todd davis
Coffin Honey
Michigan State University Press, 2022 $19.95
Playlist:
In Coffin Honey, Todd Davis explores the many violences we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named “Ursus” navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world.
lisa dordal
Water Lessons
Black Lawrence Press, 2022
$16.95
Playlist:
Water Lessons addresses multiple dimensions of grief arising from my mother’s alcoholism and eventual death, my father’s deepening dementia, and my own childlessness. Against the backdrop of these personal griefs, I scrutinize the patriarchal underpinnings of the world I grew up in as well as my complicity in systemic racism as a white girl growing up in the 70’s and 80’s.
Poems read:
“My Mother Is a Peaceful Ghost” “Grief”
“Daughter Poem”
“I Love”
former DMQ Review Contributor
Jennifer martelli
The Queen of Queens
Bordighera Press, 2022
$18
Playlist:
Just after I graduated from college in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro was nominated to the vice presidency. The Reagan administration was reveling in its greed and cruelty; the AIDS epidemic was being ignored; people were needlessly dying.
When I started writing The Queen of Queens, we had not yet been plunged into a pandemic, which would be ignored by another feckless administration, nor had Kamala Harris been nominated to the vice presidency (this is the good news).
If I were to give The Queen of Queens a shape, it would be circular, like the pearls Geraldine Ferraro wore at her nomination.
former DMQ Review Contributor