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

December 2024

Tim Kahl

Drips, Spills, Bursts, Tangles, & Washes
Cold River Press, 2024
Book & Enclosed CD $20

Playlist:

“The Body Forever"
-Tabla Pro for Jaunpuri in Teentaal Native American flute tuned to Jaunpuri in E

“The Earth's Song"
-Epiphone guitar w/ modified capo Tenor ukulele

“A Simple Gesture"
-Mid-East Drummer [Lumbeat] Native American flute tuned to Persian Dastgah Shur

“Dear If"
-Concert ukulele
Native American flute tuned to Kafi raga in G

“A Proud Standard"
-Janggu Native American flute tuned to Korean danso

“Mobility Drills"
-Classical guitar tuned to Kora tuning (with apologies to Derek Gripper)

Susan L. Leary

Dressing the Bear
Trio House Press, 2024
$18

Playlist:

Dressing the Bear is a book-length elegy to my brother who died by overdose in September 2020. Central to the collection are the themes of grief, loss, love, and addiction, though these poems especially seek to capture the distinctness of my brother's personality and perspective as well as my longing to communicate with him across our now two separate worlds.

Poems read:

“If, Elsewhere"
“Ice"
“Influencing the Angels"
“The Not-Yet Flowers"

Dawn Macdonald

Northerny
University of Alberta Press, 2024 $19.99

Playlist:

Dawn Macdonald grew up in a cabin in the Yukon without electricity or running water. Her debut collection, Northerny, explores the tensions and dislocations of being from a place that's often mythologized as a destination for adventure and self-discovery.

Poems read:
“Every Yukoner owns the 1979 Encyclopedia Britannica"
“Roadside Wildflowers of the Northwest"
“Wasp Summer"
“ONLY GENIUS CAN SOLVE THIS PUZZLE"

November 2024

Matthew E. Henry

said the Frog to the scorpion
Harbor Editions, 2024
$18

Playlist:

Matthew E. Henry is reading four poems from his latest collection said the Frog to the scorpion:

“pop quiz for March 19, 2018”
“what i learned during Black History Month”
“when asked why I don’t teach elementary school”
“the patron saint of suicide.”

said the Frog to the scorpion explores how being a Black teacher in a predominately white educational system and being in romantic relationships with unstable partners can exemplify having unrealistic expectations in toxic situations.

Megan Merchant

Hortensia, in winter
New American Press, 2024
$18

Playlist:

Hortensia, in winter transports readers on a powerful journey through the lives of women bound by blood, history, and the weight of silence. With her deft hand, Merchant weaves a rich tapestry of personal and collective histories, inviting us to linger in the quiet spaces between loss and discovery. Hortensia, in winter is a breathtaking exploration of what it means to seek and find oneself in the voices of those who came before.

Poems read:
“Invocation”
“Sealing”
“Nauvoo, Interior Temple Burned By An Arsonist-1846”
“Eye, Barb, Throat, Gap”

Kelly R. Samuels

Oblivescence
Red Sweater Press, 2024
$18

Playlist:

Oblivescence is a new collection of poetry by Kelly R. Samuels in which a daughter processes her relationship with her mother as the latter struggles with dementia due to Alzheimer's.

Poems read:
“The Alpha Privative”
“Misspoke”
“Oblivescence”
“Sugar, like the Delphinium”
“Deep Sleep” "

Samuels’ inquiries into accumulation and crumbling—as delicate as they are stoic—give these poems a hallowed feel. The collection serves as poet’s observation and daughter’s plea..." -Allison Adair

October 2024

Eleanor Kedney

Twelve Days From Transfer
3: A Taos Press, 2024
$26

Playlist:

Twelve Days From Transfer is about womanhood—how it is defined, celebrated, and feared. The book’s narrator teeters on a fulcrum between a desperate desire to give birth and the complex emotions surrounding the inability to do so. When she feels relief from a negative pregnancy test following infertility treatments, she looks closely at her childhood, uncovering inherited grief. Twelve Days From Transfer speaks to the universal experience of grief and loss. This is a generational book that wisely acknowledges the emotional pull of the past while also traversing the present.

