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Marissa Higgins' Shopgirls celebrates the grotesque with unexpected delight. Higgins' precise syllables and subtle alliteration will make you hungry. Flesh, bone, and expectation, Shopgirls is unafraid of breaking and lingering in the resulting pain. You are about to witness the work of a highly skilled surgeon.-Danielle Evennou, author of Difficult Trick How does one negotiate self-preservation in the throes of desire? How do you defamiliarize the familiar that you may understand the self better? Early in Marissa Higgins' chapbook, Shopgirls, the speaker reveals, "I've learned how to preserve/ what remains," and these poems acutely distill the exchange of power dynamics as enrapture defines its own terms. "Don't you know/ what it is to work for love?" we are asked-and haven't "My attempts to please" also been "slow" at times, haven't my fingers reached for something just out of reach, haven't I "[wiggled]/ like a panicked thing, smaller/than a deer or God" in my wantings? With concision-and precision-Higgins refuses to shy away from the body in desire, leaving the reader wanting also to be "even closer to what is/ and was pleasure." -Flower Conroy, author of The Awful Suicidal Swans In Shopgirls, Marissa Higgins creates a world that explores human insecurity by juxtaposing fashion and science. The "anatomy" of her poems "bulging beneath denim" "wound[s] in ways [Higgins] does not know how to heal." It is tight poetry that "takes [you] from behind" and forces "bruise[s] to blossom." It is an emotionally charged volume that pushes our perceptions about capitalism and our bodies to new levels-a genuine vivisection.-Jessica Hylton, author of The Great Scissor Hunt

Riddle's poems of loneliness, love-loss and love re-encountered might be anybody's story. As the author notes, "'It Gets Better' was not a governing idea when I drafted these autobiographical lyrics, but I'm pleased to see that's the trajectory, from childhood to the present. More than a few people in their middle years, of any sexual preference, would recognize the dolor and entrapments described in the first parts of this collection. That it gets better during the later (and lucky) developments of living-well, I don't know how many readers will also recognize that as the arc of their lives; many, I hope."

*Finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize These poems have an incredibly beautiful and painful landscape. The body becomes the field splayed open, as does memory, as does love, as does language. The imagery of the body is sensual and electric and you can feel the speaker risking so much as they turn from one line to another.>Hillary Brown's When She Woke She Was an Open Field are poems written on the surface of the body to be felt in the reverberations of our bones. They are necessary poems written in these times to remind us of our humanity. This is the perilous work of poetry. They are not easy to read and even more difficult to write. These are poems of unflinching bravery, full of complications and difficult truths.>"Remember your landmarks," writes Hilary Brown, whose poems are at once lyric imperatives and stirring invocations, all of them asking us to reckon with the body of our landscape and vice versa. When She Woke She Was an Open Field arrives with a fresh and clear voice that invites its reader to remember they are always already a viewer, a visitor, a voyeur, too. Brown writes the best kind of short poem-careful in its lyricism and reckless with imagistic surprise-& this collection is nothing if not a memorable landmark.>"Cleave" means both to cut something in half and to hold fast to a body or object we hold dear. Hillary Brown's poems investigate the remade female self after brain surgery: an operation that cleaves her vision of herself and the world, but also allows her to imagine a self more fully cleaved to the world she inhabits, where the tongue becomes a "prickly pear/ blossom open/ for rain," and any anonymous young woman can still "be fearless, full to bursting, free.">Hilary Brown is one of those poets who doesn't look away. Who invites you to stare and meets your eyes with her own always steady gaze-even when the world is unsteady, full of loss and all the slow death capitalism has on offer. These poems provide something else, aching bright and sharp. They sing the queer body, the disabled body. They know about not having enough to eat, about country roads, about church and how to live through it. These poems know, most of all, "There's power in there, holding / the discomfort of it close."-Stephanie Young

