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The Art of Dissolving is a fantastic book of American surrealist poetry, with Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work.   It includes poems about a home that runs away on stilts from its owners, horses that take over a person's house, and a surgeon who literally tries to reconnect the arteries in a couple's relationship.

Worry the Dead contains poems that deal with love and loss in the post 9/11 world. In 2015 Indy Week selected "Ruby-throated Goner" as a winner for their annual poetry contest.

In the words of the always-incisive Corrinne Cleggs Hales, Familiar History "expertly de-romanticizes the landscape and mythology of the American west, revealing a world defined largely by struggle and failure and broken lives." The poems in these pages take an unflinching look at rural life in the Desert Southwest and reveal a world composed of harshly beautiful scenery, as reflected in the poem "Burning Wishes": Someone said they never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. Me neither, but it seemed sometimes like they ought to be. The bark beetles that crunch in and out of their white fir tunnelsand branch outward until each thorax, leg, and instinct intersects, becoming a web meaning nothing. A cold snap couples indeterminately with wind velocity and the fracture lines of ice particles, killing only incidentally. The message is clear: in the universe of these poems, nature doesn't care about you or the meaning you give it. The book also reveals the child abuse, violence, racism, and poverty endemic to much of this region through the eyes of someone who spent nearly 30 years there. In the title poem, the narrator speaks directly to this relationship between the memories carried in human bodies and those held by the landscapes they inhabit:I will learn to seal everything up inside.We all will. In 1969 the desert will swallowan atom bomb whole. In 1969 my grandmother's pancreas will swallow too much of the awful light from a safe distance inside a bus. After awhile you begin to realize light in the desert can penetrate anything. A 1951 description of the Nevada Test Site, included in an Army brochure for the Camp Desert Rock soldiers, tells them that the desert is a damned good place for disposing of used razor blades. It is. Familiar History is equal parts a lyrical reflection on the relationship between humanity and the natural environment and a deeply personal revelation of the secrets of a family of malcontents. The narrator's story is the story of rural America: a bitter tonic of regret, euphoria, and the search for salvation.

You could say /The Boy with a Sledgehammer for a Heart/ is a book about a break-up, but that wouldn't be entirely true. At its core, this is a book about the things we do and become in order to survive, how we claw our way back to who we used to be only to find ourselves a little different, even after we've fully recovered. And that's okay.

Waiting for Rain by Mary Fox provides poetry that relates to the ordinary person and is suitable for tweens, teens, and adults, touching on common issues in family relations, illness, bullying, and break ups. The author says of the collection: "In collecting the poems, I focused on the moments that people live in between life's more dramatic events-times we are left waiting, resting, hoping, evaluating, mourning, or expecting what might come. When we wait for rain, we can hope for growth, change or relief but we also can think of rain as interrupting our progress, flooding our plans, or in some other way "raining on our parade," as the cliché says. I wanted poems that captured those reflective moments of life, our reactions, when we step back and look for meaning and enlightenment."

The book is the story (in verse and poetic prose) of Jonathan, a rancher who learns how to run a ranch in an environmentally conscious manner. He also learns how treat the animals humanely, and the employees justly. He ensures that a generous portion of land is kept feral as a wildlife refuge and a haven for local flora. As the years pass, he is daily battling cattle rustlers, horse thieves, contact hustlers, and to keep his family's ranch eco-friendly. The drama unfolds until . . .

What we learn from fairy tales is that things do not turn out so well for the Grimm Girl. Her pain and her losses are not hers alone, however, but remain recognizable to all women through the ages. The poems in this collection explore various challenges -- both physical and emotional -- of moving from girlhood to womanhood in 20th century America, a contemporary world, not so far removed from the brothers Grimm.

C. Kubasta's &s is a collection of poetry that explores family, relationships and the meanings we make & take from these interactions, created through eavesdropping, misappropriation and found text. The ampersand knits together these imaginings, questioning whether the everyday -- an awning, a briefcase, a gasket --are what they appear, or are only the constructed symbols the poet makes then refutes.

Bearing the Juice of It All, by Nancy Lynée Woo, is a poetry chapbook that invites the reader on a daring exploration of developing womanhood. These poems engage a loose narrative voice grounded in emotion, pulled forward by relentlessly imagistic language that blurs the lines between dream logic and waking states, mythology and modernity, expectations and reality. The collection questions where the locus of sight is-in her body or his? Reaching into the crevices of a maturing female psyche, the poetic arc probes into themes of sexuality and motherhood, abuse and transformation, abortion and partnership, independence and sisterhood, love and family-all ensconced in the poet's incorrigible optimism and dedication to healing. While these poems may lead into dark alleys, they emerge to illuminate the belief that women are inherently imbued with the right to direct their own bodies, thoughts, voices, and desires.

This chapbook consists of a poem cycle rooted in the East Anglian village of Walsingham, inNorfolk¿ in the visionary experience that made it a medieval pilgrimage site¿ and in the voices ofimagined characters at different moments in its ensuing history.

This short collection is about one leg of the journey of a life shaped in part by the early and unexpected loss of a mother. It is not so much the story of that loss, but of how such a thing informs a daughter's life: How does it impact one's experience of becoming/being a woman? Of early experiences with aging? Of one's relationships with other women (sister, daughter, etc.)? Of love relationships? Through it all the body sings grief, love, as well as fear and anxiety-especially at night. These songs change shape and tone over time, and resolve only in a softening, an awareness of the growing self, and in the acceptance of inevitability. Themes that emerge and are explored: the body, sexuality, death, fear, twinning, aging, magic, song, the night, claiming and re-claiming the self.

Test Tube with a View, by Shira Richman and published by Finishing Line Press, explores the odd results that a spirit of setting out into the wilds begets. In these poems, adventure is evaluated through imaginative music and metaphor, showing the process of getting lost from new vantage points-each with a spectacular view.

The book will mostly speak for itself as you read the intro, epigrams, and poems. Basically it is the story of a rancher who loves his wife and nature, and has learned to ranch the ecological way, with the cows, humans, and woods-birds-flowers-nature coexisting. He has problems first with the employees, who are cattle rustlers, horse thieves, liars, and malingerers. As he learns to deal with these problems and complete his dream of having a one-with-all ranch for him and his wife and the world, he is blind-sided by the state-bullying-economical pressure to change his eco-ranch into a pesticide-poisoning soy bean farm. He wants to return to the eco-ranch-woods, but . . .