John Arthur describes Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide as a love letter to New Jersey, a state full of “run-down casinos and strange historic landmarks overlooking the sea. It is surf rock mixed with punk at a dive bar off an alley on the Jersey Shore.” What he doesn’t mention is that these poems are spoken in one of the freshest, most compelling voices I have encountered in years. He manages the difficult trick of being both funny and deeply serious in the same poem. It’s like he peeled off layers of old paint from the English language to discover a long-lost masterpiece.

—GEORGE BILGERE, contest judge, author of Cheap Motels of My Youth

In Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, varied forms and interesting structures are on display: haiku, haibun, braided and stream-of-consciousness poems. John Arthur keeps us firmly grounded in the state of New Jersey. The place shapes how its residents study, love, and work, with the smell of onions permeating their work clothes. The environment breeds both fantasy and cynicism with poems bringing us past the top of the Ferris wheel to the moon or using the implosion of a casino to explain gravity to a child.

—DEBORAH BAYER, author of Rope Made of Bandages

In Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, John Arthur writes from the quiet fault lines between urgency and inaction, compassion and self-preservation. This book is a mash up between craft and the everyday colloquial speech of the playground. These poems refuse easy consolations, instead they live and linger in the moments when we hear the world calling out—sometimes faintly, sometimes in shattering crescendos—and choose to stay in bed, to keep scrolling, to make coffee. And sometimes, like in the poem “Atlantic Cape Community College,” to hear the speaker holler, And this fuckin’ guy…, Arthur’s voice is tender and unflinching, charting the uneasy coexistence of intimacy and indifference in a world oversaturated with need. This is a book about the distance between the sorrow of the human condition and the answers that never come, even though we fight, every day, into the colors of hope, the elephants always knowing more than we do.

 —MATTHEW LIPPMAN, author of We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On 

Katie Dozier’s All That Glitter is a delightful book about childhood—and the way that daughters can pull a mother into play and wonder and doubt: the other parents think/ I’ve raised a brat. As kids learn their ABCs (there’s even an abecedarian!) their mother invents sophisticated formal poetic challenges and the girls in these poems keep up with their witty observations—”Why are we never running early?” Through haiku, sonnet, villanelle and haibun-like gestures, Dozier’s verse about parenting and neurodiversity, shared custody and making a new home, sparkles.

—DENISE DUHAMEL, author of Pink Lady

Katie Dozier writes with remarkable lyrical dexterity. She flexes and bends language to create imagery heavy with linguistic subtext and meaning. In these intimate and powerful poems, things aren’t always what they seem. Fireworks pose as flowers, eyes are filled with drought, choosing a clove of garlic becomes a morality tale, reach for what/ is heavy for its size, tightly packed and ugly. But while the imagery is layered and complex, running through every poem is a simple, steadfast force: a mother’s profound and abiding love. Every poem pulses with maternal devotion. This is a mother who bought/ the world to make it beautiful for her children. Who dreamed into reality a home that smells of pumpkin pie spice. You can’t read this lovely, bittersweet collection without feeling immensely tender towards the family that populates it. [A] perfect/ little girl/ lost/ in her own/ bamboo forest. A girl who sings to the succulents. A mother who paints her nails in, “I Just Can’t Cope Acabana” nail polish, whose neurodivergent child has tantrums that paint fire-engines/ on the floor. But still, a mother who wraps her children in, Love a kind of/ chrysalis, never/ to be undone. All That Glitter is a spellbinding collection. Once read, these poems will take up permanent residence in your heart.

—NANCY MILLER GOMEZ, author of Inconsolable Objects

Katie Dozier’s All That Glitter is an ode to “otherness” and a peephole into parenting and the heaviness of the world, via singing into hairbrushes and slamming doors. It’s what I call a set of sleight-of-hand poems as Dozier teases us into focusing on a string of “look what’s happening over there”, while skillfully pulling together a powerful concoction of “yoo-hoo, it’s really all happening right here.” Oh, the liberties she takes, her words a series of brushstroke swirls, her intentions a daffodil facing the sun,  x-ing out the answers from yesterday. Truth be told (or tattled), this life is short. We could all use a little more glitter and Dozier brings it!

—KARI GUNTER-SEYMOUR, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of Dirt Songs

A student of turtles, inchworms and grappling hooks, Walmarts and Wawas, AA, AAA and DEA, Wojtowicz is amazed to be living in the living rooms of a pack, a herd, a pride, a family he can’t believe he helped create. His astonishment explodes in “lying like a yin-yang / on a road-worn Guatemalan / blanket and fell asleep in the shade / of a Catawba rhododendron / as a nectarine sunset / juiced the Appalachian Mountains.” There may not be a Jedi in his kitchen or a Millennium Falcon in his garage, but there is so much joy in the wild domesticity of these poems, you’ll want to slow down from hyperdrive to enjoy them.

—PETER E. MURPHY, author of You Too Were Once on Fire

Reading Wojtowicz’s poetry is the gift of getting a ride when no one else will pick you up or having your toast popped and buttered as you enter the kitchen. In a world that can be confusing and difficult, Wojtowicz gives himself, his wife, his children, and you, dear reader, permission to wonder, laugh, love, explore, and imagine. You are encouraged to be followed by the moon, romance beaches, condition doorknobs, and nurse turtles, but please, no lightsabers in the kitchen– leave the ghost of you in peace.

—DIMITRI REYES, author of Papi Pichón

Full of humor and surprise, John Wojtowicz’s No Lightsabers in the Kitchen humanizes the speaker by showing his loving side as a father, despite his struggles in other areas of life. In poems like “Wild” and “Shake Your Tail Feathers,” the dad mimics a chicken at his child’s request and attends “a birthday party for an inchworm named Spike.” In John’s poems, it is as if the speaker is asking to be seen like his children see him, through impartial eyes and childhood innocence. Ultimately, John’s poetry invites us to reexamine our own relationships and listen and respond to the smaller voices in our circle who have the power to lift us up and keep us there.

—SHAWN R. JONES, author of Date of Birth