April 2024

Willa Carroll

Demolition Suite
Split Rock Press, 2023
$12

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

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

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.

Play List:
“Independence Day"
“How You Come for Us"
“Incident Report"

March 2024

Sally Ashton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playlist:

“Hymnal”
“Bus Lady”

November 2023

Carol V. Davis

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

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

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

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”

October 2023

Annis Cassells

What the Country Wrought
Purple Door Press, 2023
$15.00

Playlist:

“In her beautiful and bracing second collection of poems, Annis Cassells traverses time, geography, and generations to bring us poems that are at once personal and political, both historical and immediate. In fact, almost alchemically, they manage to be all those things at once." –Catherine Abbey Hodges

Poems read:
“Five & Dime Memories"
“Thank You for Your Service" “Sorority"
“Mayday in May 2020"
“Resilience"

Brittney Corrigan

Solastalgia
JackLeg Press, 2023
$18

Playlist:

The word solastalgia is a neologism that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. The poems in this collection explore issues of climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene age.

“These poems are a requiem for what is lost and what we’re losing. They are also a rallying cry, refusing to erase the efforts of the many cries for climate justice ringing around the world.” —Camille Dungy

Poems read:
“The Strip Mall Changes Its Mind” “Elegy for One Billion Animals” “Anthropocene Blessing: California Condor”
“Miraculous”

Linda Nemec Foster

Bone Country
Cornerstone Press, 2023
$21.95

Playlist:

Linda Nemec Foster's acclaimed new book, Bone Country, is a stunning collection of prose poems that reflects the world before COVID: a world on the brink of an unforeseen catastrophe–the world as we used to know it.

Poems read:

“Conjuring Her Face"
“Arriving at the Train Station, the Last Place I Saw Lara Alive"
“Painted Toenails in Ukraine"
“On the Other Side of the World" (four short vignettes)
“After the Funeral in Seville"
“Statue of a Woman with Broken Serpents Embracing Her"
“The Train Station, Vienna"
“The Horseradish Dish"

Former DMQ Review contributor

September 2023

Gillian Conoley

Notes from the Passenger
Nightboat Books, 2023
$17.95

Playlist:

Gillian Conoley's Notes from the Passenger reads as if written “in an aura of intimacy," intimacy with the daughter, the lover, the reader, the dead, and with the spirit, sometimes called God, sometimes called “the messenger." In wide-open poems that expose the junk and the beauty of the material world, the violence and the grace within the social, Conoley embraces “mortality . . . with is rosy edge of want" while catapulting toward the infinite, what she calls the “next next world."
–Julie Carr

Conoley uncannily reveals our historic epoch: What is true? What is agency? What, in fact, constitutes the living?
–Rodrigo Toscano

Jessica Cuello

Yours, Creature
JackLeg Press, 2023
$18.00

Playlist:

Yours, Creature is a series of epistolary poems in the voice of Mary Shelley. Some are addressed to her mother, the feminist and activist Mary Wollstonecraft, others to her creature from Frankenstein.

Poems read:
“Dear Mother, [I had a dream]"
“Dear Creature, [The sea of ice]"
“Dear Creature, [After everyone forgot]"
“Dear Creature, [P. and I read]"
“Dear Creature, [Because of what I did]"

Sandra Marchetti

Aisle 228
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023
$18

Playlist:

Aisle 228 is a book of poems about the Chicago Cubs, listening to baseball on the radio, and going to games with my father.

“Sandra Marchetti writes like a poet who knows the strike zone. The poems are new and smooth like a ball ready to be rubbed by a pitcher. Sandra Marchetti writes from inside the ballpark, that holy sacred place. Let her poems guide you from the aisle to the altar.”
–E. Ethelbert Miller

Poems read:
“Arizona"
“Broadcast"
“Save"
“First Poem"
“Elysian Park"

August 2023

Mildred Kiconco Barya

The Animals of My Earth School
Terrapin Books, 2023
$17

Playlist:

The Animals of My Earth School is structured in four parts of the Animal Kingdom: Insecta, Mammalia, Reptilia, and Aves. The poems explore relations between humans, animals, and their belonging in the natural world through contemporary issues of ecological balance, environmental harmony, social justice, and sustainability.

Poems read:
“Giant Stag Beetles”
“Creation”
“Dream of Lizard Solidarity”
“Falling in Love”

Tresha Faye Haefner

When the Moon Had Antlers
Pine Row Press, 2023
$20.00

Playlist:

“I am blown away by Tresha Haefner’s collection, by her brave bolts of imagination and the forceful contretemps of her unexpected insights that range from personal confessional to environmental visionary. This poet interprets the world with sensitivity, joy, and a flair for invention.”
–Michelle Bitting

“These are poems we need to listen to, where ecopoetics, melancholy, and spirituality hold hands and connect us to a world where there are people who will hug us/then melt back into the night.”
–Kelli Russell Agodon

Poems read:
“Questions for a Search Engine"
“My New God Plays the Ukulele" “Let"
“How Animals Write Poetry"

Peter Johnson

While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
MadHat Press, 2023
Hardcover, $33.95
Paperback, $23.95

Playlist:

“These are poems of everyday miracles. The excitement of prose poetry is that it transgresses the rules to let the reader catch a glimpse of what could be called the true life of the imagination. This is what Peter Johnson gives us. What more could we ask of a book of poems?"
–Charles Simic

“Johnson's prose poems are comic, sexual, and endlessly inventive. They are poems of appreciation and discovery; poems that prove there is such a thing as the American prose poem."
–Russell Edson

former DMQ Review contributor

July 2023

James Brasfield

Cove: Poems
Louisiana State University Press, 2023 $17.95

Playlist:

“By exploring the translation of the sensory world into art, Brasfield faces the passage of time and the transitory nature of experience, thought, and memory. The poems find ‘angles of vision' to rescue a present instant in its essential fluidity, to go deep enough, without distraction, into the moment and reveal touchstones of being. Throughout Cove, Brasfield embraces the enduring effort to create an experience of language that is rich, lasting, and true, as life speeds into and through the future."

