March 2025

Rivka Clifton’s debut poetry collection, Muzzle, teaches us to wrap fear around our shoulders like a haunted shawl. To our delight, this keeps us warm, as even the most innocuous things—leaves on a lawn, a stray hair, even the moon and stars in various iterations—become sinister and foreboding. Clifton’s poetry thins the threshold between human and beast, nightmare and joyful epiphany.

—Mary Biddinger

ISBN:  9781-956907148

Karen Rigby writes with "fingers cocked like a gun." Deliciously inventive in its linguistic unfurlings, Fabulosa fibrillates with "noir and glitz" in these strange, seductive poems that are in conversation with a range of players from Dior to Endeavour Morse to Hieronymus Bosch. Shimmering with diamond-cut precision, Fabulosa underscores Rigby's observation that "I never write / without measuring, each line / hooking a quicksilver hunger." There is no bloat in this book; it is exquisitely hewn. Underpinning the collection is a keen interest in cinema, fashion, feminism, transformation, and textuality (from ars poeticas to portmanteaus to ekphrastics). Seamed with goldshine and darkness, we find in these fireball poems a "wilderness / glanced through the bull's eye." As the title suggests, Fabulosa is indeed absolutely fabulous!  

―Simone Muench  

ISBN:  9781956907094 

Past Lives is mysterious and alchemical, it is the seaside floating away while eating a plate of mussels in the evening and listening to the shells drop one by one into “deep yellow bowls.” The speaker of these poems is sophisticated, funny, sensual, and bewildered in a way reminiscent of John Ashbery. There is something gorgeous about the way Adams’s “crystal bullet eyes” aren’t just taking in the world, but capturing the world in flux, each moment brimming with imaginative excess. This book reminds us that our past lives are evershifting “ghostly canopies,” that glisten when we give them language.

—Sandra Simonds  

ISBN:  9781956907100

In this elegiac collection fittingly titled Everyone I’ve Danced With Is Dead, Mamie Morgan’s poems are exquisitely stitched as they offer up lamentation for, and salutation to, the dead. These are dedicatory jeremiads against loss that flame with anger, anguish, feminism, and, yes, even humor. And though they are underscored in a bladed nostalgia, they are never sentimental; instead, they are “finding new ways to feel” while “flinging every street-facing window open.” Swirling in the poetic spaces of this book, are caribou, witches, and chickens as well as cameos by Amy Poehler, Mary Oliver, and Iphigenia; but, most importantly, ascending from the book’s foundation is Morgan’s incantation for the living and the dead—the clear and sustaining phrase, “I want you alive.”

―Simone Muench  

ISBN: 9781956907070

Rita Mookerjee’s False Offering, while providing a trenchant critique of the oppressiveness of “white space,” is also glittery, culinary sumptuous, and scythe sharp. Shot through with equal parts “nectar and venom,” Mookerjee’s poems pirouette with muscular grace in a kaleidoscopic whirl of myth and alchemy, gods and feasts, rot and rose gold. False Offering is a feminist ledger of “battle armor meeting ballet.” Like a medieval tapestry, it is piped through with an elaborate galaxy of nightviolets, rosewater, bonedust, “snakes and shibari,” origami, and the KKK. It is a rare book in that even while flipping the middle finger; it has its hands held out in tenderness to those in need. 

―Simone Muench  

ISBN: 9781956907049 

Recalling Joni Mitchell’s famous lyric “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot,” Solastalgia is a heart-wrenching and harrowing overview of environmental destruction. Though it is an ominous exploration of the Anthropocene era and the ways humans have contributed to the changing climate and landscape, it spends much of its time honoring all the strange and wondrous creatures—“may you outlast us”— that humans, both intentionally and unwittingly, are shoving toward extinction’s cliff. Solastalgia is an eloquent tribute to all the awe-inspiring flora and fauna that we have failed as a species. I love this book not only for its incisive eco-eye but also for its dazzling language terrains. Using language as the tool to effect change, these poems make you want to be better, do better.―Simone Muench

ISBN:  978-1737513483 

Not only a meeting of minds, but also a meeting of hearts, lives, and imaginations links Mary Shelley and Jessica Cuello. Urgent and original, gripping and shocking, thoroughly research-based and deeply intuitive: surely this captivating collection of illuminating epistolary strangeness is exactly what Shelley might have wished a poet of our time to write about her. 

—Annie Finch, Spells

ISBN: 9781737513438 

In Suzanne Frischkorn’s intoxicating Fixed Star, content and form mirror and echo each other, twin and twine. From the opening line in the first of a sequence of sonnets that generates the book’s architecture, we learn that the subject is separation, from first language, landscape, and heritage, a loss, a violence, a thievery carried by and negotiated within the body, which becomes, itself, a translation. So what, then, can poetry be? In Frischkorn’s hands, it is—well—everything. It is the cry and the answering cry, the body’s disappearance and revolution, history and tangled myth and the site of self-creation, honoring the fragments while languaging them into something greater, more songful than a whole....Fixed Star cannot be reduced to anything but itself. I am in genuine awe.  ─Diane Seuss

ISBN: 9781737513476

In the universe of Melissa Studdard's poems, both the speaker and the audience will always have their cake and eat it too. After all, "Life's never dull when your name's Melissa," and oh my goddess, does Dear Selection Committee serve hard as a brilliant 21st-century take and critique of the epistolary, filled with infinite heart and infinite humor and infinite neon signs that point  towards the larger-than-life nature of poetry. This is excess. This is extravagance. This is the definition of sensuality. Studdard has the tremendous gift of finding the center of every poem, giving us the whole damn thing.    ―Dorothy Chan 

ISBN: 9781737513414