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Josh Feit mines decades as a city hall reporter to find metaphors and meaning in bike lanes, zoning code, housing density, and city infrastructure with a set of poems that cherishes urban planning and metro living. It's as if Jane Jacobs and Frank O'Hara made a Surrealist film together. "The wind is made of apartment buildings," he writes in the poem "City Planning Pantoum." And while City planning certainly provides the prompt here (one prize-winning poem details a recent Seattle Dept. of Transportation sidewalk report), this collection translates the NACTO (National Association of City Transportation Officials) lingo of "dwell times" and "linger factors" into verse that contemplates existential moods and aspirations.

The willow tree that forms the heart of Ribot's collection is constantly evolving, "roughed up by high winds," putting forth "a profusion of tightly knit buds" and then new leaves "like pigtails sporting a tie." The poet renders what she sees faithfully, precisely, in musical lines that capture both the willow's beauty and its vulnerability as it holds light and shadow, the present and the past, blue jays and cardinals. Stanza by stanza, the willow becomes an apt figure for the natural world as well as for our own passing lives.-Jennifer Barber Harriet Ribot paints with words, creating a portrait of a willow with March boughs "clean and spare/as a whippet/straining/at the starting gate." With sparse lines she creates mystery, elegy, and focused attention. Step in among the leaves and imagine what tales she has braided into a crown, with grace.-Tina Kelley

Michael Broek's The Window Light, about a devastating time in his son's life, is clearly written with Edward Hirsch's Gabriel in mind. In fact, its use of an epigraph from Gabriel shows the reader the stakes of this collection from the very first page. These poems grapple with the heartbreaking and all-encompassing experience of trying to take care of a child in crisis. It is a work of brutal honesty and self-recrimination that thrums with intensity. While acknowledging how often humans are powerless to save, or even help, those we love most, Broek's tightly crafted, spare poems remind us of the power of art-both experiencing it and making it-to heal.-Jennifer Franklin, No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018)

Our Imaginary Childhood, Sara Watson's vivid new chapbook, takes on the task of narrating childhood through the offbeat, precocious voices of eleven siblings growing up helter-skelter. The mother and father drink and "spend whole days in bed." "They love us, but they have headaches," the unnamed central narrator says, and later adds, "Every family needs a storyteller, otherwise the family is a secret." The slow reveal of this family' secret pries open the brief, compact form of the chapbook. The ending of OUR IMAGINARY CHILDHOOD is worthy of a novella. This is a very poignant and intelligent debut.-Lynn EmanuelThe magic of Sara Watson's Our Imaginary Childhood collects in coffee cans, dirty spoons, crows' nests, and graveyards. This is a family ghost story where the ghosts are alive, playing house or playing dead in a home filled with love and haunted by alcoholism. But in the mailbox or under a rock or beneath a tree there is always a secret password, a key to the kingdom of hazy orange kid dreams. Each of these prose poems is a tiny wonder.-Rochelle Hurt

In the title poem of Dan Bellm's Counting, a circle of rabbis in Talmudic times confess to each other ruefully, "I have never in my life prayed with intention...." "I have been counting chickens...." "I have been counting the layers of stone in the wall...." These poems, on a seeking-and-straying spiritual quest of their own, count and recount the layers of days in a life, ranging widely from yearning, elegy and political outrage to passion, devotion, and gratitude.

The poems in Sleep on Needles disperse human consciousness beyond us vs. them tribalism to create fleeting bonds with any number of species: a garlic flower, some gibbons, a Greenland shark, a nautilus, a blue whale, a rat. Trying to leave room for the impossible, these poems crave experience outside of language. They eschew convenient certainties including homo sapiens' historical claim of dominion over plants and animals. "Memory decants identity," one poem claims, and, thus, within these poems, identity and persona are on the move and always about to change.

Rope Made of Bandages contains poems that describe the end of a woman physician's career during a pandemic. She grieves over her patients' losses of life and limb. She transitions into being a writer. Her path includes her own cancer journey. Exploration of spirituality sees her through grief and burnout. She ends in a place of surrender to her craft.

