December 2025

Jill Michelle

Underwater
Riot in Your Throat, 2025
$17

Playlist:

“Visceral and vulnerable, Jill Michelle’s Underwater recreates the enormity of post-traumatic grief, the way it ensnares the body and mind in time. February, which 'floods like broken water in our bed—rafts of sad blood,' becomes a portal to infant loss, parental loss, sexual assault, and divorce, happening always as if for the first time.” —Eugenia Leigh

Poems read:
“Aftermath"
“Bedrest at Winnie Palmer" (first appeared in DMQ Review)
“Clock"
“My Dad Adored Coffee"

former DMQ Review contributor

Frank Rubino

Frank's Lunch Service
Lithic Press, 2025
$20

Playlist:

“I tore through it in one night and really felt so surprised and taken by the dailiness, a poetry written by a guy living through losing parents and having difficult kids and a gay uncle who died of AIDS and a kind of disaffected survivalist brother. The whole thing is told in this straight-ahead way that is always a sweet and strangely clear-headed guy talking to himself …” —from the introduction by Eileen Myles

Poems read:
“Young Women Who Are Kids, KWAYW”
“The Russians”
“Frank's Lunch Service”

Erik Manuel Soto

Inside the Umber Iris
What Books Press, 2025
$18

Playlist:

Inside the Umber Iris, winner of the Gronk Nicandro prize for a first book of poetry, is a collection that traverses the realms of the subconscious and mythology. Tying a lyrical and surrealist style to themes of generational trauma and folkloric genealogy, while continuously weaving pain and passion through every stanza, the poet constructs a striking odyssey with high emotional stakes.

November 2025

Holli Carrell

Apostasies
Perugia Press, 2025
$20.00

Playlist:

“Holli Carrell’s pulsating first poetry collection, Apostasies, lifts the veil on growing up Mormon in the United States to expose the seeded brutalities and indoctrinations from organized belief structures that stint and oppress the very fibers of selfhood, girlhood, womanhood, and nonbinary existence. Apostasies boldly interrogates a life under righteous surveillance, under siege by holiness and flockness, and what religious control cultivates in the interior. Carrell’s intimate and experiential poems deconstruct the “myth and figment” of the “American story” of the LDS Church with both a scalpel and an axe—this book is a reckoning.” - Felicia Zamora

rob mclennan

the book of sentences
University of Calgary Press, 2025
$19.99 CAD/US

Playlist:

Poems read:
“Quartet for an end of landscape, with farmhouse"
“Autobiography"
“Summer, pandemic"

Soundtrack:
Ólafur Arnalds, “A Sunrise Session” (2021)
Beach House, “Thank Your Lucky Stars” (2015)
Brian Eno, “Thursday Afternoon” (1985)

Paula Neves

Passaic
Get Fresh Books, 2025
$20
@itinerantmuse

Playlist:

Passaic is a collection of poems that reflect on the Passaic, an 80-mile long river coursing through prime New Jersey real estate in counties that run the gamut from affluence to working class. Its lower 17 miles in particular comprise one of the biggest environmental atrocities in the country. Passaic celebrates the complicated legacies of the actual or spiritual descendants of communities who lived and worked along these banks, and continue to be affected by the river's destruction, its fitful, politically charged rehabilitation, climate change, and “economic development.”

October 2025

Bill Hollands

Mangrove
ELJ Editions, 2025
$16

Playlist:

In this delightful collection, Bill Hollands confirms he “can, after all, put on a show.” With humor, a conversational rhythm, and a careful eye for detail, he explores how a boy who is told “you are not like the others” finds his own identity. Via masks such as Ginger and Mary Ann, elementary musical performer, and young tennis wannabe––sometimes tortured, always determined––he keeps returning to and claiming “beauty, beauty beyond understanding.” —Ellen Bass

Poems read:
“The Second Ginger Grant”
“Al's Books and News, Miami”
“I Revisit My Favorite Children's Book, and by Favorite I Mean Most Terrifying”

Daniel Lassell

Frame Inside a Frame
Texas Review Press, 2025
$21.95

Playlist:

Frame Inside a Frame explores the boundaries, overlaps, and portals of memory and seeking. The collection greets readers with visceral childhood memories, gritty landscapes of climate collapse, and pollen everywhere. Meditative on what boundaries mean, Frame Inside a Frame is a constellation eyed toward the exploration of distance and meanings inherent within distance and proximity.

