In America. Right Now. Written by #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Jason Reynolds.Jason Reynolds and his best bud, Jason Griffin had a mind-meld. And they decided to tackle it, in one fell swoop, in about ten sentences, and 300 pages of art, this piece, this contemplation-manifesto-fierce-vulnerable-gorgeous-terrifying-WhatIsWrongWithHumans-hope-filled-hopeful-searing-Eye-Poppingly-Illustrated-tender-heartbreaking-how-The-HECK-did-They-Come-UP-with-This project about oxygen. And all of the symbolism attached to that word, especially NOW. And so for anyone who didn’t really know what it means to not be able to breathe, REALLY breathe, for generations, now you know. And those who already do, you’ll be nodding yep yep, that is exactly how it is.

    Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women, and teenage girls. In Shire's hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life: full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life: full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life: full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl.The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.

    Her writings are haunted by the ghosts of girlhood, god/s, lovers and the landscape of childhood, but Warren is unflinching - she haunts her ghosts in return, with sharp lyricism and cutthroat vulnerability. On Sun Swallowing explores shadowy emotion, at times in a whisper, at times in a scream. Think: cheap cigarettes, even cheaper wine, and an oath to reach hell by midnight and be home in time for work in the morning.”Compiling five years of poetry, prose and journal extracts, On Sun Swallowing is the debut release of Australian poet Dakota Warren. Winding through unflinchingly raw snapshots of her youth, Warren’s words are accompanied by original illustrations from Lydia Stone and curated photography from Francesca McConnell, Caroline Dare, Leche de Arte and Clara Slewa.

    Complete with historical photographs, author’s note, chronology of events, research, and sources.

    Spare, plain, sometimes startling in their snatches of humor, Pollari's poems careen into the "tilted reality" of grief. This is poetry dredged from shock and rage, then dissected with pointillistic precision.Many of the pieces are closer to prose: in plain, forceful, language that will capture readers outside the poetry audience, they uncover and name sentiments outside of what is expected in books about child loss and grief: for instance, the embarrassment Niina felt for letting herself feel hope and joy, for revealing that she desired to be a mother at all, and for having to inform the world that her desire would not be granted.A shattering experience rendered with candor and immediacy, Path of Totality is a book "for anyone who ever expected anything" about a rarely told experience of motherhood.

    

    It tackles feelings of desire and dark passion through the lens of love and lust. The poems take us through this journey. Letting our minds and hearts wander throughout this lustful escape. Searching and yearning at each and every turn for a new encounter or blushing moment.... maybe a few hot and bothered ones as well. All the poems in ValENDtine can be found throughout all my prior collections including some from my online postings.In addition to these poems, I also have written several new ones that are exclusive only to the ValENDtine collection.I hope you enjoy this new collection and may it find a permanent place on your nightstand.Live to Love_hydrus

    With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself—its foreclosures, affects, successes—she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom.Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.

    It’s about learning to grow alongside grief. About taking the hand of your younger self and forgiving them. Through pages of truisms and poems, this debut collection from Caitlin Conlon explores the boundaries of our most poignant and human emotions.Deeply personal yet universal, The Surrender Theory speaks to anyone who has put their heart out into the world and hoped with everything in them that it would come home unscathed.

    Rogue’s newest poetry collection—After The Blackout—explores the author’s experiment to give up alcohol for a year. And how it transformed into a new way of life. Weaving between debilitating hangxiety and the gross marriage between alcohol and her sexual encounters, the author tears down memories and walls to expose the black and white definition of alcohol abuse society feeds us. And brings the stark truth to the surface—the face of alcohol use disorder can be anyone, and any reason to give up alcohol is valid.This collection is about everything we lose and the ways we let ourselves go. And in the end—how to reclaim peace.

