Cosmology of Heaven & Hell

by Michael Waterson

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 15, 2022

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The poems in Cosmology of Heaven & Hell were written over a span of four decades and set in locations from the Maritime Provinces of Canada to California and beyond. Subjects range the from the deeply personal to political and cultural figures and events employing both traditional forms, sonnets and villanelles, as well as free verse. Throughout the collection there exists an overarching theme that hell exists in different manifestations—all of which is tempered by the author’s deliciously dark humor. In the latter half of the twentieth century, celebrities like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe proved that in modern day America fame can be a hell. On the political front, President Richard Nixon’s Machiavellian Madman Theory flirted with a hell-on-earth scenario. Today wildfires and melting icecaps brought about by climate change present the prospect of a hellish future for the planet. Beyond public manifestations of perdition, the book explores the private hell of a dysfunctional family and failed relationships, our woeful ignorance about the nature of our existence, the darkness and tormenting doubts that lie below the surface of everyday living.

Cosmology of Heaven & Hell perfectly captures Waterson’s fiery chthonic leitmotif and dark humor, as does the brilliant, “Stooges Apotheosis,” a universe where brutal slap-/ stick chaos calls the tune,/ and laughter is the thunderclap/ of the gods applauding ruin. Reckoning with a steel-working, hard-drinking, domestically violent, Irish Catholic upbringing, he swaps a hell with the lid off Pittsburgh for hellish California wild fires, plumbing the hells we make for ourselves and the heaven we can have, if we agree to savor this breaker-breaking, cloud-scudding,/ sand-in-the-eye now.

—April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

After Pyre

by P.M. Draper

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 15, 2022

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P.M. Draper’s poems in After Pyre explore change, loss, and unfathomable heartache, while offering the reader respite with her skillful verse that is not only refreshing, but achingly funny when you least expect it. From the tragic tale of suicide by fire to poems about squirrel sex and the Kung Fu Nuns of Kathmandu, After Pyre will take the reader on quite a ride.

In After Pyre, her second collection of poetry, P.M. Draper skillfully and piercingly explores what it means to experience both personal and collective trauma. Written in radiant, unfancy language, her poems speak of family dysfunction and tragedy, the pandemic, illness, and ageing—all with bracing clear-sightedness and compassion, defiance, abundant humor, and above all, an abiding sense of hope. Draper’s poetry asks difficult questions: how does one move through the world while haunted by memories of violent sibling deaths, mental illness, addiction? How does one find beauty and joy amidst enormous suffering and loss? These galvanizing poems implore and inspire the reader to embrace possibility in the face of heartache. They are a stunning testament that, out of chaos and ruin, we humans are endlessly capable of discovering the power to live fully to touch the bones of every dream.

 —Skipwith Coale

This Is the Lightness

by Rachel Barton

Scheduled Release Date: Sept 15, 2022

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The poems in This Is the Lightness are fired with imagination and the fragility of the human experience. Rachel Barton has created a collection of poetry that takes the reader on a journey through the natural world; explores the concept of identity and belonging; honors our sacred connections with family and friends through aging, death, and loss; and tackles the present-day with all its perils and possibilities.

If poems had skin, I’d say Rachel Barton’s were comfortable in theirs. This Is the Lightness welcomes the reader into its poem-world through intriguing and often surprising narrative, lush natural imagery, close attention to sound and flow, quirky humor—and most strikingly, a tonal tendency that’s simultaneously serious and light-hearted. Sadness, pain, acute awareness, even trauma and its lasting ramifications do not lead to cynicism or despair for Barton. Always clear-eyed, she remains hospitable. This seems to me a daring stance for a contemporary poet. It’s at least unusual. As a reader I appreciate feeling essential to the full existence of this work in the way that an audience completes a play. Reading helps these poems happen. The last section, “The Sky is Falling”, expresses a sense of freedom and delight that leaves me hungry for Barton’s next book.

