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Jackie Craven toys with time in WHISH, winner of the 2024 Press 53 Award for Poetry. Surreal prose blocks follow the uneasy relationship between a wistful narrator and shape-shifting characters-managers, bookkeepers, secretaries-who manifest as hours of the day. "It's rare to find such perfect prose poetry," says series editor, Tom Lombardo. "Jackie Craven's abrupt swerves and disruptive metaphors drop readers off cliffs, repeatedly." Startling, provocative, and darkly comical, WHISH speeds along a "quantum highway" where memory and loss plume into stained glass light.

Mark Cox pulls no punches in these candid poems about family, relationships, loss, regret, growing older and our human condition, generally. "Looking back for a low point marking the worst of my insobriety, it might be that signal moment I put out my cigarette in the holy water font of St. Paul's Catholic church, right in front of the priest, I might add. . . " Sometimes wry, sometimes tender, always honest and thought provoking, this is the seventh volume of poetry from a lauded veteran poet who has been publishing prominently for almost forty years.

Fish Streets before Dawn brings us all the fabric of Rick Campbell's created worlds, and then he takes us further as his energy expands and contracts along newer avenues of thought and feeling. Campbell is one of his generation that took to America's roads and byways, old cars, hitchhiking, The Greyhound, and just plain walking. . . . Campbell's wanderings and questing are testimony to the core of his art: surviving, yes, but surviving as the step that allows us to pursue any small good we can bring along with us. (from the Introduction)

Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia, offers up his newest full-length collection of poems and demonstrates his dependably keen observational skills that elevate landscapes and people into an almost mythic realm. In many of the poems there is, as well, a threatening presence from whose grim circumstances he wrestles, if not hope, glimmers of its possibilities. And always there are signature poems like "Poet in the Schools" that simply lift off the page with a storyteller's finesse "for every single one of us / who's ever not been called on / who's felt hung out to dry, been picked last, / been poked, tripped, and toppled, / lost, strung out, yearning, abused, dying / somewhere out of sight / in our private universes, and he, he has opened the rooms / of paradise / for us to see / how simply easy it is / to smile. . ."

In Mummery, all the world's a stage. Historically, mummery requires silence, but on the stage crafted by Maura Way, nothing goes unsaid. Poem after poem presents a speaker unafraid to dissect the performance of a life in which every familiar story is rendered the strangest adventure. (Christopher Shipman) These poems are wise, genial, witty, and sharp as acid rain. They sing hard through American heartache. (Catherine Wagner) We're lucky when a poet's sense of humor merges with old-soul wisdom . . . . This poet, who, she avows, has "seen clowns from / both sides now." (Janet Holmes)

Internationally acclaimed ekphrastic poet Hedy Habra's most recent collection is luminous and powerful in its exploration of women and art. Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? turns on a superb and often spellbinding use of anaphora exploring artists, muses and creative practice. Reminiscent of Anne Carson's Short Talks, Habra composes poems as alternatives including on topics such as Half-Open Doors, Hot Flashes, Heartbeats, Fractals, Lovers' Encounters on TV Shows, Ciphers, and Keys. These ultimately culminate in the question, "Or What Is Life If Not A Constant Carving Of Oneself?" Using diverse sources including art from Remedios Varo, Shiharu Shiota, and Wadada Leo Smith, this is poetry as "mobilis in mobile," expressing haunting and indelible feminist voicings of women in art. -Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature, Melbourne, Australia

Blair's wonderfully sensual poems teem with animals and insects who soothe and torment, whose lives and deaths complement and foreshadow joys and sorrows, as the speaker copes with the decline and loss of loved ones: "can there be any/ ecstasy/ like a cardinal/ in a birdbath/ unaware/ of the cat below," which precedes the poem bearing news of her sister's stage four diagnosis. The oneness yields a profound acceptance, as when rotting salmon bodies feed "the future with their pasts,/ bridging life with death/ with life again." -April Ossmann

Terri Kirby Erickson, winner of the 2021 international Book Award for Poetry for her sixth collection of poems, A SUN INSIDE MY CHEST, offers up a series of new poems on family, health, loss, and healing, along with selected poems from her previous six collections.

Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough is a testament to Shuly Xóchitl Cawood's belief that it's the moments that matter-the ones you want to relive, the ones you want to take back, the ones you can never forget. Her poems often hone in on a particular story where life took a turn, or a truth was revealed. They mine regret and longing, travel through joy and sorrow, and hold on to a vision of the future while trying to let go of the past.

In The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990-2022, award-winning author Michael Hettich presents selections of his previous books-more than two dozen, spanning five decades-alongside a section of new poetry written for this collection. His poetry "takes us on a constant course of discovery," and The Halo of Bees is a journey as much for the reader as it has been for Michael Hettich.

Appalachian author Robert Morgan delivers eight new stories about life and legends in the mountains of Western North Carolina. An alligator in in the deep woods of a state park? Ghosts? The mob? Robert Morgan takes readers into the mountains where Spanish Conquistadors once hid out, where cougars and thieves stalk their prey, and where a rock with strange markings can conjure the unexpected.

The poems in Maya J. Sorini's The Boneheap in the Lion's Den take us inside the intense and often gruesome world of a hospital trauma unit, a milieu both surreal and (often) deadly real. Sorini never looks away from the hard stuff-in fact, the hard stuff is where she starts-but her gorgeous, precise lines and rhythms make this book unputdownable, despite the human instinct to look away. I finished this book grateful and changed. -Lynn Melnick

Lindsey Royce has given us a beautifully observed book of love and remembrance, loss and endurance. You will be moved. You might even be changed. It is shining with life (Luis Alberto Urrea). This is poetry that touches and transports, which is what we expect from the art; the difference in The Book of John is the generosity with which the poet nourishes our creativity, inspiring us to sing-renewed!-in our own voices. Lindsey Royce serves us our communion feast with her sublime poetry, inviting us, "Break bread with me then- / Make merry, drink my wine." (Aliki Barnstone)

Portals: Poems by Sean Sexton is as expansive in subject, tone, and structure as it is breathtaking in the lyrical quality of its craftsmanship and language. Reading this stunning collection is like looking inside the workings of the mind and soul and spirit of a man who has given his life to poetry but also to nature, family, friends, art, music, and-if that's not enough-the arduous life-work of a cattle rancher.

Winner of the 2021 Press 53 Award for Poetry, Smile, or Else by Chanel Brenner, is a moving collection of elegiac poems dealing with the death of Brenner's six-year-old son, and her and her family's ongoing trek toward healing.

In Sailing the Bright Stream: New & Selected Poems, David Treadway Manning, Three-time winner of the North Carolina Poetry Society's Poet Laureate Award, offers us an in-depth look at his writing career that spans seven decades, taking readers from this young rowdy days in California, to philosophical conversations around campfires in the deserts of the Southwest, to small-town mechanics in the mountains of West Virginia. From his ten poetry chapbooks and three full-length collections, Manning brings us his best and most personal poems, a journey readers will remember and revisit often.

Award-winning poet Stacy R. Nigliazzo is a nurse who served the Houston community in the emergency department over the course of five COVID-19 surges.