"In her new collection Lovely, Lesléa Newman takes us on a long glittering walk through nostalgia, from her childhood memories in New York City, to silver sequined mini-dresses and steamy woman love. She holds up a world that is crumbling in our very sight. She holds us close as she guides us through the hardships of being homeless and displaced, being young and queer and still not accepted in our world. Her words are raw and tender, transparent and visceral. She holds nothing back. She aches with a vulnerability that both calls us out and challenges us to do our part to make our planet safe and inhabitable."-Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, author of Arrival "Wise, sharp, sometimes rueful, often witty, always self-aware, Lesléa Newman's Lovely ranges across the landscape of human experience, reflecting on the moral complexity of childhood, the many phases of Newman's relationship with her mother, growing up and growing old, and the lifelong weave of sex and love. Lovely offers a kaleidoscope variety of forms, including ghazals, villanelles, and playful forms of Newman's own invention, such as 'My Mother's Stories, ' a marvelous portrait composed almost entirely out of soap opera titles."-Joy Ladin, author of Fireworks in the Graveyard "Lesléa Newman lures the love poem into beguiling territory in her new collection Lovely. Funny, sassy, tender, Newman knows how to entice a line-with formal dazzle she gives us the beat of the repeat (the villanelle, the triolet) in her pitch-perfect, lucid voice. With a marvelous mimic's ear, she even conjures up her recently deceased mother's exasperating advice as feisty love-loss litanies. Newman examines the sheer loveliness of girlhood as she lived it and observes it now, reveling in the girly side of adult lesbian love in a woman's long relationship with her butch. As the poet leads us from childhood to the pleasures of mature love-yes, in a garden, too-she sketches a self-portrait over time, from makeup to curls. Calling all Lesléa Newman fans: alluring Lovely is a must for your shelf."-Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst, Poems "Lovely is an adventure and a romp, a slide through loves, a trip back in time, a reflection of earlier days. There are poems where Newman allows us to hear her mother's voice, her admonitions, the Brooklyn accent, the cadences, the oft-repeated clichés, in a playful way. In the final section, we find an unleashed exuberance, a celebration of same-sex marriage, an all-abiding adoration for a life partner, and also, throughout, an over-arching love for life, for mangoes and chocolate, a 'Paradise Found.'"-Laura Foley, author of Night Ringing "In this book, innocence yields to awakening, cruelty softens into compassion, and ever-present delight tussles with ever-looming death. Lovely offers tender requiems, taut memories, hot pink love letters, and odes to the edible. Poet Lesléa Newman writes with rhythm, humor, sensuality and care. Lovely is just that!"-Lenelle Moïse, author of Haiti Glass

Week/End is a portrait of a break-up. With any break-up, with any loss, we're left to tend to a dissolved intimacy, the empty space where closeness was. With equal candor & imagination, Duncan reshapes intimacy into a verb. Ebb. Flow. Break. Turn. Let. Go. She immerses us in closure's mud & fog, in closure's very open-ended-ness. Duncan writes with great attention to paradox, tenderness & transparency. In Duncan's tender grasp, the clouds become an elegy, sorry, a masterpiece. She grapples with the lost beloved, "How do you want me to tell it?" I'm grateful she told it as boldly, nuanced, & carefully as this. --Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium and Be/Hold Week/End is a beautiful chapbook full of longing & surrender, desire & departure. The poems make loud all the silences that fall, sometimes, between us and the ones we love. These sweet little violences we make of ourselves and each other are captured starkly here with honesty & candor. I admire this courageous writing and I am thankful that it exists.>Language is Sarah Duncan's playground where she doesn't follow the rules of the turf -- she snowboards down the slides, flips the swings upside down to wear them as hats. Duncan does not just play with language. She invents it. This chapbook reads like a relationship on a dissection table -- it picks at tiny bones. It magnifies the little, unlivable moments that haunt us with their humiliation after. The parts of love that are too desolate, too awkward, the parts of the story you leave out in your retelling to friends. The parts that most poems forget or conceal. And here, gorgeously, Sarah Duncan shows us the quiet elements of trauma, mental illness, and heartache and doesn't let them go unsung. This book made me feel less alone. - Megan Falley, author of Drive Here and Devastate Me The inscription reads "this book is 4 lonely queers everywhere" and it is apt. For any of us who have struggled with the incapacitating loneliness that comes from isolation, this chapbook encapsulates that sentiment over the course of a difficult week in Sarah Duncan's life. Duncan writes viscerally and poignantly about shame, solitude, desire, ending, inadequacy, distance, wellness, need, finality, vulnerability and gutteral yearning.-Mal Blum (writer/musician/fan of nothing)

*Finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize The poems themselves are archives, of the body, of place, of the body's gestures and movings through the city of these poems. The images are electric with worry and wonder, memory and possibility, and through it all, love.>"What does courage mean anymore?" asks the speaker in Freesia McKee's How Distant the City, a question that pulses through the nuanced body of this book to its profound extremities. "She would fly home more, but TSA never knows who to get to do the pat-down," comes one moment of revelation. "You realized your pain isn't the only pain/ worth knowing," comes another. How Distant the City is a courageous and arresting debut. -Julie Marie Wade, author of When I Was Straight and SIX: Poems Freesia McKee's How Distant the City is a city of questions, asking us to account for how we pay attention to our small wild moments in a time made strange by war. This poet pushes us to keep circling around what most would pass by to mark our stains on each page, to turn our ears to notice who has gone by and who has gone missing.-Ching-In Chen, author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant Freesia McKee's debut chapbook, How Distant the City, illuminates geographical, emotional and psychic spaces to expose the alienation and displacement we create when we substitute apathy and avoidance for empathy and connection. This collection shines most brilliantly in poems that connect the quotidian to the remarkable, traversing with linguistic adroitness through representations of loss, rape, racial injustice, murder and commonplace acts such as getting a haircut or setting a Thanksgiving table. In the juxtaposition of everyday acts to acts of terror, McKee draws attention to the dialectics of the self's most private desires, struggles and traumas with those of the displaced and terrorized "others" in our villages, in our hearts, in our local and national news, and in our global community. McKee boldly makes connections across differences with a poetic fluency that is vibrant, honest, inspiring and chock-full of integrity.-Donna Aza Weir-Soley, author of First Rain, Eroticism, Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women's Writings, The Woman Who Knew and co-editor of Caribbean Erotic.

Layered and heartrending and transcendent, this is Ladin's best book yet. The speaker's nearly omnipresent fear-and acceptance-of the possibility of impending death are offset by her eagerness to speak, her expressions of love, and the poems' persistent music. And whether considering "the snake of time," the curving of eternity, or "plain old forever," these poems are chock-full of the myriad nouns of the world-which is to say the concrete feel and fabric of living: "I want to swallow the ocean of more, yes more."-Ellen Doré Watson, author of Dogged Hearts and pray me stay eager A Sapphic glance at the Pleiades; a Heraclitean thought on I-95; a siddur-derived "ritual for comforting someone afflicted by a nightmare"; a Woody Allenesque "death, shmeth"-these moments among many others blend into the improbably triumphant harmony of Joy Ladin's new collection. Woeful and ecstatic, earthy and ardent, Fireworks in the Graveyard enacts its title.-Rachel Hadas, poet, critic, and author of Questions in the Vestibule Today, "The world/grew wider, warmer, more dangerous, /more densely cross-referenced/with emptiness." Poet Joy Ladin again gets the temper of a complicated world-inner/outer-down on the page: "life may be all there is." Still, ". . . that tree over there [is] spinning light into sugar." Her poems rescue us from history as we read.-Hilda Raz, author of All Odd and Splendid The Zen admonition 'to live as if you were already dead' is suffused in every one of these watchful poems. Start anywhere. Or turn to "Balance," a masterful crystallization of what happens when meditation and lyric poetry become indistinguishable from one another. -Timothy Liu, author of Kingdom Come: A Fantasia

Sarah Caulfield's work is inspired-in the antique sense of the verb inspirare, to impart, to instill, to breathe life into. Fully inhabiting the fragility and messiness of ailing bodies and anxious minds, Caulfield probes with surgical ruthlessness and hard-earned empathy into the meat of something that might be called (if this collection did not resist the clichés of universality) the human condition. "Your spine is made of beach glass," a time-traveling woman, speaking "To The Girl I Was," informs her past self. "It will withstand." The same is true of the seventeen spoken-word poems that make up the vertebrae of SPINE. These are stories about pain and compassion, despair and endurance, doubt and faith, that will not "fade in the telling." They will withstand.-Samantha Pious, Finalist for the 2015 Charlotte Mew Prize SPINE stitches together a mythology of sickness, without romanticising it-this is vital, visceral work, grounded in the realities of blood and bone. Glittering fragments of imagery repeat and refract throughout the collection, weaving through a world of sterile hospital walls and incense-rich catholic churches. Here, religion, sex, illness, and death all bleed into each other: themes not isolated but mutually entrenched, and foundational to Caulfield's voice. This complex self-portrait is an assured debut that overwhelms the senses and improves on every reading.-Hel Robin Gurney, nominee for the Rhysling Poetry Award, spoken word performer and scholar (The Sleeping Princess, EdFringe, 2016) Sarah Caulfield's writing is contemporary and engaging. Honest and important. I'm really happy to have a writer like Sarah creating LGBT work that is likely to be read forever; she makes the new writers' landscape much more exciting.-Remilyn Browne Oshibanjo, member of London-based creative collective SXWKS, author of these are the most terrifying thoughts

