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All of Us is about people in a small town in upstate New York - different, even alien, from one another, often politically at odds, yet managing to live in peace, side by side. Seen through the lens of a warm-hearted narrator with an eye for a good story and a good laugh, All of Us is a unique tribute to rural upstate New York - a funny Spoon River Anthology, a northern relative of Eudora Welty's Why I Live at the PO.

In The Eaters of Flowers, her third book of poems for Saddle Road Press, after the much-loved Blood Sugar Canto and Cuicacalli/House of Song, Ire'ne Lara Silva writes about the loss of her brother, her adopted son. In her unique canto style she sings the stunned, broken months following his death, navigating grief, loss, loneliness, and the remembrance of joy, as she begins to re-assemble her life.

The title poem in The Sea Lion is based on a true story, and its suggestion that there is magic in the world, even at the darkest moments, could be seen as the implied metaphor for the book. These poems were written to connect with others on earth who are wrestling with grief and loss; they also celebrate the love of friends, children, trees, our indivisibility, our deep connectedness with all.

Amy Holman writes about what is held captive-wild animals by humans or environmental destruction, the self by fear-and what captivates: discoveries, exposures, and mysteries. From marine life to ultramarine pigment, the self-in-the-world to the world we can't separate from ourselves, she writes poems that delve into the news, plumb the past, and play with refrains to catalogue absurdities, recklessness, lapis lazuli, shyness, and wonder.

1970s rust-belt America. The era of civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights, as well as the birth of the environmental movement. Twins Jake and Wren are raised in the white-flight suburb of Laurentine, not far from an industrial city ironically named the Forest City. The twin's parents, Harry and Florrie, do their best to keep their offspring on the straight and narrow, according to principles common today in MAGA America, before it got the name. But the two are not good at coloring inside the lines. Wren falls in love with an African-American youth named Donald, and Jake falls in love first with Romeo and then Peacoat--with traumatic results. Their story is told by the family mutt, Molly, whose outsider status offers the reader a unique view on human culture.

Linney has long understood that her place in the family is to not make trouble, no matter the many ways in which her parents and sister fail to see her. When she is sixteen, Linney's father makes a deal with relatives to trade her for a boy cousin who will be more help with the farm work at their home in early 20th-century eastern Kentucky. Once her father's plan is revealed, Linney resolves to decide for herself who she will be. Her story is one of what to do with betrayal, of learning to look inside her own self and to attend to deepest sources in order to make sense of the world and her singular place in it. Her time with the Chandler family shows her a different way for families to work, and she is especially guided by Aunt Hesty, the grandmother of the family. Aunt Hesty's own story connects with Linney's, and she opens to Linney other kinds of stories-fairy tales, myths-as maps for the difficult passage she wants and needs to make. As she learns to ask her questions out loud, and to answer yes or no or I don't know to the questions her life puts to her, Linney also maps for us-gives "a picture in my head," she would say- for what it looks like to live by the truth of the heart: no harder work, no greater prize.

How is Travel a Folded Form? is a question that moves through the American landscape, imagining how different eras might interrogate each other. The book revels in the history and peculiarities of the national tourist machine, while remaining rooted in the continent's palpable presence. If this is a travel guide, it is perpetually unfinished, uncertain, wondering and wandering toward a destination as changeable as water.

As part of community service, Miles Radke agrees to work for the State of New York on a common loon survey in the Adirondack Mountains. If he completes the summer job without incident, his record of misdemeanors will be cleared. Miles is assigned to assist Annie, a wildlife biologist. Their charge is to canoe a hundred lakes in the northern Adirondacks and report on any loon activity they encounter. Among his duties, Miles is responsible for keeping a journal of what they experience during the summer. Miles has spent most of his adult life as an itinerant worker. A free-spirited drifter, he often finds himself in trouble with the law. Annie, on the other hand, is a dedicated conservationist who once worked as a Greenpeace activist confronting Soviet whaling ships on the high seas. At first, Miles is skeptical of the survey. Gradually, though, he begins to appreciate the Adirondack backcountry and the value of their work. Eventually, he comes to identify with the loon as he slowly falls in love with his partner. This is ultimately a humorous, provocative, tragic novel about species extinction and what it means to live in the Anthropocene. 