    Something to tear into pieces. Something to burn.” We’ve all been paper before. We’ve all been fragile. Leaf-like and gently blowing. Enough to create stories or build fires. So, we go through life like that. We come across the things that tear us into pieces, and we keep going. We keep fighting because we must. We look for ways to be whole. To be the person we dream to be.  Fragile by nature, but tough by circumstance, paper girls are shaped by their love and loss. This collection of poetry and prose describes the journey of learning to live fully through the messiness of life and tenuousness of mental health.

    “I deal only in the hardest pain-revivers, symbols and tongues,” writes Stone. “I want to tell you only / in the intimacy of our discomfort.” Populated by Archangels, limping in paradise; by allergies of the soul; the intimacy and danger of motherhood; psychic wounds; and dirty, dirty chocolate layer cake, What is Otherwise Infinite deftly examines our inherent and inherited ideas of how to live, and the experience of the Self—which on one hand is so intensely personal, and on the other, universal.

    In an era of self love, the ability to love oneself is only as effective as the ability to know oneself. Throughout his collection, Leake asks readers to look at something beautiful, yet still see its flaws. On the flip side, he encourages readers to look at something evil, and yet still see the beauty it holds.Universally relatable, surprisingly educational, and all around powerful, Unraveling is a collection of poetry inspiring us to slow down, breathe, and read between the lines.

    The author portrays relationships with a passionate realism that encompasses complicity and ambiguity, violence and tenderness, and an understanding of the layers of complexity and complicity that exist between men and women.

    A book of love poems that consciously and subversively hearken back to Shakespeare's sonnets, marking Hofmann's position as one of our necessary poets of erotic desire. These short lyrics come together in their discussion of geography, painting, sculpture, and classical music as if to say that love (that queer love!) is indeed as immortal as a poem. Or as Hofmann himself writes, 'There is so much to say. It may take until night.'" --Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The TraditionA Hundred Lovers is a catalog of encounters, sublime, steamy, and frank. Inspired by French autofiction, the poems feel both sharp and diaristic; their lyrical, intimate world brings us everyday scenes imbued with sex. Eros enters, where shame had lived, the speaker observes, as the poems explore risk and appetite, promiscuity and violence, and, in the wake of his marriage, questions about monogamy and desire.Bringing us both the carefully knotted silk ties of the wedding pair and their undress in a series of Hockney-like interiors where passion colors every object, Hofmann speaks plainly of the saliva, tears, and guts of the carnal, just as he does of the sublime in works of art. A Hundred Lovers invites us to consider our own memories of pleasure and pain, which fill the generous white space the poet leaves open to us between his ravishing lines.

    These ten much-loved poems are gathered together for the first time in this compendium to make a perfect gift for old friends celebrating a decade’s tradition or those experiencing the magic of Duffy’s festive verse for the first time.

    It is the act of learning to be whole in a broken body, a broken world. It is a collection of tales told through generations of stories hidden beneath the skin.

    When a skateboarder dips his pen into poetry, what will his passion create?After a lifetime of abuse and the tragic loss of his mother, NYC teen Michael Daniels needed an outlet. Despite his cheerful nature, his inner mind was teeming with the stark contrast of darkness and light. So, in this volume full of imagery and symbolism, his underground rhymes reflect days full of extreme sports, failed relationships, and nostalgic memories.Written by Bernard Jan in character as the hero from his novel Cruel Summer, this channeled view of the world is an extravaganza of extremes. And in its groundbreaking perspectives, you’ll discover the cries of a heart longing to be understood.Buy this book of poetry and feel Michael’s passion through these unusual literary postcards.

    "A book like no other: tender, and eloquent, a singing across borders, across silences."--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, National Book Award finalistThe poems in Yanyi's latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them.How can we carry our homes with us? Informed by Yanyi's experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dream of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. These are homes in memory--homes of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.

    as a Brazilian immigrant, Aline Mello’s debut poetry collection, More Salt Than Diamond, is a true testament to the power of finding a home.Born in Brazil, Aline Mello immigrated to the United States in 1997. Using her experience as an undocumented woman during a time of incredible flux and tension, Mello’s debut collection of poetry, More Salt than Diamond, speaks to her struggles while also addressing the larger cultural issues on an inclusive and global scale.Lyrical, moving, deeply emotional, and sometimes painful to read, Mello uses exquisitely sharp yet widely accessible language to crack open a life in multitudes. She shines a rare light on what it means to be a Brazilian immigrant in diaspora, stretched thin between borders and fraught family tension yet belonging nowhere. Aline is poised to not only change the face of Latinx poetry in years to come but to redefine the power of undocumented creators and artists.