In Farrell Greenwald Brenner's playful, cutting Diatribe from the Library, books are toxins, grenades, they have bones. Books are typed on cigarette papers and smoked outside of the library. Farrell writes of the burning of books, reminds us that "witch-burning is still in vogue," and hints at the smoldering fires of the Holocaust. All of this feels even more palpable as we enter an era with a president-elect who states that the burning of the U.S. flag should be punishable by the loss of citizenship. What is citizenship? What happens "when your family crosses an ocean"? What is displacement and diaspora-for Jews, Palestinians, African-Americans? Can the library, can the book, heal wounds-"this/is mine/the word/the page/the book"? Farrell's book itself is a kind of antidote: "I wish for you the megaphone into which you can spit that fire/and become a dragon of your own."-Becca Shaw Glaser, co-author of Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out Bursting with playful repetition, Farrell Greenwald Brenner's Diatribe from the Library is a storm of lyrical verse. Her collection serves as treatise on the millennial college experience-both in and outside the library-with unconventional odes to the "red solo cup," a sly "Psalm" to "...dark roast, merciful be / Thine earthen beans divine," and a hat's off to the "fairy godmothers," of "JSTOR / and SAGE." Often abandoning traditional form and punctuation, Brenner surprises us often with this smart and charming debut.-Christina Quintana, author of The Heart Wants

Wendy DeGroat's Beautiful Machinery is a fine collection of intelligent, witty and moving poetry. She is direct without ever being simple. Her ear is excellent and she creates webs of sound. She writes love poems that are sensual and never sentimental. These poems bring you in contact with someone you want to know.-Marge Piercy, award-winning author of a memoir, 17 novels, and 19 books of poetry, most recently Made in Detroit Reading Wendy DeGroat's poetry makes me think of the phrase, "daily bread." Precise imagery, the joy of internal rhymes, and the light touch of formality are abundant in these poems. Attuned to the music of spoken word, DeGroat's lyricism and her sense of connection to the natural world, to the "beautiful machinery" of the beloved's body, provide substance and sustenance for the heart, for the imagination.-Janice Gould, author of Doubters and Dreamers, and the forthcoming chapbook, The Force of Gratitude Wendy DeGroat's Beautiful Machinery draws its title from "Running Late," a playful and beautifully wrought poem about the body's wonders, yet the book maps not just the body. It expands to cover the difficult territory of marriage, divorce, sexuality, feminism, and new love-all with the same tender honesty of the title poem. In "Ode to Spiders" she writes, "Webs etch-a-sketched across the deck, / watch them cast lines, ride the wind." DeGroat has etch-a-sketched her own lines across traditional themes-and they merit your careful attention.-Sierra Golden, author of Aristotle's Lantern The female body, that "beautiful machinery," is Wendy DeGroat's subject. It is the "lit wick flaring" or the tingle of taut nipples that makes it so "hard/to get ready for work." In language luscious and liquid, these poems invite the reader to join her in wonder and praise.-Kim Roberts, Co-Editor, Beltway Poetry Quarterly