Poems read:
“Imagine”
“The Wielding”
“Women Pruning Pear Trees”

Alysse Kathleen

McCanna

FishWife
Black Lawrence Press, 2024
$16.95

Playlist:

I’m a sucker for magic, for sleight-of-hand, for surprise and bafflement and wonder. That’s what poetry is: a gesture that appears effortless, but isn’t. It’s curated, often with an absurd amount of calculation, and yet still comes from the impulsive, the involuntary–the difficult, the necessary. This book grew from my desire, an innate need, to reconcile dictionary and cultural definition and language with my own experience of wifehood and womanhood.

Poems read:
“The [ ] Wife”
“The Soldier”
“For Burning”
“Heat”
“The Houses”

Lee Rossi

Say Anything
Plain View Press, 2024
$17.99

Playlist:

Say Anything, Lee Rossi’s 5th book, finds him in an uncharacteristically expansive mood. Typically, he prefers delving into the deep, dark, and dire. Of course, he’s always liked the occasional laugh, but here laughter is closer to the surface, whether he’s bemoaning a mythical parent or chastising his own penchant for gloom. Now in his 8th decade, he chooses to ignore the approaching darkness and instead celebrate the beauties and oddities of this life.

Poems read:
“Instructions to My Teenage Self” “Not Brave, Not Free”
“The Angel Angle”

September 2024

John Amen

Dark Souvenirs
New York Quarterly Books, 2024 $16.95

Playlist:

John Amen's Dark Souvenirs was prompted by the suicide of his uncle, Richard Sassoon. Amen seeks clarity around Sassoon's death while expressing grief over the sudden and violent loss. The poems, however, quickly expand to include imaginative leaps, Amen recasting Sassoon as his brother, his son, a stranger he meets in random places, and a teacher who graced the world with a unique brand of wisdom, madness, and humor. Throughout his sixth collection, Amen navigates stunning imagery, memorable declarations, and language that shimmers with signature musicality.

Poems read:
“Family Systems”
“Apprenticeship”
“Dark Souvenirs”
“Recovery”

Robin Michel

Beneath a Strawberry Night Sky
Raven & Wren Press, 2023
$15

Playlist:

“Neither a reproach nor a celebration, [this collection] is a look at the underside of the known world, where everyone is at fault, there are no clear solutions, and the painful beauty of the search is all that is left.”
—Indigo Moor

“…poems that seek redemption in their honest examinations of a life. They speak not only to poetry but to domesticity, motherhood, and marriage—squarely facing the limits and ends of love.” —Shara McCallum

“…spare and beautiful…wise and powerful.” —Lynne Kaufman

“These poems recognize the shape-shifting nature of love and the way poetry saves us.” —Angie Minkin

Anne F. Walker

Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length
The Black Spring Press Group, 2024
$16

Playlist:

Most of these poems began on a train from Emeryville to Toronto. Most are 100-word prose poems where different shapes, colors, and textures fly over and in multiple same-sized square boxes. They reflect landscapes, bodies, travel, time, and rooted memories. Precision of image, narrative, and language are aesthetic goals, as are storylines that deepen with rereading.

Poems read:
“Warm Springs"
“Beating Heart of the Track"
“Beating Heart of the Track"
“Good Use of Beautiful Light (on Clinton Street)"
“Glutted on a Morning Rose"

August 2024

Laura Isabela Amsel

A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet
Brick Road Poetry Press, 2024
$17.95

Playlist:

By the time I came to poetry in 2016, my study of the Spanish language had already awakened in me a love of the sounds of words, of how they feel in your mouth when spoken aloud, and of the nuances of meaning that change and grow richer over time. Words also afforded me the power to manage the unmanageable, to reimagine endings, to make of the chaotic and the ugly beautiful arrangements.

Poems read:
“Father"
“Cain"
“Black Fox"

Katie Berta

retribution forthcoming
Ohio University Press, 2024
$17.95

Playlist:

In the lineage of New York School poets like Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, retribution forthcoming does its exploratory work through narrative and lyric modes, by simile and catalogue. Katie Berta’s poems look vulnerably and honestly at sexual coercion and the psychological fallout of assault. The world of these poems and their trauma narrative is deepened by the heartful speaker’s sense of humor and eagerness to love and trust.