    While refusing to hide, minimize, justify or ignore instances of trauma, it also refuses to succumb to them. Instead, it probes these histories as a strategy to move through the pain and forge an alternate path for a new tomorrow."REVENGE BODY teems with sharp, curious, brilliant work gilded with a sense of humor that careens from deadpan to ALL CAPS and back. Luna's writing is measured, generous, examining everything unexamined, but also percussive, bereft, and fiery. I love this book, I read it three times back-to-back on my first read, and I suspect you will too."Tommy Pico, author of Feed, Junk, Nature Poem and IRL“Caleb Luna brings maw and might in their debut chapbook REVENGE BODY while undeniably presenting a collection that plays with tone, rhythm and form fantastically. REVENGE BODY demands to be witnessed while graciously ferrying readers throughout the journey that Luna traverses in a body that refuses to be an apology. REVENGE BODY sincerely envisions a different tomorrow for the many bodies so many of us forget.” jaye simpson, author of it was never going to be okay“Caleb Luna’s REVENGE BODY is a searing examination of how lived experiences can accumulate inside a body--a body adorned by narratives inherited and prescribed. These poems probe the soft space between memory and hope, making tender, the bodies weaponized by language. The clarity in which Luna writes: "i / want you to see me / & / I don’t / want / that / to / be / brave," shakes me awake, as if I’ve been dormant this whole time. When I first read REVENGE BODY, I was scared by how much it seemed like the poems knew me, but that fear quickly settled into a feeling of kinship. I want to throw this book at the strangers who stare at my body. I want to make it required reading for all my past and future lovers, to say: before you know me, you must know this: “the body is a celebration / & I have had a lot / to celebrate.” I celebrate this book. I celebrate this poet.”Hieu Minh Nguyen, author of This Way to the Sugar and Not Here“Caleb Luna's debut collection of poetry is a series of beautiful and real love and honesty notes to and about fat brown disabled queer survivor body landscapes. These are medecine stories for everyone needing to hear their body and heart's stories and questions remembered, written with fierce power and grace. Take your time and let them linger on your heart and tongue.” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice and Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home“In Caleb Luna’s REVENGE BODY, the body is defined and redefined so as to reflect the terror and the beauty of the world. There is a great poetic power exhibited here; through odes, elegies, flashbacks, and polemic, Luna shows how structures of violence - fatphobia, heteropatriarchy, racism, capitalism - interlock but ultimately cannot wholly deny a freedom intuited as something more than “one long masochistic scene.” Destruction, Luna powerfully concludes, is not theirs to hold.” BIlly-Ray Belcourt, author of A HISTORY OF MY BRIEF BODY

    How does a daughter emerge whole from an upbringing saturated with religious fundamentalism? And if not whole, how does she piece together some kind of coherent self out of fragmented half-truths? The eighteen narrative poems in Imago, Dei bear witness to the emotional and psychological weight amassed from a girlhood fraught with vexed messages about what it means to be “good.” Narrated in third-person, lyric vignettes, these are poems about a daughter’s desire to be the son her well-meaning, but deeply damaged father thinks he needs; about an adolescent world filled with cute boys, predatory church leaders, Lakes of Fire, and broken girls who beg to be reborn; about the bad-girl specters of Eve, Jezebel, and Delilah that haunt her into adulthood and wreak havoc on her intimate relationships; about dirty dancing, Bible study, Lacanian theory, and crying after sex; and about what happens when a recovering evangelical becomes a mother to her own daughters.Winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize, Imago, Dei is a poetry collection from the author of Wild Things.