In The Great Scissor Hunt, Jessica K. Hylton showcases emotions on the edge. This is a collection full of turbulent inner dialogue-a war within the poet's mind-stuck straddling the fence between lust and love, forgiveness and hate, grand images and mundane trivialities of daily life, and an intense, almost childlike longing for home, coupled with an overpowering desire for adventure and the unknown. These emotions are presented raw and uncensored, and are woven together with sharp humor and skeptical nostalgia. The characters we meet are flawed and often unreliable, moving with uncertainty through their relationships. As readers, we are left not only questioning the nature of our desires, but the ways in which we came to those desires in the first place.-Jess Hager "[T]here's something/Intoxicating about the taste of skin/Designed to peel away," Jessica K. Hylton writes in her incisive collection of poems, The Great Scissor Hunt, poems that seek language for the excess of bodies and the excess of loves that are "not written in the skies/But scarred into wrists." Inevitably, language fails these bodies and sensations, but instead of conceding their unrepresentability, Hylton's poems limn and lineate them. They give form to nights "with too much/Alcohol and not enough sleep," and they give voice to the "razor blade wielding confessionalists" of this collection who, instead of merely peeling and peering below the skin, crave and carve with "unrestrained/Lust," with the honest hunger of women who refuse to be denied their own bodies-or each other's.-Billie R. Tadros Jessica K. Hylton's confessionalist collection, The Great Scissor Hunt, is both honest and frank as each piece gives you a thrill like peeking in through the window to see those intimately tense moments between the poet-incurably lovesick and incredibly cynical-and her lovers-blissfully manic and void of all empathy. Unnoticed from the sill, the reader slips into synesthesia at the visceral and inventive ways the strangers move. The characters you meet as you flip through the pages are captured in unforgettable snapshots, tied to a moment, to the wrong thing they said, the expectation they never lived up to, or the incredible sex they used to have.-Sami Richardson

The work of the poet is to bear witness and tell truths, to report and document the beautiful and the strange, the twisted and the sweet. Because this is the work, being a poet means coming to terms with the joys and burden of saying, "I am here. This is the story." Sometimes that work comes at expense of comfort and sometimes it comes at the expense of the pained expectation to remain silent, to tow the line. In this raw, wondrous, and heartbreaking debut, Kathryn Leland's body is given in full to the work, and that body is hammered into wood, into bedroom doors slammed shut, into dented car hoods, into a garden of bruised soil purpling to blooms of Aster and Dahlia. These are not flowers of melodrama. This garden is the reality of wreckage, the salvaged self of a girl becoming a woman. This is Leland learning if she can make a body for herself, "they can burn it, tear it, throw it away," but through the work there comes the toughened spirit of a poet and the resolve to say, no matter what, "This happened."-Bryan Borland & Seth Pennington (Sibling Rivalry Press) Remarkable is the generosity of Kathryn Leland's gaze, how it never settles with her own concerns but encompasses the entirety of a family knotted with loss and violence. Her poems strive to protect even when no protection was extended; they lend compassion to those times when there was little to be found. The result captures a difficult, unflinching truth while also striving toward a time when "we stop letting him be / the most important thing that happened to us." This is a debut that survives on a belief in poetry-how it's possible to write your way out, how writing down the impossible means that "if you make a body for yourself out of paper, they can burn it, tear it, throw it away, but you will always be able to make yourself a new one." To read I Wore the Only Garden I've Ever Grown is to bear witness to a phoenix rising, but a phoenix that never once forgets how she was first burned to ash.-Jessica Jacobs & Nickole Brown

Finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize Acid and Tender is rich with music, vivid detail and the tensions suggested in the title. The poems that explore Frida Kahlo's life and art mirror her surreal imagery and passion, a worthy homage. Jen Rouse gets to the heart of both poetry and painting when she writes, I paint/ the flowers so they/ will not die.-Ellen Bass, Judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize Jen Rouse's poems are the dark and delightful imaginings of a born fairytale maker. Into the woods we go, there to find a girl with a hummingbird head, a resurrected Frida, a pair of small ruthless kings, a phoenix in a coffee shop, blow darts, knives, wings of Jurassic proportion. All is fabulous, all is makebelieve. Or not. Reader: read carefully. These poems walk the blood edge of real.-Maureen Seaton, Author of Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems Jen Rouse's Acid and Tender embraces the tragic myth of Frida Kahlo-though not through the artist's biography. Instead, this poet approaches the iconography of Kahlo's paintings as if crafting intercessory prayers to the feminist icon. The poetry then shifts from art historical references to a personal journey that indulges the memories of being a mother, daughter, and granddaughter confronted by mythic figures. Such abstract memories, in turn, leave her readers incessantly craving more of that sweet nectar sought by the hummingbird that weaves its way through Rouse's collection.-Christina Morris Penn-Goetsch, Professor of Art History, Cornell College