This book takes the readers on a journey beginning in Puerto Rico to different parts of the world, on foot. The reader does not have to actually be on foot to join different events and experiences from the perspective of the legs. However, the reader might start seeing legs everywhere, perhaps themselves having more than two legs, and/or like a cat having multiple lives. In Puerto Rico there is the common idiom, "She is always looking for the five legs of the cat." It is said when someone is believed to try to complicate matters by overlooking and overanalyzing the situation. It assumes that this will lead to feeling overwhelmed, distressed, and to internal and external conflict. It can be said in a funny way while adding a sarcastic compliment of being creative. However, more often is meant as a critique, even a severe one. Through poetry, this book embraces the challenge of accepting some of the idiom''s veracity, while leaving it up to the readers to come to their final conclusion. The book is divided into seven parts, including the five legs of the cat. The first part is about my childhood and youth experiences as they happened. The second part stays closer to home with childhood and youth experiences while adding a more nostalgic and reflective tone. The third part starts looking closely at the legs around the world from a critical perspective. The next part is about capturing the legs literally at different positions and their implications in different situations. The fifth part can be considered Ars Poetica by showing the process of turning the legs/the feet into poetry. This is followed by a section on the legs making different arts and becoming playful. The seventh and last part is about the legs at the end of life and perhaps taking us into the next one. The Five of Legs of the Cat goes from a more narrative and prosaic to more reflective and experimental style; from the mundane to the existential, the local to the international, the simpler to the complex experiences in life. It covers a wide variety of topics, such as, gender, religion/faith, relationships, race, the body in general, love, memory, the arts, food, health issues, death, migration, the environment, domestic violence, war, and other injustices. The book can be considered an autoethnography, a poetic ethnography or an ethnographic poetry within the context of literary anthropology and native anthropology.

Memoir meets true crime in Don Mitchell's exploration of a brutal 1969 murder - of which he was himself a suspect. In Hawaiian culture, shibai means "gaslighting," a concept on which Mitchell expands in this riveting first-person account of the ripples felt from the murder of Jane Britton, the Harvard graduate student who was his friend. Weaving together speculation and discoveries that excavate layers of truth and error, Mitchell moves through past and present, detailing his youth on the Big Island of Hawai'i, ultra running the high plains of the dormant Mauna Kea volcano, navigating the language and culture of the Nagovisi people in Bougainville, and meeting Becky Cooper, an investigative reporter in whose book about Jane's murder he is a continuing presence. Mitchell explores the way facts can shatter long-held perceptions, how love and connection transcend time and culture, and the way memory and meaning can shapeshift into shibai.

At age five, Marcia Meier was hit by a car, losing the left side of her face and eyelid. Over the next fifteen years she underwent twenty surgeries and spent days blinded by bandages, her hands tied to the sides of her hospital bed. Scarred both physically and emotionally, abused at school, blamed and rejected by her mother, Marcia survived and went on to create a successful life as a journalist, a wife and mother. But at midlife her controlled world began to fall apart, and Marcia began a journey into the darkness of her past, her true identity, her deepest beliefs – a spiritual and emotional exploration that resulted in the creation of Face.

Through lyric and narrative poems alike, the speaker of the poems in Crash Course attempts to understand the manner in which cultural traditions and expectations shape their understanding of the world. Watching a father patch up a truck ponders the effect of language across generations. A simple knock on the door provides a meditation on the immigrant experience, and the anxiety surrounding what it means to arrive with nothing in a different country. Other poems look at the complexity of familial relationships, dissecting specific moments that although appear mundane on the surface (shopping for items to put on layaway, barbecues, watching a cousin feed his pet snake), are - once fleshed out on the page - profound episodes that enlighten a labyrinth of memories.