    Raw honesty paired with concise language inhabit and fully embody a life shaped by the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This is my favorite kind of poetry, necessary and urgent, revealing and saving and healing and re-creating both poet and reader.” - ire’ne laura silva, author of CUICACALLI/House of Song, 2021 Saguaro poetry prize judge"The powerful lines, the no-holds-barred voice, and risk-taking candor of these dynamic debut poems make the reader hungry for a whole volume." -Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas“Readers can expect to witness the origins of an audacious and empowered advocate whose lyric and inquisitiveness bodes well for the future of poetry." -Faylita Hicks, author of HOODWITCH“Read this book when you need a good cry, or a knowing look across the room: when you need to be reminded of what tethers you to yourself.” - Ariana Brown, author of We Are Owed.

    Between Lost and Found and Infinite is a collection of sixty poems divided into three parts.Lost explores the futility of unhappy endings.Found injects hope into despair, rising with beautiful promise.Infinite lingers on the wonders of life and reflects on the sweetness of the universe.With themes of memory, grief, self-discovery, relationships, and longing, this is a compilation to savor and cherish.

    Theweather also happens,as it always does, & passes on, & brings those other placeswhere it falls into the orbit of the glass.'To look up from Padraig Regan's words is to find oneself gently re-fitted into the world,' writes Vahni Capideo, praising Padraig Regan's 'awesome originality and honesty'. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.

    Textured with mountains―a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self―and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold.Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations―among Taiwan, China, and America―cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later―the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past.Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”

    Asherah serves as a guide through the sections of her book while also allowing the readers to see the words as their own. A Life Cycle is broken into sections after a traumatic event that represents the final tipping point. What follows is The Shattering: a deep dive into the suffering of fully losing one's sense of self and safety, The Healing: a journey through processing layers of trauma to reach the root hurts of childhood, Light Shines Through: an exploration of reigniting hope and learning to find joy, and The Loving: a discovery of what love is and how the act of loving has much more to do with one's self than the person receiving the love.This book transcends the genre of poetry because of its ability to universally help people process and name feelings that often elude words. This book is for anyone developing, hurting, healing, or becoming new versions of themselves. She knows this because that is exactly what she was doing when she wrote it: healing childhood trauma, processing a sexual assault, and learning how to experience joy.

    

    Together, text and image call up a nightmarish and seemingly insatiable buzzing-clicking-scrolling-sharing appetite for a daily diet of Black suffering.In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection How She Read (2019), Gibson gives sombre voice to Nostalgia, “the signifying ache in search of its signified.” A meditation on the rise of falling monuments, in the wake of Add to Cart consumer culture, this collection draws on the language of brand marketing, news and social media, DIY culture and graphic design—"the tyranny of copy and paste”—to confront the role of the new colonial machinery in the relentless consumption and commodification of Black bodies.Drawing on icons past and present, this collection imagines Black voices moving freely across time and space: the hold of a 19th century slave ship diagram printed on a white rubber yoga mat; a whispering set of 1950s grinning salt n pepper shakers on a Pinterest dinner table; ringside with wrestler Sweet Daddy Siki at 1970s Maple Leaf Gardens on YouTube; and the dissenting centre of the 2020 Black Square. In the journey from longing to belonging, with/holding disrupts the fetishizing algorithms that continue to reproduce Black pain, promote anti-Black racism, and reinforce white supremacy. As an act of protest, this collection imagines how to survive the unspeakable present. As an act of reclamation it seeks to build a meaningful connection to the past through transcending acts of resistance.

    Part debut poetry collection, part journey through the author's life, At Least This I Know is a collection exploring ancestry, racism, nationhood, activism, and queerness. These poems are a means of working through belonging both in a physical sense and emotional. Be it the belonging of immigrant bodies in new countries, or the belonging of the queer self within found families and safe spaces. This debut confronts trauma and pain, while making space for joy and humour, and ultimately redemption.

