Books
Awkward Scrapes
Awkward Scrapes is a collection of poems that celebrates love, family, fatherhood, and the natural world while confronting grief, violence, memory, and healing. Rooted in Appalachia and Kentucky landscapes, Eric Scott Sutherland's lyrical, music-infused poems seek beauty, tenderness, and hope amid the awkward scrapes of being human. "The poems in Awkward Scrapes are the best kinds of love songs, never sentimental and always powerful. They are meditations on romantic love, on the profound connections we have with our children and the natural world, even on life itself. This book is a celebration of all that makes us human: the awfulness and the beauty, sometimes tangled. Sutherland is one of my favorite poets and I loved every carefully chosen yet organic word."—Silas House
Soliloquy to the Night Sky
The brave poems in this book, Kathleen Gregg's first full-length volume of poetry, tell the deeply moving and sometimes heartbreaking story of a family's struggle with Alzheimer's. " Kathleen Gregg's poignant portrayal of her sister's descent into dementia displays the attentiveness only deep love can bring. In Gregg's deft hands, we experience Nancy's "beautiful exuberance" and the sisters' long tight bond as well as the growing space between them that's like "standing in a cave / hearing the last echoes." These poems transmit grief and fear but also a "rush of wonder" at the richness of natural and human worlds. This collection is an homage, finally, not to loss but to life."—Libby Falk Jones
Tainted
From the author of Girl comes the next instalment of the multigenre story of a girl growing up in difficult circumstances. Friendships, family relationships, domestic violence, health challenges come into focus in this beautiful, hopeful, heartbreaking, relatable book. "Tainted picks up where Wendy Jett's first book, Girl, left off, wrestling cosmic questions posed by the family, creatures, and spirits accompanying Girl's journey. Tragic and tender, magical as God and real as beans and cornbread, Tainted is a triumph and true to the bone. If you liked Girl, you'll absolutely love Tainted."—Mike Wilson, author of Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, political poetry for a post-truth world
Love House
If you liked Frank X Walker's first poetry collection, Affrilachia, you will love Love House—a book highlighting family life with its joys and challenges, with special attention to social justice placed in historical context. "In Love House, Frank X Walker not only brings the collective past back to us in living color, but these poems delve into the sacred personal, the psychohistory of what it means to be father, son, husband, brother, Black. Up close and personal, he writes poems that are on a pendulum, bringing us through the intersection of what is deeply personal in the intimate glances of the depths of our insides; what we find in birdsong and the garden, the devastation of a flood and erosion, then back to the passing of his closest loved ones, what it means to age, violence and the abuse of power, what it means to be human."—Crystal Wilkinson
Open Burning
At times elliptical and surreal, the emotional and psychological landscape of these poems is punctuated by flashes of the real risks and rewards of navigating difficult times with grace and compassion. Through the magic of these well-crafted poems, we become invested in the seemingly inconsequential as well as the life-changing. "The poems in this rich collection are both spare and candid, chronicling the demise of a marriage, even as it nearly coincides with a father's blooming love for his young daughter. One love is lost, but a wholly different love arrives. At times the contrast is inexplicable and the speaking voice in these poems doesn't quite know to whom the poems should be addressed. That is a perspective I find so arresting in this book, a crossroads of grief that has no bottom and love that has no end, weighted with the plain responsibility of somehow going forward.—Maurice Manning