After her husband died of ALS in 2014, poet Ellen LaFleche began writing of physical love and loss, of the complications of memory, of the small, personal, persistent sorrows that lived with her every day. These poems push back against clinical theories of bereavement by validating the necessary persistence of grief and remembering. They also challenge platitudes about the easy comfort of memories. The poem "Unbearable," for example, describes the sensory joys of the couple's honeymoon: We splurged on fine wine and watched sunset spreadits slow flush across evening's throat...I tipped a shell against his lips and told him to drink.Too sandy, he said, too salty, but he swallowed the broth,wiping his beard with the knuckled swipes of a pre-historic man.Now, memories of the salty taste of a littleneck clam bring an intense mixture of joy and sorrow.Memory also fails, erases: "Your face is fading into my brain's neuronal mist," the poet writes, and "I remember how you carried home a bouquet of foliage. /I don't remember the spider that crawled up your sleeve."The sensual, recurrent imagery of Walking into Lightning - fire, ocean water, corn fields, thunder, birth, the pleasures of physical love - spiral through the poems, linking them in a long, tangled journey through bereavement and loss.This is a remarkable book for the bereaved, unsentimental and undistracted, profoundly moving and cathartic.

Part song, part grito, part wail, part lullaby, and part hymn, Cuicacalli / House of Song is a multi-vocal exploration of time, place, and history.Song lives within and without the poet’s physical and spiritual experience of body, of desire, of art, of loss, and of grief on an individual and communal level.Cuicacalli / House of Song sings survival, sings indigeneity, sings some part of the tattered world back together.

At the beginning of Whale Fall & Black Sage, "three strange angels" command the poet: Go down./ Now you must love that too. She descends into the darkness of whale fall, with its strange creatures both real and imaginary, its song of death and rebirth. Returning to the upper world, her journey becomes more difficult, increasingly revelatory, ultimately transformative.The book ends with a joyous, fully embodied Whitmanesque crow. In Whale Fall & Black Sage, the praise poems of Here Along Cazenovia Creek have deepened and become more resonant: "This is the blood/of black sage:/resinous, unfailing.//A leaf crushed/between fingers like this/saves us from desolation."

At sea, the four-hour watch at the end of the work day is cut in half to make two dog watches. Drawn from thirty-five years in the Navy, in a career ranging from from seaman to captain, Rolf Yngve's Dog Watches brings to life the men and women who stand the dog watches, the moments when their decisions define them and shape the lives of those in their care. A former commanding officer finds himself powerless when he confronts young woman about to leap from a bridge. A captain blames his second in command for the crazy decision he makes that ends his career. A heroic young woman discovers the deep tragedy of trafficking. An officer pursuing his duty makes a fatal error that defines his entire life. The inventory of dead sailor’s locker haunts a young officer’s first hours on board and the life of his ship. The illicit affection between a beloved captain and a shipmate is discovered after a near tragedy. Praised by Tim O’Brien, David Kranes, and Goldie Goldbloom, widely published and anthologized, Yngve’s work has been compared to Conrad. Compelling reading and a powerful exploration of the meaning of integrity, duty and personal responsibility in 21st century America.

The Gateless Gate and Polishing the Moon Sword is a collection of poems inspired by Zen and Japanese folk traditions. The first section, The Gateless Gate, contains poem-responses to the 48 Zen koans of the Mumonkan, following a long Zen tradition of composing poems as a spontaneous, personal response to koans. The second section, Polishing The Moon Sword, retells traditional Japanese folk tales through prose poems.

Born in Tokyo to an American military father and a traditional Japanese mother, Kathleen Hellen describes the landscape of post-war America, a personal history and a hybrid culture.

Poems that take their shape from daily walks around a teeming harbor.

In Always A Blue House, poet Lisa Rizzo is an unwilling seeker, generous-hearted even in her disbelief, suspended like Chagall’s blue angel just inside the window of the infinite. Brilliant travel poems, poignant tracings of her father’s decline, and sharp memories of an Illinois childhood round out Rizzo’s second collection.