—Marjorie Power, author of Sufficient Emptiness

Blood Moon

by Elaine S. Nussbaum

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 16, 2022

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The poems in Blood Moon recount the first eighteen months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Elaine Nussbaum’s personal narrative is interwoven with social issues, climate change, and astronomical events, such as the blood moon that occurred simultaneously with a blue moon on Oct 31, 2020. The titular poem from the collection pays tribute to Marvin Bell and his “Dead Man” poems—

All the dead people can’t live without you Marvin, and the live people cannot die
We are a country washed up on a beach after a shipwreck.
The tide is coming in, and the waves are getting closer
It is raining and we are naked…
Help will be coming in eighty days, but how do we get through this without eating each other?

The poems in Blood Moon are shards of light wrested from a dark and chaotic time in our history. Nussbaum journeys deep into our collective experience of the pandemic and emerges with poems of remarkable beauty and resonance. As the Covid death toll climbs, wildfires rage, and protestors clash in the streets, the poet struggles to make sense of the madness and draws strength and solace from the natural world: the changing seasons, cycles of the moon, and resiliency of wild creatures.

Nussbaum is a master of closely observed, finely rendered images: the feeling of a pinky finger grazing the back of a stranger’s hand; ivory-colored butterflies with two charcoal dots on each wing.

Though firmly rooted in a specific moment time, these poems are about more than living through the pandemic. They are about how to keep our hearts open and our spirits intact even when the world is burning down around us. This is a nightmare/ we will wake up from, she writes. The Rufus Hummingbird/ still searches for sugar water/ in the red-based feeder.

—Gwen McNeir, author of An Animal with Wings

The Weight of Clouds

by Cathy Cain

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 16, 2022

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maybe…let the clouds be in charge / since they are

The Weight of Clouds is an intimate celebration of how our spirit is surprised and enlarged at the moment of perception, when the weight of reality is balanced by that of our imagination.

Cathy Cain’s words, phrases, and images dissipate, then reemerge like shifting cloud formations. She observes the openings where mystery flows through us like a luminous current. Even as Cain quietly addresses the impermanence of our bodies, she focuses on the amazement, the near impossibility, of our existence and the wonder of love. Her poems are a reflection on how we create the beauty that we need to survive.

“Though heavy with memories, Cathy Cain’s poems are informed by the emissaries of weightlessness, especially angels. She has spent a lot of time looking up. Flight, sky, dreams, and clouds, of course, are all described with her painter’s eye. Dedicated to a sister and their shared families, this book is both a passionate and compassionate experience. As her inquiries and intimacies suggest, she has also spent a lot of time looking in, revealing, as she says a tenderness about our mortality.”

—Allan Peterson, author of This Luminous, Precarious, and Fragile Acts

Earthwork

by Kristin Berger

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 16, 2022

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The poetry of Earthwork is centered around, sprung from, and located in the landscape of mothering during the increasingly mapless territory of climate change and the pandemic. These are poems that take careful care of the small wonders of childhood and parenthood against such large and looming realities; poems that never stray away from wide-eyed honesty, taking in grief, joy, memory, and the strangeness of life, equally. Poems that stay put on the earth, show us with their small mappings a few ways of doing the necessary work.

“Kristin Berger’s Earthwork creates a topography inhabited by complex sorrows and joys. In a seamless braiding of the domestic and the natural world, the body and the celestial, Berger’s poems explore grief, divorce, motherhood, and mortality in language that is part lullaby, part anthem. Some poems face the pandemic, our political climate, and the state of our planet head on, reminding us that Loss is accumulating faster than we had planned.  Other poems buttress our worries and fears with the knowledge that We are here to keep each other up. Throughout this extraordinary collection, Berger’s lyrical, meditative voice buoys readers through the wild wrack lines of our existence, making us ask, Dear world, where would I be without you?”

—Brittney Corrigan, author of Daughters and Breaking