Poems read:
“Frame [In the underworld]"
“Seven Frames"
“Frame Inside a Frame [Like a resurrected body]"
“Frame [beyond these hills a river]" “Road Trip"

former DMQ Review contributor

Shannon K. Winston

The Worry Dolls
Glass Lyre Press, 2025
$16

Playlist:

The Worry Dolls explores how worry is internalized, resisted, and reimagined through a range of poetic forms. In addition to intergenerational anxiety, the collection engages themes of gender and the body, showing how poetry and music can create possibilities for hope and survival.

Poems read:
“My Octopus"
“The Newborn"
“Worry is the Dress Rehearsal"
“The Cello"
“Pitch"

former Salon contributor, 10/2021

September 2025

Kirk Glaser

The House That Fire Built
MadHat Press, 2025
$21.95

Playlist:

A house possessed by a mysterious suffering. A house where a father dies whose actions fed the madness and death of wife and sons. A house a family enters to be caught in this web of inheritance, consumed by nightmare visions and haunting events until the house burns to the ground and leaves them spinning in mysteries. The House That Fire Built tells the true story of a family pulled into the disturbing and sometimes violent mysteries of this house, and how they slowly come to see that the forces of destruction may also save them from a worse fate.

Sandra Marchetti

Diorama
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2025
$20

Playlist:

Diorama is a new full-length collection in which the female speaker undergoes a re-wilding process in her exploration of the natural world. The collection draws heavily from other poets and provides an immersive, sonic experience. Diorama can be purchased at the link above or or anywhere books are sold.

“In Diorama, Sandra Marchetti’s pensive and beautiful collection, a poet’s deeply lyric engagement with the world plays out as a series of tense, distilled encounters filled with longing." —Sandra Beasley

Poems read:
“Semblance"
“Seven Sisters"
“Triptych"
“Breath"
“A Swim at Europe Bay Beach in July, Deserted"

Theodora Ziolkowski

Ghostlit
Texas Review Press, 2025
$21.95

Playlist:

Ghostlit is part trauma narrative, part pop cultural examination, and part gothic fever dream. Memory, too, is at the heart of these poems, as enacted through a speaker who is continually working to reconcile her past with her present.

Poems read:
“In the dream in which I refuse to repair us”
“At the memory care center, the waters are calm before they are choppy”
“From NPR, the wife learns of the hog problem in Texas”

August 2025

Clayton Adam Clark

Auscultate
Galileo Press, 2025
$16.42

Playlist:

To auscultate is to listen to the sounds of the heart and other parts of the body for the purpose of better understanding what’s going on in there. And so in this collection, I've sought to investigate the body in many of its forms, in addition to the intersections where these bodies connect (or don’t quite), while also seeking to understand the way environment influences those bodies and their (dis)connections.

Poems read:

“Self-portrait With Leap-second Vigil"
“Buzzing Beneath the Leaves" “Leeches"
“Tornado Season"

David Greenspan

Milk Sickness
Querencia Press, 2025
$14

Playlist:

Somewhere between a fable and an exigence of language, Milk Sickness exists. The girl. It scurries. It prefers dirt. The girl holds. A story about a boy, a girl, their children, their children's ghosts, a city, a softer, gentler apocalypse. The girl holds a boxcutter. There are also knives. Milk Sickness speaks to, or at least toward and around, a world of climate catastrophe without mentioning the Anthropocene. The girl holds a boxcutter to the awful. Whatever sense there is to be found subsumes itself beneath the fever of the sentence. The girl holds a boxcutter to the awful throat.

Lesley Wheeler

Mycocosmic
Tupelo Press, 2025
$19.95

Playlist:

“Good things come to you through fire,” a Tarot reader told Lesley Wheeler as she was composing what became her sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic. But how could that be true, while the planet was burning and life slamming her with one loss after another? Then she learned about pyrophilic fungi that lurk in soil until activated by fire. Enter mycelia and a teeming underground world that metabolizes death, changing what remains so that life can begin anew.

