These poems seem to dwell in mystery, and wonder, and humor—with a kind of zeal for the vastness and complexities of our experiences as humans. —Michael O’Driscoll

Gatza’s poems urge us to see, feel exalted in the ordinary beauty of our surround, look out at a new world each moment. Yet mid-winter, our dream is of spring’s warmth, early flowers, myths, stories of heroes and sub-heroes. His collages invite us: Tape a banana to the wall, and call it ours. Write poems that serve up a rare joy of outward contemplation and thrill an inner life. —Deborah Meadows

“In Peter Mladinic’s poetry collection Files of Information on People Who Don’t Exist, the minutia of daily forgetting become memoirs set in free verse. With the precision of a reporter, Mladinic uncovers our deepest impulses, surrenders, and sins. —Barbara Leonhard

"Creation--all of it, and each atom of it--is, as Wade Stevenson avers, an "action of time," with an allure that is also a lure to Actual Presence. In Fiat Lux, poetry limns the body of this presence without irony and without ambiguity. Here there is light beyond the shadow's reach." —Donald Revell

Behold! A series of modern fables that address the quality of truth in what has become a contemporary  Age of Lies. Writing with a cosmic sense of humorous indignation, Frym plunges into the dilemmas of today's realities and metaphysical quandaries.  What is true meaning!  Who lies! —Maureen Owen

In Diana Adams' Slip Knot language twirls in a fantastical motion of ordinary events gone looping into knobs of surreal perception.  Mind bending internal experiences spin from a turtling gaze.  Temporary stops from a masterful unraveller. —Maureen Owen

A librarian in Buffalo, Edric Mesmer is the author of two full-length collections, POEMS: now & then (BlazeVOX [books], 2020) and of monodies and homophony (Outriders Poetry Project, 2015). He edits the pamphlet series Among the Neighbors, dedicated to conversations about little magazines and small presses. His own recent writings on small press cultures include paged like coral reefs (eohippus labs, tract series, 2023) and “Asterisms Among the Magazines” in the Post45 Contemporaries cluster on little magazines (2023). He’s thankful to everyone who reads these poems.

The lyrical poems in Wonderwork explore the pressing questions of human meaning-making, reflecting on grief, spirituality and memory. The collection offers intimate and necessary moments of curiosity, hope and possibility in a world that is at once both heartbreaking and beautiful, difficult and joyful. Drawing subtle parallels between the landscapes of self and place, Wonderwork undertakes a personal search for healing that echoes a larger planetary need for wholeness.

I had a blast swerving through this preposterous Proustian epic of poly-simultaneity. Tony Trigilio uptwists his cheezy, tee-vee subject—goth daytime soap Dark Shadows—into epiphanies of love and loss, but also fashion and history. In its own weird, OCD way, The Punishment Book vampires time itself beyond the boundaries of the undead. —Jack Skelley

Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series is an intoxicating brew of quasis: scientific, esoteric, bibliographic, geologic, lettristic. Who knows what poetry lurks in the heart of codes? It’s as if we are privy to the history of knowledge from its other side, before as much as after. These poems are an explosion in a pataquerics factory. —Charles Bernstein

Koronas makes me see words that aren’t there. Her gnōstos is mantic, and her Sophia—the liquid crystal wombed God—inseminates with ink, strumous as an ethotic alley (i.e., a post-bodied diachronic polysemic strangulation). gnōstos is our proleptic apocalypse; “the last Oedipus/licks his gonads.” —Tom Prime

"Eros, like Lear, must sometimes wander unhoused across a cruel landscape. How wonderful, then, to read the poetry of Cassandra Manzolillo, there to find desire sheltered in its brightest insouciance and in the full flourish of actual yearning. There is a tireless, guileless presence in these poems that I find both admirable and original." —Donald Revell

1992. The war rages in Bosnia and Croatia. In Slovenia, which has escaped the war’s horrors on its own soil, a high school graduate finds herself profoundly shattered. Unable to transition from the safe environment of the high school to the loosely structured student life, struggling to come to grips with an unsuccessful relationship and tormented by her helplessness in the face of the war, she embarks on a harrowing search for the meaning of her existence. But the streets of Ljubljana leave her empty-handed. Until something changes. A visitor comes by.

American Outrage provides an innovative approach to the seemingly intractable problem of gun violence in the United States. Fresh and moving, yet cerebral and somber. At a time when powerful voices are most needed, H. L. Hix has answered the call.  — Louis Klarevas

William Huhn’s Bachelor Holiday is a bittersweet, multi-dimensional recollection—of past loves, historical mysteries, moments of weather, of philosophical obsession—whose subject range and command of language dazzles. —Rachel Abramowitz

In Tender Travis Cebula transforms raw, emotional experiences into preserved moments of artful reflection. —Janaka Stucky

Like W. E. B. Du Bois finding solace in his library, Norton moves back and across “the color line,” sits with Shakespeare, Fanny Howe, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, etc., and they wince not, welcoming her into their esteemed company. —Tyrone Williams

Stephen Bett’s new book SongBu®st sounds like a ship-wrecked wit (“We are coast people”) riffing at the end of the world. Here you’ll find snippets of old American pop songs morphed into takes on gun carnage and quotes from tech bros, each separated from the other by an “infrathin delay.” —Rae Armantrout

Polaroids of Turbulence is a chronicle of culture trouble, a verse report of the unfathomable depths of our times: “barbarism’s eternal return.” Sussman’s sharp observations and linguistic play mark a “jagged trajectory” through “the outerbanks of / introspection.” —Nancy Kuhl

Epilogue is a brilliant collection of Craig Watson’s late-stage poetry. As such, it signals neither harmony nor resolution, but intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved conflict. This dazzling, posthumous work admits the reader into a shimmering, luminous present. —Kit Robinson

Mostly, Cycholl proceeds in dismay for the beggaring of his world. prairie)d is the song of a grieving poet. It tells of the water which dribbles muddily through a once-garden and into lives malformed by manias of profit. —Dennis Cooley

"In his American classic Essays before a Sonata, Charles Ives avows that 'the substance of a tune comes from somewhere near the soul.' It is Wade Stevenson's singular gift to express, with a candor indistinguishable from courage, the vivid geography of that most specific 'somewhere'. These sonatas are personal in the very largest sense. And in their expanse, we are given to see love and loss as imperishable features of a singular landscape and the departures of one soul.” —Donald Revell

Charles Rammelkamp’s exposition of the “flesh trapeze” that swings through American entertainment and culture, via the voices of some of its most prominent acrobats, is vital to an understanding of our culture. —Roman Gladstone

Gary Pak’s Kewalo Blues and Echoes reflects his profound, joyous, and critical grasp of Hawai’i as entangled site of local pidgin, Native Hawaiian, oceanic, and ethnic mores of world-dwelling and culture-making. —Rob Sean Wilson