Winner of the 2016 Charlotte Mew Prize The centerpiece of Odd Mercy is "The Little Mommy Sonnets," a crown of sonnets that carries us poignantly through the life and death of the poet's mother, as well as their complicated bond over time. I was impressed with Gail Thomas' dedication to craft, her richness of detail and especially her deft transitions from the end line of one sonnet to the opening line of the next. The challenge here is to repeat the line, but to make it new, to show us another facet, and Thomas does that so skillfully in these poems, propelling us forward through the narrative. Poetry uses words to convey what is beyond words, to say the unsayable. The last line of Odd Mercy expresses this paradox tenderly as the poet reflects on her mother: "your words/now gibberish, your voice always in my head."-Ellen Bass, Judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize The stunning centerpiece of Odd Mercy, "The Little Mommy Sonnets" explores a complicated mother/daughter relationship that is turned on its head by dementia. "Did we find each other too late or just in time?" asks the daughter as her mother's "sharp tongue dissolves" and her own "armor melts." Beautifully written, heartfelt, generous, and forgiving, all the poems in this collection touched my heart deeply. Gail Thomas is a poet of tremendous talent.-Lesléa Newman, author of I Carry My Mother On Waving Back (2015) These are poems of authority and grace, alive with the pulse of desire and the mystery of our deep connections.-Joan Larkin Thomas brings precise observation and earned wisdom to poems in which the "bitter and the sweet entwine."-Robin Becker

In A Bracelet of Honeybees, Lynn Strongin conveys braided stories of aging, pain, and sexuality through her signature genius with language. In these poems, we find Strongin, an older lesbian poet, surviving with the disabling remnants of a childhood bout with polio. Strongin's language is always lush and playful; her imagery always surprising; and her allusions always erudite. No emotion, notion, or possibility is missing in these sharp-witted, sometimes twisted, poems. Strongin writes despairing lines such as "all nights are hospital nights" and "In my childhood all cities were London bombed by the Germans" alongside praiseful stanzas such as "Unseen fire/ Reflected in your round face/ my ample, deep desire." A Bracelet of Honeybees is a joy ride; it's full of honey and sting.

*Finalist for Lambda Literary Award! These poems are brilliant and dangerous. The opening poem, "Invisible Woman, Dancing," is the best protest poem of the decade. The speaker attends a party full of casual, good-intentioned racists and ableists. The ending of the poem is explosive. Constance Merritt shows incredible range - erotic poems to a wayward lover; blues lyrics so rhythmic I can nearly hear the guitar; and devotional poems that offer "this, you know, is love, is all, the end." Blind Girl Grunt is a major work by a major poet.-Jillian Weise Merritt's latest collection is a back in bend-bend in love, bend in prayer, and bend in anger. A Blues infiltrates these lines and stanzas, ready to sing and stay (as any devoted lover) through the long haul. And the haul here is a woman, her myriad contents, in medias res.-CM Burroughs Beyond their shared-and dazzling-immunity to taboos, the poems in Constance Merritt's fourth book are very different from each other. Different in form, from stern villanelles to get-drunk-on-them blues poems to wandering narratives. And they are different in their tones, with ruthless self-awareness next to sexy lullaby next to persuasive rage at being "unmoored and vanishing" beyond "the flag of whiteness." Even within single poems, tone is protean. "The Less Than Greater Than Blues" is goofily playful and also as blunt as blunt gets about the roots of the suffering we cause each other. The penultimate poem "Advent" shifts between a longing that intends to wreck and a longing that intends to redeem. In fact the book as a whole shifts between these longings. As do we. Merritt implicates us gently but without hesitation, wrapping us into the "brilliant skin, the ruinous eyes, / the body poised in transit" that opens the collection and that judges and blesses, throughout it. Blind Girl Grunt is supple, and rigorous, and so surprising. It is vital.-Taije Silverman