Poems read:

“We Could Be"
“Dark Energy"
“Return Path"

July 2025

Noah Davis

The Last Beast We Revel In
CavanKerry Press, 2025
$18

Playlist:

The Last Beast We Revel In coalesces around love for one’s romantic partner, family, community, and the natural world. As the Appalachian Mountains enter their most recent chapter of environmental catastrophes and abuses, the need to discover joy within the human and greater-than-human community is essential. These poems balance revery, mourning, lust, and love while wading the rivers and meandering the deep hollows of Appalachia’s enduring landscape.

Poems read:
“Trout Heart”
“Places Familiar”
“The September Side of Light”

Linda Nemec Foster

The Lake Huron Mermaid
Wayne State University Press, 2024 $24.99

Playlist:

The Lake Huron Mermaid is a story in verse with illustrations by Meridith Ridl. It’s a call and response book in two voices that was written with my co-author Anne-Marie Oomen. We each assume a different persona throughout the book. I assume the voice of Auroraelelacia, the mermaid of Lake Huron, and Oomen assumes the voice of Dawn, a teenager whose sister is struggling with long COVID. The mermaid and Dawn bond and unearth a deeper understanding of sisterhood.

Poems read:
“Morning on the Lake”
“Mystery”
“The Lost Sister”
“The Colors Falling”
“Contrapuntal: The Gift”

former DMQ Review contributor

Carol L Park

Songs Sharp and Tender
Kelsay Books, 2024
$23

Playlist:

Poems selected for this reading involve a long-enduring partnership between two lovely, neurodivergent people with contrasting cultural backgrounds. Many people who haven’t read poetry since college are loving my work. An engineer wrote: “Carol’s poetry is a heart-wrenching, sharply focused, wide-angle, deep field view of a love-filled life gleaned from a world too filled with suffering."

June 2025

Dane Cervine

Nine Volt Nirvana
Word Poetry Press, 2025
$20

Playlist:

Nine Volt Nirvana takes the reader on a subtle journey through landscapes both existential and noetic. Deftly juxtaposing a Zen tradition rooted in doubt with the joys of ordinary moments, he also journeys through India before landing, like any good poet-pilgrim, at home again in the given world. This is Dane’s ninth book of poems, often characterized as literary bridges between poetics, meditation, and psychology. Ellen Bass has commented that his work is “deliciously full of joy, insight, and awe”; and Lola Haskins that “Dane has a talent for opposites…like a buzzard tearing at meat, he relishes very moment.”

former DMQ Review contributor

Brandel france de Bravo

Locomotive Cathedral
The Backwaters Press, 2025
$17.95

Playlist:

I chose three poems from Locomotive Cathedral having to do with mothers even though motherhood is not an explicit theme in the book. The first poem takes place during the pandemic when I took care of my mother-in-law after a bad fall. The second poem is dedicated to a dear friend of mine who had a fraught relationship with her mother; and “Final Descent" is a prose poem about my own mother's passing.

Poems read:
“If It’s in the Way, It Is the Way” “Tradition is the Prison in which You Live”
“Final Descent”

former DMQ Review contributor

Stephen Haven

The Flight from Meaning
Slant Books, 2025
$18.00

Playlist:

This collection, a finalist for the International Beverly Prize for Literature, responds to a contemporary spiritual/psychological “space” that often abandons a sense of meaning in the natural and human worlds.

“The Flight from Meaning is masterful in its rubric of language poetry and its urgent and operatic call to the Anthropocene for new symbiotic memes. Each poem disrupts and interrogates the mundane, mirrors our ‘human place jungled in the dark,’ and in acts of flux removes scaffolding and counters the hubris of our times.” —Rosa Lane, author of Called Back

Poems read:
“Solo”
“Lines After Pasolini”
“The Flight from Meaning”

May 2025

Bob Heman

Washing the Wings of the Angels
Quale Press, 2024
$17

Playlist:

All of my “non-series” prose poems written since 1997 are “headed” with the generic description “Information” and are published or performed under that title. Washing the Wings of the Angels contains a selection of those pieces written between 2014 and 2022. To avoid a redundancy in the presentation, the generic descriptions heading each poem were omitted, with the initial words of each poem instead being capitalized.

