Jessica Poli’s debut collection, Red Ocher, stirs with its reverential questioning of ritual, boundary, and expectation. Though the collection modestly labels itself as the red paint of a barn, Red Ocher unabashedly opens into an intimate search for the true meaning of knowledge and the missed acts of closure following a first love. Poli’s collection […]

Pam Rehm’s seventh collection and her first with Wave Books, Inner Verses, gifts the reader with luminous lyric poetry whose probing speaker ranges across inner and outer landscapes in search of what persistent vision might, through gentle attention, render. At forty-seven pages, this slim collection is a rich result of its ephemeral precision. In a […]

Nicholas Yingling’s debut, The Fire Road, is a place-based poetry collection focusing on Western wildfires and their myriad effects on California’s landscape and human psyche. Many poems describe survival and coming to terms with ecological ruin and human consumption; the metaphor of fire extends from ecological and economic consumption into the human body. Specifically, a […]

Driven by an infectious curiosity even amid calamity, Mom in Space explores the stunning insights that arise when arranging opposites side by side: the intimate alongside the faraway, the space program alongside the human animal, and mothering alongside civilization. Lisa Ampleman’s third poetry collection imparts stories of inhabiting a woman’s body—particularly a mother’s body—everywhere bodies […]

Erica Reid’s “Ghost Man,” an imaginary man who held the speaker’s place on bases during wiffle ball games with her father, continues to run “toward & away / from home, toward & away from home.” So, too, does Ghost Man on Second, Reid’s brilliant debut poetry collection which plays skillfully with themes of grief, home, […]

In Ezra Miles’s The Signalman, the weight of silence and solitude lowers and reshapes an individual during extended periods of time. The verses in Miles’s debut collection focus on the poet’s time working in a rural signalbox, a place where the isolation eventually leads the poems’ speaker into various conversations with God. Simultaneously, the speaker […]

Katie Naughton’s first book of poetry, The Real Ethereal, is as timely as it is transcendent of time and space: it is simultaneously an inventory and a spiral, resigned and hopeful, affirming and disarming. Naughton accepts the responsibilities of life on earth with the responsibility of a poet and writer: “sounds of daily being / […]

Dorinda Wegener’s debut collection Four Fields builds a world for the reader to step into from the first poem. A Perianesthesia Certified Registered Nurse in Richmond, Virgina, with work published in journals such as Indiana Review, THRUSH, and Hunger Mountain Review, Wegener reveals a house and garden, a homestead and family, dark woods and strange […]

Fanling in October opens with a journey back to Pui Ying Wong’s Hong Kong roots, as questions of memory, home, and loss ebb and flow alongside equally personal inquiries into the nature and role of poetry for a poet and for humankind. Much like the waterways, squalls, and quiet rainfalls that wend throughout Wong’s collection, […]