    This trust can be romantic, carnal, or familial. What do we do when this trust is placed with the wrong person? What do we do when that trust is twisted and abused for the benefit of another, at the expense of our innocence?We will fight to justify what happened and make peace with our demons. We will re-play in our heads “he’s a nice guy,” or “she didn’t mean it like that,” until we believe the lie ourselves. But to truly heal and become resilient, we must acknowledge our truth.With Convalesce by Enne Zale, you are challenged to acknowledge your truth. You are challenged to revisit your demons and become resilient. You are challenged to create peace from trauma and find wisdom through your experiences.Find a cozy place to sit. It's time to whisper your confessions.

    The long central section, 'Translations from the Pasiphaë', gathers these themes together in a blistering, unforgettable re-telling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen from the point of view of the bull-child's mother - the betrayed and violated Pasiphaë. The familiar legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth is transformed here into a story of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary cycle of violence, power and the abuse of power. At the centre lies Pasiphaë calling for her son: 'They took him away from me/and they killed him in the dark, for years.'Telling uncomfortable truths, going deep into male and female drives and desires, our most tender and vulnerable places, and speaking of them in frank, unshrinking ways - these poems are afraid, certainly, but also beautiful, resolute and brave.

    her debut poetry book is split into three sections that flow into one another, letting every person who has had their heart broken, see the thoughts in their head finally written on paper. Isabella’s book was created to, in her own words, ‘give people the comfort of knowing they are not alone in their emotions’. from relationships, to body image, to mental health, ‘how sunflowers bloom under moonlight’ has the sole purpose of making you giggle, cry, smile, reflect and cry a little bit more. so, keep a box of tissues close, find a quite place to read and allow yourself to feel absolutely everything.

    Writing at the frayed edges of textbook girlhood, Sara Matson crafts in a new and necessary lexicon for (a)dressing embodied trauma.

    This book is divided into three chapters, signifying how we bring ourselves into different moments in our lives, and how we always return to them once more. In Forever, time is a fluctuating construct that could be water one day and stone the next. Forever explores and questions life on Earth and what this might mean for us all, weaving in love, loss, religion, struggle, and joy throughout the different chapters.

    Deetz. The poetry collection is based on life as a teenager. The book includes mental illnesses and puts words on feelings a lot of people can't express.

    It's about girlhood. It's about naming what he did to you & learning that it doesn't define you. It's not about the men & their hands. It's about you & how you survived them. How you reclaimed your sexuality & redefined it on your own terms. Most of all, it's about how you kept living & smiling & working & creating & healing. Even when you were bleeding.

    Deploying a range of forms and techniques astonishing in a first collection, Boychuk creates unsparing scenes of their complicated life together. Poem after poem attempts to wring clarity from memories ripe with trauma and love, as Boychuk questions whether it is possible for a child to ever extricate herself from an abusive parent—to become, as it were, a living “antonym” of a painful family legacy. A booklength loss-lyric of vivid beauty, Antonyms for Daughter is a singular example of grief transformed into art.

    

    Ebony Stewart reclaims her own narrative to speak against the racism and colorism she’s experienced, while criticizing society’s treatment of women as sexual objects. This collection reaffirms the reader through storytelling as an open letter to retell, acknowledge, overcome, and learn new ways to use poetry as a coping technique. As BloodFresh reflects the importance of owning your own space, Stewart carves out a home for herself, her poems, and all of the readers who take refuge in her words.

    Ahmed uses haunting language to bring life to the gut-wrenching poems, reflecting on childhood trauma, that first-once-in-a-lifetime love and the broken heart that follows. It is a collection about how depression and anxiety can affect every day life and the role of a daughter in a South Asian family. It is a journey about pain and finding a semblance of hope in all that darkness.

