Thus begins a lifelong affair with a genre she tries to emulate in her real life relationships, often with disastrous results. Yet even after Nichole realizes she’ll never become the women in her books—and that that’s not necessarily a bad thing—she fears the love she yearns for is only found between pages. Romance Novels Ruined Me is a reader’s journey that takes us through the stages of a typical long-term relationship: early infatuation that gives way to disillusionment and ends in enlightened commitment—with lots of growth along the way, and heroes found in the most unexpected of places. Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Nichole Perkins writes about the intersections of pop culture, race, sex, gender, and relationships. Nichole loves Prince, romance novels, and the television show Frasier. You can find some of her work online at Vulture, BuzzFeed, Fusion, and The Toast to name a few. Cover design by Kerry Ellis

    The poems in The Book of Endings try to make sense of, or at least come to some kind of reckoning with absence--the death of the author's mother, the absence of the beloved, the absence of an accountable god, cicadas, the dead stars arriving, the dead moon aglow in the night sky.

    Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyen’s writing as “a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the words find their pathways.” As grounded in the earth as in the stars, her poems are reminders of the possibilities of contemplation in every space and moment.A Brief History of WarAnd what if Jupiteris your faitha balloonbut I call youby the impropernames I'm stainedby the world hereTo be brave and endurethe losing    To be braveand be the losingLuck    BrutalBorn in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX, their home for fourteen years. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and As Long as Trees Last. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.

    “Out here I am…not even safe as the sea,” she writes. “If I am peaceful…is not peace,/is getting used to harm.” Brand writes about a place where she is an outsider – as any poet or painter must be – and also about the many outsiders who have come here and settled over the years, uncomfortable with the land and its people, uncomfortable sometimes with themselves.No one writes about this country like Brand, free of post-colonial cant yet selvedged with Black suffering in the Americas. Speaking of memory but without a longing for the past, these poems hover between story and song; between groundings of life, wherever your landfall, and the grace of love and light. They ring with a poet’s hesitations, a woman’s praise and prayer for her people and their place. “It always takes long to come to what you have to say, you have to/sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and point to the/signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth and guess/at the fall of words.”

    Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him to see life in a wholly new way. Mosquito is a resilient meditation that is as much Zen as it is explosive, as clinical as it is philosophical and lyrical.

    After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery. Wright negotiates the precarious transition from illness to health in a state of skeptical rapture, discovering along the way the exhilaration of love--both divine and human--and finding that even the most battered consciousness can be good company. Whether he is writing about his regret for the abortion of a child, describing the mechanics of slander ("I can just hear them on the telephone and keening all their kissy little knives"), or composing an ironic ode to himself ("To a Blossoming Nut Case"), Wright's poems are exquisitely precise. Charles Simic has characterized him as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception. Here is one of the poems from the collection:Description of Her EyesTwo teaspoonfuls,and my mind goeseveryone can kiss my ass now--then it's changed,I change my mind.Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.From the Hardcover edition.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    The poems are mercilessly recursive, placing pressure on the lyric as a mode of both the elegiac and the ecstatic. The result is an enforced silence, urgent with grief.

    Felt—a fabric made of tangled fibers—becomes a metaphor for the interweavings of humans, animals, and planet. But Felt is also the past tense of "feel." This is a book of emotions both ordinary and untoward: the shadings of humiliation, obsession, love, and loneliness—as well as states so subtle they have yet to be named. Reticent and passionate, elliptical yet available, Fulton's poems consider flaws and failure, touching and not touching. They are fascinated with proximity: the painter's closeness to the canvas, the human kinship with animals, the fan's nearness to the star. Privacy, the opening and closing of doors, is at the heart of these poems that sing the forms of solitude-the meanings and feelings of virginity, the single-mindedness of fetishism, the tragedy of suicide. Rather than accept the world as given, Fulton encounters invisible assumptions with magnitude and grace. Hers is a poetry of inconvenient knowledge, in which the surprises of enlightenment can be cruel as well as kind. Felt, a deeply imagined work, at once visceral and cerebral, illuminates the possibilities of twenty-first century poetry.

    Moving between dramatic and interior monologue, and moving through intersecting histories, the ambiguities of inwardness and the eros of wakeful existence, these poems search for relationships with self, others, the world and God that are authentic—however quirky or strange."This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald JusticeIn Tennessee I Found a FireflyFlashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clungto the dark of it: the legs of the spiderheld the tucked wings close,held the abdomen still in the midst of callingwith thrusts of phosphorescent light—When I am tired of being human, I try to rememberthe two stuck together like burrs. I try to place themcentral in my mind where everything else mustsurround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.There is courtship, and there is hunger. I supposethere are grips from which even angels cannot fly.Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.When I am tired of only touching,I have my mouth to try to tell youwhat, in your arms, is not erased"This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald Justice

    Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there’s only the questing forward—with no regrets and no looking back.

    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

    With work that ranges from the laugh out loud funny to the silence and rage of loss, Forgive Yourself These Tiny Acts of Self-Destruction is a must read. As the book unfolds Jared guides the reader through fresh takes on the discussion of body image and body positivity side by side with all too familiar discussions of mental health, anxiety and suicide. It explores the complex cloth that is American culture and New York in particular, taking extra time to examine his identity as a Jewish American and how that underpins the authors daily experience. Forgive Yourself is a modern handbook for finding yourself and your place without losing your way.

    Bergin.Illustrated with drawings by Aldo Salvadori

    McLane’s stunning third poetry collection, This Blue. Here are songs for and of a new century, poems both archaic and wholly now. In the middle of life, stationed in our common “Terran Life,” the poet conjures urban pigeons, Adirondack mountains, Genoa, Andalucía, Belfast, Parma; here is a world sounded out, broken, possibly shareable, newly named: “Take it up Old Adam— / everyday the world exists / to be named.” This Blue is a searching and a singing—intricate, sexy, smart.