Poems read:
“The Rattlesnakes
They Keep in the Life Sciences Building Remind Me of My Dog”
“I Realized Skincare Would Not Save My Life”
“Will I Survive This New Season?”

former DMQ Review contributor

James gering

Tickets to the Fall of Icarus
Interactice Press, 2023
$18

Playlist:

Tickets to the Fall of Icarus charts the flight of two flamboyant characters, Icarus and Audrey, as they navigate their way through the maelstrom of modern life amidst natural disasters, pandemics, online dating and even a little self-sabotage.

“Gering achieves artistic flair through deft control of language and shots of Kafkaesque absurdism.” —Daniel Ionita

“Full of literary references, puns and wit, this collection is a waterfall of mordant humour, note-perfect and a mirror to our post-pandemic selves.” —Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

Poems read:
“Icarus”
“Companionship Comes Sailing” “Sublime Old Fig”

July 2024

Nancy Miller Gomez

Inconsolable Objects
YesYes Books, 2024
$18.00

Playlist:

Nancy Miller Gomez’s debut poetry collection, Inconsolable Objects, is part cautionary tale and part love letter to the broken objects and people of this world. Driven by the search for beauty in the forsaken, Gomez offers fetal mice floating in a snow globe, soldiers marching past a disembodied heart, birds that have learned to imitate the sound of an AK47. A compassionate homage to the humanity tucked away in unexpected places, these poems seek to offer a hopeful glimpse into the mysteries of our shared experience.

Poems read:
“Lost”
“The Invisible Mother”
“Why I Tie My Hair to Trees.”

John Linstrom

To Leave for Our Own Country
Black Lawrence Press, 2024
$17.95

Playlist:

“Wise, clear-eyed, and exquisitely musical, John Linstrom’s assured debut creates its own weather. Reading To Leave for Our Own Country, I felt the snow and rain, the welcome sun at the storm’s end, the long dark and the long day, the endings that lead—always—to new beginnings, the pure, bright, melodic holiness of the moment and what it might teach us.” —Joe Wilkins

“[...] a fine, uncommonly absorbing book, one that tilts the somber toward affection and the grave toward delight.” —Maurice Manning

Poems read:
“Thunder and Lilies”
“Ungathered Words”
“Another Small Town Drowning”

Cintia Santana

The Disordered Alphabet
Four Way Books, 2023
$17.95

Playlist:

The Disordered Alphabet contains letter-poems written to the letters of the Roman alphabet as the speaker attempts to find voice in the wake of grief. References to the atom and the atom bomb are interwoven throughout . Like atoms, letters hold the potential to gather, create, destroy, and be destroyed. In the wake of loss, the fission and fusion of language enacts the ways language births itself anew, foregrounding its role in our quest to make meaning.

Poems read:
“Inherit"
“Word"
“Dear B"
“Hum"

June 2024

Lisa Collyer

How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up
Gazebo Books, 2023
$19.97

Watch here:

Playlist:

How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is a conversation in poems on the taboo and abject bodies of women. Collyer disrupts selflessness, tackling the disquieting dilemmas of feminine space with erotic and comic freedom.

‘Searing poetry of feminine experience, How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is unashamedly visceral and lights up with flashes of literary incandescence. Formally inventive, bleakly comic, slyly erotic – these are poems which bristle with edges and glint like cut gems. Each poem arrives like a dare, refusing euphemism or domestication.’

Darren C. Demaree

neverwell
Harbor Editions, 2023
$18

Watch here:

Playlist:

This reading is of the opening arc of neverwell, my nineteenth full-length collection, which deals with my own history of alcohol addiction. The goal of this book was to write a collection of poetry that was stark, with as little metaphor as possible, and to show in full that time just before sobriety, new sobriety, and the ramifications of what is carried deeper into sobriety.

former DMQ Review contributor

V.C. Myers

Ophelia
Femme Salve Books, 2023
$20

Watch here:

Playlist:

V.C. Myers's new gothic poetry collection, Ophelia, intertwines erasures of Shakespeare's Hamlet with original poems to explore allegories of sexual assault, domestic violence, and death, spanning the centuries from classic mythology to the #metoo movement.