Risa Denenberg's Whirlwind @ Lesbos is a collection chronicling one life echoed in many lives, real and imagined: girlhood loves, activism, friendships ravaged by AIDS, a lover lost to suicide, a son lost to a custody battle, the body getting old, the heart congesting. Women's voices speak across time and place, but are all bound by the same fierce desires, the same heartaches. Whirlwind @ Lesbos is a decisively erotic, explicitly lesbian collection, where the speaker being entered by a lover feels herself to be "a glove/surrounding her like a galaxy." But even the intensity of passion is tinged by melancholy, a sense of separateness. "I am no more alone than Emily Dickinson," notes the speaker, as if that fragile link to the most isolated of women poets might provide a measure of comfort. These poems are written at a distance from the speaker's passionate early self, recalling with a sense of astonishment the time "When I was still trying/to undress the universe/and know her." That time is no more. "And that has been my story," says the speaker ruefully in another poem, "not her face/but my hapless life." Yet despite a life punctuated by pain and loss, these are proud, tender and passionate poems, recounted unflinchingly, with acute lyric intensity. @ RACHEL ROSE "I wanted more of those nights/ your wild fingers inside me" stately yet vulnerable, these poems are vibrant reports of humans wrestling with that icky thing, baggage- sometimes lost, sometimes stolen, never forgotten. Full of passions marked by place, but not by boundaries, Whirlwind @ Lesbos is a necessary collection in our contemporary era of shoved-away storage units and international border politics. @ AMY KING Risa Denenberg's Whirlwind @ Lesbos is a fine coming-of-age collection especially relatable to women who evolved during the 70s and 80s and discovered woman love. Spare and sensual, the poems embody the struggle with yearning, loss, and acceptance. Confronting the complexity of physical desire and how it wanes with age, these poems leave the reader wanting to read them again and again. They are the real stuff-emotional heart and power. @ CHELLA COURINGTON Risa Denenberg's Whirlwind @ Lesbos is a book of life lived, the sense we have when older that this, here, now, is all epilogue. Denenberg recalls the thrill of young love, or was it love imagined, or love in history books, or myth? They run together, overlap, through echoes of Sappho 31, "He seems to me equal to the gods," the lover who can bear proximity to the beloved without implosion. Now, though, when spring returns, / the forsythia fail to astonish. As sure as I know the anhedonia of which Denenberg speaks, I know these poems are a pleasure. @ MICHAEL H. BRODER

WINNER OF THE BI BOOK AWARD "Home is the structure you build when nowhere else will have you," writes Ann Tweedy in this gutsy, no-nonsense collection of poems built on a precarious and often tender journey through homes no longer available to return to. The result is neither sadness nor nostalgia; it is hard, clean narrative of self-preservation and survival, fitted with unexpected joy. I feel such kinship with these poems, their testament to the strength and determination of women and men who struggle to build life anew, and to find home and happiness in a world of travail. What a blessed space this book is: a home for the wayward soul.>Ann Tweedy's first book is a brave and honest examination of liminality. In delicate lyrics she confesses to trespass, asking readers to question the boundaries between acts and identity, sexuality and family. The Body's Alphabet documents the poet's courage, living openly as a bisexual feminist. Although childhood logic taught her that "home is the structure / you build when nowhere else will have you," these beautiful poems knit and nest safe haven for a life spent gathering freedom.-Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics What made me sit down and read The Body's Alphabet, cover to cover, in a single evening? Perhaps it is the way that I know, in Ann Tweedy's poems, I will find the unvarnished truth, and a voice with "the drowsed freedom to talk about anything." And I know I will find that truth compassionately rendered, details delicately arranged like the flowers of the "dutiful and stubborn" forsythia of which she writes. This is a book about finding homes for ourselves-homes for our adult selves, even as complex memories of our childhood homes still live inside us; homes for our bodies; homes in the natural world. Tweedy's vision is both hopeful and wise.-Katrina Vandenberg, author of Atlas and The Alphabet Not Unlike the World

These poems are lush, melodious, striking. Abe Louise Young isn't afraid to be brash, to be soft, to be big, to be the one to tell the queer kids to keep living. This is a potent and necessary collection.

"I revel in the genius of simplicity" Laura Foley writes as she gives us in plain-spoken but deeply lyrical moments, poems that explore a life filled with twists and turns and with many transformations. Through it all is a search for a fulfilling personal and sexual identity, a way to be most fully alive in the world. From multicultural love affairs through marriage with a much older man, through raising a family, through grief, to lesbian love affairs, Night Ringing is the portrait of a woman willing to take risks to find her own best way. And she does this with grace and wisdom. As she says: "All my life I've been swimming, not drowning." -Patricia Fargnoli, author of Winter, Duties of the Spirit, and Then, Something I love the words and white space of poetry. I love stories even more. In this collection, Laura Foley evokes stories of crystallized moments, of quiet and overpowering emotion, of bathtubs and lemon chicken. The author grows up on the pages, comes of age, and reconciles past with present. Almost. Try to put the book down between poems to savor each experience. Try, but it won't be easy. -Joni B. Cole, author of Toxic Feedback, Helping Writers Survive and Thrive Plain-spoken and spare, Laura Foley's poems in Night Ringing trace a life story through a series of brief scenes: separate, intense moments of perception, in which the speaker's focus is arrested, when a moment opens to reveal a glimpse of the larger whole. Memories of a powerful, enigmatic father, a loving but elusive mother, a much older husband, thread Foley's stories of childhood, marriage and motherhood, finally yielding to the pressure of her attention, as she constructs a series of escapes from family expectations, and moves toward a new life. In these lucid, intense poems, Foley's quiet gaze, her concentration, and emotional accuracy of detail, render this collection real as rain.-Cynthia Huntington, author of Heavenly Bodies Foley's voice rings with quiet authority undercut by calamity, examining a life so extraordinary, she seems to have lived several people's lives, setting a high bar for poetic craft she meets, in great mystery perfectly expressed in the tiny, quotidian, "spent matches pressed on wet pavement," to soulful beauty, "as wind lifts/every shining wave"; in wisdom rooted in humor, from the deliciously funny "Flunking Jung," to self-deprecating wit, misreading "poetic" as "pathetic," reminding us wisdom is love, grown from self-compassion.-April Ossmann, author of Anxious Music

