spot of coolness, lichen, and the daytime moon. The poet wants the reader to slide in a bookmark and head out for a walk.