May 2024

Grace Cavalieri

The Long Game: Poems Selected & New The Word Works, 2024
$28.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

Grace Cavalieri reads from her new book The Long Game: Poems Selected & New. The book contains parts of 20 previously published books of poems. Today you will hear poems “Grandmother” and “The First,” characters from childhood who helped form poetic memories/visions in one section of The Long Game. “Grandmother” is about a strong individual who started the first Italian restaurant in Trenton N.J., the early part of the 20th century. “The First” depicts a recognition of feminism (age 5).

Poems read:
“Grandmother”
“The First”

Sarah Kain Gutowski

The Familiar
TTRP: The University Press of SHSU, 2024
$21.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

A book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar explores female existential crisis through two characters, the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self, who send a single household into chaos as they vacillate between the siren call of ambition, the necessity of the workplace, and responsibility to love and family. Engaging with philosophy and pop culture, bouncing between high and low diction, The Familiar considers the effects of second and third-wave feminism through an absurdist and fabulist lens, wrestling with the notion women can truly “have it all.”

Poems read:
“Climate of Destruction”
“Torn and Useless”
“A True Believer”
“We Must Be Ruthless”

Sarah MaClay

Nightfall Marginalia
What Books Press, 2023
$17.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

“A Breathing Lake” is a response, in part, to a photo of a Sankai Juku dance-theatre performance. “The Hidden Springs” is initially situated in a dream I had right after seeing Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. “Before Us” explodes a constraint exercise initially based, at her encouragement, on the syntax of a poem by Kathy Fagan Grandinetti. Weaving through these poems: the navigation of and shocked gratitude for a renewed and impossible desire. Nightfall Marginalia, a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Poetry, is a collection of nocturnes and ekphrastics, constraint-based experiments, prose poems, and poems of the dream.

Poems read:
“A Breathing Lake”
“The Hidden Springs”
“Before Us”

April 2024

Willa Carroll

Demolition Suite
Split Rock Press, 2023
$12

Watch here:

Playlist:

Demolition Suite engages climate change, environmental degradation, and hazardous exposure with unexpected poetics. From contaminated sites to troubled bodies of water, forest fires to rewilding zones, this innovative sequence covers wide ground. Fluid tones shift between grief, wit, intimacy, and beyond. With kinetic diction, these pages stage embodied responses to our imperiled planet. Out of crisis, Carroll forges strange radiance, envisioning ecological restoration.

Poems read:
“Score for the Body with Bioaccumulation”
“Score for the Body as Fire Season”
“Score for the Body as Calving Glacier”
“Score for Sovereign Body”
“Score for Bodies Dressed in Pollen”

former DMQ Review contributor

David Denny

Angel of the Waters
Shanti Arts, 2023
$18.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

In his third full-length collection, Angel of the Waters, David Denny sings a variety of odes to rescue pups and window spiders, angels and freight trains, Starbucks and The Beatles, film noir actors and post-impressionist painters. In a world besieged by bullies and braggarts, Denny's poetry creates a refuge for the meek. Unique among North American writers, he makes his gentle stand in the heart of the suburban wilderness, excavating the extraordinary within the ordinary, holding up shiny bits of treasure among the expansive hodgepodge of invasive junk.

Poems read:
“Open Letter to the Watchers"
“Man Beneath a Tree"
“Aubade"

Ken Weisner

Songs for the Great Horned
Shanti Arts, 2024
$18.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

Songs for the Great Horned casts every poem in the second person (every “you” is the great horned owl), so the poems necessarily break into rapture, lament, and other rhythms of thought to meet the moment. Beneath the surface, the reader encounters grief, personal loss, sober reckonings with mankind and history, but also love, fervor, always awe—for this creature.