"I write for those women who do not speak," said Audre Lorde. But in the case of Paper Cranes, Dinah Dietrich writes as a lesbian speaking for herself, with delicacy and honesty, about her journey from silence to speech. The poems are situated in a diminished present, remembering childhood and family, painful and pleasurable moments, like the red paper crane of the title poem which gave her "the gift of experience / the gift of memory." With the utmost economy, a small stanza can evoke a lifetime of deprivation: "In my room at home, / I struggle for light. / The plants strangle / at the small window." With a fine ear and a light touch, Dietrich courageously charts a course back to life from the brink of death. For those of us who have been to this outsider's hell, it's a comfort to hear the voice of a sister traveler.

* Winner of the Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew Prize This collection is quiet in its transformations-both imagined and radically real-as the speaker allows us to understand different ways in which "love has gone and left [us]." The images that cypher throughout the manuscript-Blue Mosques, Persian seaweed, the song of the muezzin, goats left bleeding in the street-ally themselves with literary allusions from Millay and Dickinson to Zafon and Stein to create a new oeuvre of sound, voice, and color that is wholly the poet's own making. At once melancholy and defiant, On Loving a Saudi Girl wakes some of the most difficult, buried truths of what it is to "love in silence, with deeds and not with words," creating new ways for the reader to surrender again and again until surrender is made new. -Meg Day, Judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize Between East and West, both lovesick and at a loss, the innovative lyrics of Carina Yun's On Loving a Saudi Girl pronounce what-for this poet-has been forbidden, dangerous. "The brittle Black Sea is more than I can bear," the poet writes. Reading Yun's poems is not a casual exercise. The work is rooted in necessity, the necessity to uncover a world where the many dimensions of love coexist.-Sally Keith Carina Yun's debut chapbook, On Loving a Saudi Girl, is an enthralling sequence of intimate lyrics-gorgeous poems of love, longing, and loss. Interleaved among letters home, song-like addresses to Millay, Dickinson, and Stein, dreams and nightmares, we hear the rush of the Marmara Sea, the muzzein's calls to prayer, the traffic and trams of urban Istanbul, and the clatter of hail on a Stockton street. Yun's work pays rapt, word-wise attention to what living feels like. These are startling, memorable poems.-Jennifer Atkinson Carina Yun's poems map a landscape where travel and a love of place merge with the loss of an erotic obsession. It's a startling distillation of sensual experience-bodily, grieving, joyful. This is a wonderful debut. -Bruce Snider

Each poem in this radiantly plainspoken collection offers subtle and penetrating observations that swell to a rich tapestry of ordinary life, beheld from a stance of grace and buoyancy. Starting with intimations of desire in childhood, these poems travel through ordinary domestic scenes to the blessing of a maturity in which the narrator, still embracing desire and wild promise, thrives in the midst of life's darker gifts. This collection is truly a joy to read. It puts to shame those of us who walk through our days with "the din of loneliness," ignoring life's many invitations for bliss.

...alive with passion.>...these poems achieve the seeing that comes with compassion.>G.L. Morrison displays an immense range of emotions...>If love had a voice, this would be it...>...a delight of investigation into all the rumors of women's emotions.>...a formidable, brilliant queer intellect.>...one of the most inspiring collections of poetry I've seen in the last decade.- Regie Cabico