When I perform poems from the book I still call each “INFORMATION” even though those headings don't appear in the book. I will be reading 13 of the poems from the book.

Derek JG Williams

Reading Water
Lightscatter Press, 2025
$20.00

Playlist:

Winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, awarded in 2024 and chosen by judge Eduardo Corral, Reading Water undertakes a restless search for a self under constant evolution.

“These poems explore our particular American moment, all of us figuring out what to do with our angers and our loves." - Jill McDonough​

“Reading Water dives deep and dares us to hold our breath...(in it) you will find the intricacies of our own frail human hearts." - Sean Thomas Dougherty

Poems read:
“In the House of Words"
“Dogs, Parrots, a Dragon"
“Low Tide"

Wendy Wisner

The New Life
Cornerstone Press/University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, 2024
$18.55

Playlist:

The New Life explores motherhood through the lens of a fractured childhood and intergenerational trauma. Stories of loss return throughout the book: a grandmother’s stillbirth, a child lost on the ship from Russia to the U.S., friends’ miscarriages and child losses. There are poems written in the wake of 9/11 and Sandy Hook. Throughout the collection, the speaker wrestles with the turmoil of raising children in a volatile, violent world.

Poems Read:
“Solstice”
“The Father”
“Dream of the End of the World” “The New Life”

April 2025

Claire Crowther

Real Lear, New & Selected Poems
Shearsman, 2024
£12.95 / $20

Playlist:

Real Lear, New & Selected Poems, marks a major point in my publishing life. Many thanks to Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books, an extraordinary contemporary poetry publishing house; he has supported my development as a poet for so many years, resulting in this collection of new poems plus the best of the rest.

Poems read:
“Marriage, A Sunbeat”
“The Visitor”
“We Shine Love So Hard” “Hazards and Thrown Humans”

Jon Davis

Fearless Now & Nameless
Grid Books, 2025
$18.00

Playlist:

Poems read:
“Flamenco Recital"
“The Owl on Rattlesnake Drive"
“Against Deliverance"

Melissa Eleftherion

Gutter Rainbows
Querencia Press, 2024
$13

Playlist:

Gutter Rainbows is about transformation through trauma. It’s about growing up in Brooklyn & forming alliances with sidewalks. About being a girl on the verge of something shattering. About the fur. Many of the poems in this collection are based on a type of mineral. Melissa Eleftherion works with the language of minerals and rocks to tell a story of the relationship between women & geological trauma, along with the sediment of betrayal that lingers in our foundation.

This book is about trusting yourself enough to claw your way out.

March 2025

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Frangible Operas
Gunpowder Press, 2024
$18

Playlist:

The diversity of forms and subjects in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s Frangible Operas is breathtaking. With grace, precision, insight, and care, she engages nearly every aspect of our world—the political, the natural, the theoretical, the familial, the theological, the personal. One section of the book is devoted entirely to poems about works of art, ranging from Rembrandt to Diane Arbus—a fitting metaphor for the expansive reach of her vision. —Dean Rader

Poems read:
“Moon Bee"
“Photograph of Your Father Sewing Needlepoint at Precinct Headquarters, 1956"
“After the War"
“Passing By"

Sarah Lyn Rogers

Cosmic Tantrum
Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025
$18

Playlist:

Cosmic Tantrum is a tragicomic exploration of transactional relationships, myths, masks, rituals, and what happens when we reject the stories we've inherited about our worth. I wrote parts of it while going through my Saturn Return and reexamining everything I thought I knew about how to be "good" and "worthy"—and who decides that. Sometimes all we have is our refusal, even in small ways, and our ability to laugh.

Poems read:
“A Toast to the Dismay of Certain Industries"
“It's the Local Beast, Charlie Brown" “Cosmic Tantrum"

former DMQ Review contributor

maw Shein Win

Percussing the Thinking Jar
Omnidawn, 2024
$22.95

Playlist:

In Percussing the Thinking Jar, her third full-length poetry collection, Maw Shein Win reveals how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Through deft braiding of the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in a human body, Win has developed new forms which carry the reader to realms that are both deeply personal and universal. This generous collection includes 16 Sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher. Reflecting on our strange times, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book that invites readers into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience.