Poems read:
“Independence Day"
“How You Come for Us"
“Incident Report"

March 2024

Sally Ashton

Listening to Mars
University of Wisconsin Cornerstone Press, 2024
$21.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

Listening to Mars begins with the pandemic’s first year. I attempt to recreate the shocks to “normal” beforetimes life and preserve the disruption of that experience, a surreal journey (lockdown, social distancing, the displacement of time, the social fractures, etc). We became strangers in the strange land of our own homes seemingly overnight. Truth seemed stranger than fiction.

The bewildered speaker in Listening to Mars moves through those years in an increasingly fractured world, trying to tell the story, to bear witness. Hoping to find a way through.

Poems read:
“California, April”
“This Is What It Looked Like When We Got There”
“The Still Center of the Galaxy”
“Terra Incognita, September”
“Winter Rhetoric #21”
“Quantum Migration”

Editor in Chief, DMQ Review

Francesca Bell

Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner
Red Hen Press, 2023
$21

Watch here:

Playlist:

Whoever Drowned Here is a collection of new and selected poems by Max Sessner translated from German by Francesca Bell. Born in 1959 in Germany, Sessner is beloved by readers in the German-speaking world. This book includes poems from Sessner’s three full-length collections plus ten new, uncollected poems. In it, Sessner plays with our perceptions of time and reality and shines a light on the strange, spectral lives of inanimate objects and the misadventures of humans who live, lonely, among them.

Poems read:
“A Dry Cleaner’s”
“Swimming Ghost”
“Table”
“While Leaving the Café”

Dion O’Reilly

Sadness of the Apex Predator
University of Wisconsin Cornerstone Press, 2024
$20

Watch here:

Playlist:

Many readers comment on the predation in my books— even if every poem faces difficulties and moves beyond them into presence. The speaker learns to love her dark angels, for they have protected her, and now they can fly away. So I have emphasized, in this reading, the speaker’s found wholeness. “The man who bathed me in the burn ward,” however, shows what she endured. That being said, even in the burn ward, the speaker finds companions. Guardian angels if you will.

Poems read:
“World Books”
“The man who bathed me in the burn ward”
“Dear Tongue”
“How to Dress Wounds”

February 2024

Lynn Domina

Inland Sea
Kelsay Books, 2023
$20.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

Inland Sea is Lynn Domina's third collection of poems. Many of the poems here focus on place, especially Lake Superior and Michigan’s upper peninsula where Lynn lives, but also the Catskill region of New York, the plains of Nebraska, and one famous bridge in California. They’re filled with water, sometimes in the form of snow and ice, and they’re populated by dragonflies, white deer, and black bears. The book is a celebration of the earth and everything that dwells there.

Poems read:
“Do Carnivorous Plants Experience Hunger?"
“Burned"

Jeff Friedman

Ashes in Paradise
Madhat Press, 2023
$19.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

Ashes in Paradise, my tenth book, blends surrealism, dark comedy, fable, hyperbole, history, and reinvented myth to target what it means to survive and live in our troubled times. Surreal and wildy humorous, the prose poems in this collection glow with the intensity of heaven—and hell.

Poems read:
“Lost Memory”
“Not Everything Was in My Father’s Will”
“Boy with Holes”
“Last Truth”

Former DMQ Review contributor

Karen Poppy

Diving At The Lip Of The Water
Beltway Editions, 2023
$20.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

Special thanks to my publisher Beltway Editions, DMQ Virtual Salon, my dog Kitty, and all you viewers!

Poems read:
“Standing in the Kitchen”
“Concho”
“The Pot”
“The Flower”

January 2024!

Susana H. Case

If This Isn’t Love
Broadstone Books, 2023
$18.50

Watch here:

Playlist:

If This Isn't Love suggests we're all on television, themes and plots from an Italian soap opera overlapping with themes and plots from “real-life" relationships. This is a book of lovers, betrayals, sleaze, violence, and comedy, all within the organizing framework of thirteen telenovelas. Meanwhile, Elvis, Zorro, Goya, Cezanne, Einstein, and others, including the poet's parents, make guest appearances.