    When something is easy, brings joy and excitement I do more of it and that is what happened here. Poetry has been a life-long pleasure, but usually as a reader. I have dabbled in writing private pieces before, then these came. Sometimes, there is a meeting of two people that changes everything. This book is a result of one of those times. The words coming through on the music of a guitar; the notes and melodies acting as a muse; the song as an anchor to hold onto while playing with the creative force that is available to all of us. It opened a channel for me and the words dropped onto the page. Most times, I felt vulnerable to read them, let alone share them, but here they are for you. My work in the world has always been the work of the heart and of the soul, connecting people to a deeper truth of themselves. Helping people to remember that they are connected to something wonderful and vast. Opening them up to their inner spiritual power. This book is another vehicle for that intention of my life. May it remind you of your own heart’s strength. Sarah x

    More than anything, these poems are an attempt to write toward joy, toward futures in which we buy flowers for ourselves.

      In C. T. Salazar’s striking debut poetry collection, the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South’s historic and ongoing violence. His restless relationship with religion (“a child told me there was a god / and because he was smiling, I believed him”) eventually includes a reclamation of the language of belief in the name of desire. “I felt myself become gospel in your hands,” the speaker tells his beloved. And, as the title poem asserts, a headless body “leaves more room for salvation.” Though Salazar’s South is not a tender place, the book is a petition for tenderness, revealing in both place and people the possibilities for mercy, vulnerability, and wonder. The lyric I, as it creates an archive of experience, is not distanced from the poems’ subjects or settings, but deeply enmeshed in a tangled world. In poems with lush diction, ranging from a sonnet crown to those that explore the full field of the page, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking seeks—and finds—where the divine resides: “Praise our hollow-bell bodies still ringing.”

    Taking us on slippery nights out fuelled by chemsex, on drunken lads’ holidays, and into the quiet violence of small domestic moments, this is a world where tracksuits hide queer desire, where shame masks vulnerability, where wallets hide wraps of crystal meth. From the eager trepidation of teenage sex, to the ecstasy of parties, to the stigma around HIV, Limbic is at once a therapy and a celebration, showing how queer learning can be both soft-edged and brutal at once. An exploration of masculinity, addiction and trauma, this is a revelatory collection of poems; wise, tender, and vital.

    Like all great jokes, this one is dead serious. -Eve L. Ewing, award-winning poet, playwright, scholar, and sociologist For Chicago's Oak Park and River Forest High School's Spoken Word Club, there is one phrase that reigns supreme: Respect the Mic. It's been the club's call to arms since its inception in 1999. As its founder Peter Kahn says, It's a call of pride and history and tradition and hope.This vivid new collection of poetry and prose -- curated by award-winning and bestselling poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Peter Kahn, and Dan Sully Sullivan -- illuminates just that, uplifting the incredible legacy this community has cultivated. Among the dozens of current students and alumni, Respect the Mic features work by NBA star Iman Shumpert, National Youth Poet Laureates Kara Jackson and Natalie Richardson, comedian Langston Kerman, and more.In its pages, you hear the sprawling echoes of students, siblings, lovers, new parents, athletes, entertainers, scientists, and more --all sharing a deep appreciation for the power of storytelling. A celebration of the past, a balm for the present, and a blueprint for the future, Respect the Mic offers a tender, intimate portrait of American life, and conveys how in a world increasingly defined by separation, poetry has the capacity to bind us together.

    The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father's death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide--all of these compound to "month after / month" and "dream / after dream" of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry's cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like "wrist skin when a grater slips," a "laugh as good as a scream," pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release.The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to "trying, these days, to believe again / in people," another concedes that "defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose." Look: the chair is just a chair." But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy "torn open" by dogs and a suicide, "two beautiful teenagers are kissing." Between screams, something intimate--hope, however difficult it may be.

    Survivors of a lost time, they enter a labyrinth filled with the haze of nostalgia, loss, meaning, and hope.At turns mythic and intimate, wry and lyrical, Alice and Antius show us the power of words to trace our path across the shadow of ruin.