Poems read:
“Catalog”
“Hyphen Log”
“The Thinking Jar”
“Hyphen Log”

February 2025

Jessica Cohn

Gratitude Diary: Poems
Main Street Rag, 2024
$15

Playlist:

Jessica Cohn will tell you she landed on the title of her first collection because Gratitude Diary seems generic enough to be disarming. Cohn has long written nonfiction but finds poetry can say more about some of the harder facts we’re facing in post-truth times. In her poetry, nature serves as a lens on a political thematic. In this book, the speaker marks a way forward with rocks, feathers, and dark spots. These three offerings explore sub-themes of family and survival.

Poems read:
“The Birds”
“Transplants”
“How to Read the Summer Sky”

Hilary king

Stitched on Me
Riot in Your Throat Press, 2024
$17.00

Playlist:

My book, Stitched on Me, is about growing up as a woman in the South, wearing expectations and learning to discard those expectations. It's about women coming into their own, in power and comfort. These poems are about mothers, daughters, Jennifer Lopez, Ginger Spice, and what to ask for at Christmas.

Poems read:
“Stitched on Me"
“If My 1970s Childhood Had an Instagram Feed"
“Edgestitch"

former DMQ Review contributor
Current editor, DMQ Review

Nancy L. Meyer

The Stoop and The Steeple
Frog on the Moon, 2024
$15.00

Playlist:

In The Stoop and the Steeple Nancy L. Meyer introduces us to Mel, a Jamaican artist she met on a New York stoop, and Zebulon, a man her ancestors enslaved in Massachusetts, a man who climbed a steeple and crowed!

Poems read:
“Zebulon on the Steeple”: the shock of this information drove the book.
“Medicine Box”: the speaker responds to diary excerpts of her 8th great grandmother, the enslaver. This poem explores the kinds of power we exert over another.
“Recant": using the lens of race, class, and culture, the author revisits her interracial/intercultural marriage which ended in divorce 45 years ago.

January 2025!

Caroliena Cabada

True Stories
Unsolicited Press, 2024
$17.95

Playlist:

This book is a kind of fusion of two different poetry collections I was writing and thought were distinct: one collection was about extreme weather and climate change, and the other was about isolation during the pandemic. I soon realized, though, that many of the same images, feelings, and experiences were echoed across both collections. For the poems read here, I tried to choose ones that exist in the bridge between the two halves — ones that are a little bit stormy and a little bit lonely.

Poems read:
“Futile Denial”
“First, Ask”
“Inflorescence”
“Geo Logic”

Tim Hunt

Western Where
Broadstone Books, 2024
$17.00

Playlist:

The stark, moody poems of Tim Hunt’s latest collection Western Where put me in mind of a Paul Simon lyric, “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike / They’ve all come to look for America.” Though in Hunt’s version the highways are out west; the mood prevails, only the scenery changes. By the time we get to the exquisite third section, I felt as if I was in a Cormac McCarthy novel: vast wide-open, sun-bleached plains, arid deserts, desolate, and unforgiving. The journey is all about searching for what we have already found within ourselves. —Alan Catlin

Poems read:
“Still Life: Barbed Wire With Tumbleweeds (Owens Valley, CA)”
“Silver Mine (Tonopah, NV)”
“In This America (sections 1 & 21)”
“Rodeo Ride”

Alison Stone

Informed
NYQ Books, 2024
$18.95

Playlist:

Informed addresses contemporary subjects in traditional forms, including pantoums, ghazals, villanelles, and a jeweled sonnet crown. Love, loss, family, mythology, music, and current events are placed within these structures to add pressure to the subject matter. Stormy Daniels, Sandra Bland, and Echo all have their say, as does a small-town girl struggling with suburban conformity.

Poems read:
“Visit”
“Home to Roost”
“Say Her Name”
Poem Inspired by a Line by Natalie Diaz