Poems read:
“Brothel”
“Telenovela 7”
“Something Amiss”
“Fallen”

J. Michael Martinez

Tarta Americana
Penguin Press, 2023
$19.99

Watch here:

Playlist:

Ragged and raging across the spectrums of cognition, race, and desire, Tarta Americana envisions forms of survival outside neuronormative perceptions and histories. Against the recent tide of white nationalism in the United States, Tarta Americana finds a rhinestone in Ritchie Valens, the rock and roll legend, surfacing across time and bodies, genders and sounds, displacing the linear unfolding of desire and biography. Valens, the embodiment of corporeal transcendence, guides Martinez as he expresses his neurodiversity, his struggles and triumphs, interrogating memory, gender, and race, traversing pain in search of compassion and joy.

Kristen Staby Rembold

The Harvesters
FutureCycle Press, 2023
$15.95

Video not available

Playlist:

The memorable poems of The Harvesters pay close attention to the seasonal miseries and mercies, rigors and rejoicings of rural America.  In a feast of sonnet forms, Kristen Staby Rembold culls through the homesteads and farmlands as an anthropologist might sift through a kitchen midden to bring to light the essence of a life that has almost disappeared.  With a voice and tone characterized by resonant detail, subtle metaphor, colloquial phrasing, and quiet understatement, this collection marks a significant variant in the pastoral tradition: it strips away the romance as it retrieves the timeless worth. —J.C. Todd

Poems read:
“Carpenter’s Lace”
“What Didn’t Last”
“Grandmother”
“Junk Trees”
“Lament”
“Vacancy”

December 2023

Lauren Crux

Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants, and Intimate Conversations
Many Names Press, 2023
$25

Watch here:

Playlist:

Difficult Beauty is a collection of prose poems, reveries, and images: delicate renderings of passion, kindness, beauty, inquisitiveness, and humor. They are public conversations with the self and the reader about love, life, death, transitions, time, and (oh why not) life's absurdities.

Jodie Hollander

Nocturne
Liverpool University Press, Pavilion Poetry, 2023
$24.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

Set in a technicolour world of dreams, ghosts, classical music, and Key West storms, Jodie Hollander’s compelling second collection, Nocturne, charts the emotional journey of the daughter of a professional classical pianist. These bold and arresting poems, rich with musicality, and fierce in their emotional honesty, chart the complicated repercussions of family dysfunction and musical obsession while traversing the landscape of the human condition and exploring the need for refuge in the natural world.

Linda Ravenswood

Cantadora — Letters from California
Eyewear London/ The Black Spring Press Group, 2023
$19.95

Video Unavailable

Playlist:

“Hymnal”
“Bus Lady”

November 2023

Carol V. Davis

Below Zero
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023
$18

Watch here:

Playlist:

Below Zero is centered on poems about Siberia, an ethnic minority region of Russia where I was teaching in 2017 and 2018, both times in winter. Poems in this collection explore place, not just Russia, but Nebraska, the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, posing the question, where do we belong? Other poems delve into folk traditions, faith and doubt, superstition, the nature of belief and the natural world.

Poems read:
“On Flying to Siberia for the First Time”
“January”
“Driving on Hwy. 31”
“Russian Chocolates”

Lisa Dordal

Next Time You Come Home
Black Lawrence Press, 2023
$19.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

In Next Time You Come Home, Lisa Dordal distills one hundred eighty letters she received from her mother over a seventeen-year period (1983-2001) into short, meditative entries that reflect upon motherhood, marriage, grief, the beauty of the natural world, same-sex relationships, and the passage of time. The entries—which are something between letters and poems—portray a mother who, despite her alcoholism, maintains an engaged and compassionate presence in the world, one nourished by intellectual curiosity, life-long relationships with family and friends, and active involvement in the larger world.

Former DMQ Review contributor

Brian turner

The Dead Peasant's Handbook
Alice James Books, 2023
$17.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

“Brian Turner possesses the extraordinary capacity to transform grief into art, whether intimate or collective, immediate or historical, illuminating that anguish so that we may learn, survive, even flourish in its wake.” —Martín Espada

Poems read:
“On This Harvest Moon”
“The Drive”
“Central Park in the Spring”