The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras is a collection of light-hearted poems on such topics as algebra, fractions, Newton's Third Law, inertia, Pi, and other math and science subjects you probably studied in school. Read deeper and it's a commentary on life and love. Fran Abrams loves Pythagoras because his theorem always works, whereas life does not offer much that is certain. In her poem "Ice Cubes," you'll understand about relative density as the cubes float in your glass of scotch. Algebra helps you decide whether to buy that candy bar. Percentages are simply fractions with fancy symbols. With titles like "Poetry is a Word Problem," "Define Infinity," and "Solve My Life," these poems will have you appreciating poetry, math, and science from a refreshingly different perspective. Poet Sandra Beasley says of this book, "Readers who prize the consideration of big questions, balanced against agile specificity of phrase, will delight in this quirky collection."

concrete, rust, marrow is a new chronicle of queer experience from the heart of the Rust Belt. Enveloping themselves in landscapes of murky water and empty factories, these poems wrestle with place, history, queerness, and the natural world, facing down the ghosts of a collective past while imagining a better, kinder future.

Confronting the fragmented narratives of slavery and colonization in the Caribbean, DREAMS OF DIASPORA grapples with questions of place, belonging, and identity of the dispossessed. In scales both intimate and epic, probing the region's revolutionary and literary legacies, these poems wander the seas of the Americas, centering the roles of class, race, economics, and history in the decimation of Haiti and the migration of peoples around the globe. At once eulogy and song, DREAMS OF DIASPORA forges a new understanding of self for the Caribbean's decolonized, reframing what it means to be home.

Somewhere at the heart of every event in the universe, there is an ever unfolding process indistinguishable from what we might call 'play.' In The Equalizing Jokebook, Rose Novick knows this. 'Who can find the logic of this?' these poems ask of our world. 'Truly our thoughts fall short of the gods'.' And yet, for Novick, this is not a lamentation, for the epistemological horizon is a place to dance, to laugh, to stare into the unknown and sing. This, quite simply, is one of the most original, whimsical, and yet well-wrought gatherings of poems I have encountered in quite some time. Open it and enjoy it, 'featherlight, freely and easily.'-Joseph Fasano, author of The Swallows of LunettoRose Novick's debut collection, The Equalizing Jokebook, offers the reader an astonishing journey from Zhuangzi (from which the collection draws its title) and an assortment of Greek philosophers to Paul Klee and the "mirrordark" water of the muddy Wabash. A deeply learned book that nevertheless wears that learning lightly, Novick's collection alternatively breaks your heart and then busts your gut, and it does so while asking the questions we all care most deeply about: identity, loneliness, joy, purpose. The contents and their intellectual underpinning at times evoke a contemporary poet like Troy Jollimore, but so often Novick branches out in new and exciting ways: nonce metrical forms, engaging perspectives, surprising metaphor. Her figurative language frequently calls the reader to relate to the most overlooked lifeforms, as the wonderful sonnet "Low Tide" compares tragic miscommunication to "barnacles that guessed wrong." In this, and so much more, Novick is a poet who resists pandering to the reader and who trusts her own voice. She is exceptional at creating engaging rhythms: her poems range from prosimetra to syllabics to more traditional English iambs. Indeed, Novick delights above all in the beautiful sounds which language offers, in particular excelling in subtle assonances and consonances that cause the reader to stop and smile. This collection demands to be read aloud, and I don't know that a higher praise can be given to a collection of poetry than that.-Andrew Szilvasy, author of Witness Marks

In Reverie Koniecki's to the god of sore feet and bad backs, "faith is a violent waiver" for the pains brought on by destructive family members, economic injustice, systemic racism, and more. This collection is a prayer, a plea, a defiant cry of resolve. Speakers sing "an unsteady soprano of innocence," knowing that "a lure can be mistaken for a life preserver" as they navigate landscapes punctuated by construction sites, frozen food aisles, and drugstores, which in Koniecki's poems become sites as holy as any temple. "Blessed be the weary who are tired of waiting," Koniecki writes; "blessed are these calloused hands / for they shall inherit the rent." In this incisive examination of family, spirituality, and endurance in the face of all odds, she offers guidance and wisdom in soaring verse. The "future is two syllables / too heavy to carry alone," she writes; "you deserve to exhale / without accusation."-Catherine KyleReverie Koniecki casts a warm, piercing eye on how the everyday is woven into the story of the world itself. In bearing witness to the whispered catastrophes of life lived in the twenty-first century, she raises those whispers to shouts, gifting them voice, volume, and veracity. Her poems grant gravity to small moments that pack a nearly unbearable density of insight and music. She is an essential poet.-Connor Stratman