Striven, The Bright Treatise, offers readers a graceful synthesis of art and ethics…. a point of entry to a thought-provoking discussion of suicide as a social, philosophical, and ultimately political problem.

It is a distinct feature of [this] book that it impresses into service both logic and passion, and that it can sustain a nerdy delight in physical artifacts alongside metaphysical meditations.

You have to be fierce to write, and perhaps even read, these poems. They follow the call they hear. They are trustworthy but not reassuring. Hamilton shows us how stumbling is a necessary grace.

Road Scatter, Sandra Meek’s devastating new book of poetry, aches with a sense of loss that is not only personal (the collection is dedicated to her mother), but historical and global. This collection illuminates the fragility of our constructions—lives, buildings, societies—and their vulnerability to illness, folly, and the ravages of the natural world.

There is a problem, however, with this Romantic undertaking: the American frontier has long been closed, and worldwide there are very few outposts of the “undiscovered.” Even “the final frontier” seems to be shrinking rapidly. What one hopes is left—the landscape of the mind—may have been already co-opted, conquered

Small Porcelain Head is filled with beautifully crafted poems…which offer a thought-provoking relationship between form and content, dazzling the reader with visually arresting imagery all the while. In short, White’s latest collection is a finely crafted book, and a truly spectacular addition to this gifted writer’s body of work.

Meditation would be too tame a word; instead, it is more appropriate to describe To Anacreon as an exploration

It is hard not to recall the deft turns of Mary Oliver in Clark’s work—both poets seem to be working within a tradition that seeks to understand the self by way of the natural world that is so often viewed as “other,” asking the human how and why and where it belongs in this world.

“The fact that Collom invites the audience to take part in the work of the poet and actively contribute to the meaning of the text, renders the work, and its meaning, even more impermanent. In many ways, these formal decisions mirror the ecological message that recurs throughout the book. Just as the text is a collaboration between artist and audience, nature itself is what we make of it, retaining the possibility of both grandeur and ruin.”

Michael Heller’s poems, now available in their imposing entirety in This Constellation Is a Name, more often than not take place in both a figurative and a literal sense, for Heller brings a traveller’s—not a tourist’s, mind you—keen observing sensibility to bear on everything around him.