Poems read:
“Etruscans at Monterchi”
“Amalgam”
“Winter Precipice”
“Founding Cities”
“The Ritual”

former DMQ Review contributor

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

REAP: a Flora
Shipwreckt Publishing, 2023
$18.95

Playlist:

The poems in REAP straddle the global and the personal, emerging from research in the natural sciences, social histories, geology, biology, and horticulture, alongside the poet's fascination with remnants of material culture. An avocational naturalist Adamitz Scrupe utilizes her considerable experiences identifying, documenting, and drawing indigenous wildflowers to ground the collection: from birth references in the first section, to allusions of inevitable decay in the last grouping of poems, REAP expresses the poets’ devotion to the study of nature as a locus for human ecology, underpinning intimate linkages between people, plants and animals, and the interdependencies of all species.

Tracy Youngblom

Boy
CavanKerry Press, 2023
$18

Playlist:

The death of a youngest sibling as a child, an alcoholic and distant father, a grief-stricken family, a tentative faith: these are the building blocks of the narrative of Boy, a sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to each other and to their shared history.

former DMQ Review contributor

June 2023

Doug Ramspeck

Blur
The Word Works, 2023
$19.00

Playlist:

“The reader comes of age a hundred times in Doug Ramspeck’s poignant new book of poems. Mythic and elegiac, Ramspeck intertwines images from the natural world with familial and fraternal memories, with a haunting lyricism that hallows both past and present. ‘What we can’t see is everywhere,’ he reminds us: always precise, always moving, these poems are ‘epistles of moonlight’ from one of America’s most gifted and prolific poets.”
– Mark Wagenaar

Poems read:
“Divining the Mountain”
“dream of the ten rivers”
“Winter Trance”

former DMQ Review Contributor

Gemma White

Oh My Rapture
Interactive Press, 2022
AU$26

Playlist:

“In Oh My Rapture, Gemma White stages the politics of fandom in percussive, edgy and unforgettable poems. White performs intense moments of intimacy and yearning against a backdrop of grief, so that lines such as ‘you dumped me in the psych ward’, ‘you kissed me in Dixons Recycled Music’, and ‘my madness is a burnt orange fox’ become deep entanglements of desire.”
– Cassandra Atherton

Poems read:
“Poem 9”
“Poem 26”
“Poem 25”
“Poem 2”

Megan Wildhood

Bowed As If Laden With Snow
Cornerstone Press, 2023
$23

Playlist:

Poems read:

“Mystery Confirmed” (from the space in the Venn Diagram of my terror of the passing of time and my interests overlap)
“But I Am Still Connected To You” (a tribute to my late grandfather)
Birthday” (another reflection on the passing of time)
“We Are Not World Enders” (processing being told both that the world could end at any moment since we were children and that it was our oyster)
“How To Talk About The Weather” (an homage to my favorite section of the SAT before they changed it)

May 2023

Rosie Prohías driscoll

Poised for Flight
Finishing Line Press, 2022
$19.99

Playlist:

“The poems in Rosie Prohías Driscoll’s debut collection are stepping stones through the liminal spaces which marry the past and present: dual heritages, bilingual explorations into the ways we carry our ancestors in language, memory, and faith. Through a language of her own belonging and with skillfully crafted images and metaphors, Prohías Driscoll fathoms the power of transience and inheritance, all of us pajaritos in flight."
– Richard Blanco,
2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet

Poems Read:
“Papá del Loro"
“Feathers"
“Diagramming Sentences"
“Word Blossoms"

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Flare, Corona
BOA Editions, 2023
$17.00

Playlist:

Flare, Corona describes the last six years in which I was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, then multiple sclerosis, then the coronavirus pandemic happened. So it's a really upbeat book! Just kidding, but it is all about survival in a variety of circumstances.

Poems Read:
“In a Plague Year, I Found Foxes" “Irradiate"
“Calamity"

Matthew Thorburn

String
Louisiana State University Press, 2023 $18.95

Playlist:

A book-length sequence of poems, String tells the story of a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy’s fractured, echoing voice—in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation—String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.

Poems read:
“Once”
“The Magician”
“Pale Stars”
“Shatterings”

April 2023

Amy Barone

Defying Extinction
Broadstone Books, 2022
$18.50

Watch here:

Playlist:

Defying Extinction is a collection of 61 poems that pay homage to survivors of all genres—animal, object, spirit, place, the arts, the human heart. Witty and colorful, the poems shine with hope and resignation, underscoring the essence of remembering and then moving on.

“The title of Amy Barone’s new collection of poems, Defying Extinction, is absolutely perfect! … This is a vital book in these harsh times. Please check it out.”
—Ron Kolm

Poems read:
“Survivors”
“Sanctum”
“Bearly”
“Island Exiles”
“Handkerchief”
“Defying Extinction”

Ronda Piszk Broatch

Chaos Theory for Beginners
MoonPath Press, 2023
$16.99

Watch here:

Playlist:

As a kid I used to lie in bed at night and wonder what held the bag that contained all the stars, planets, and us? Now my nighttime reading is often focused on planets and Planck lengths, though my understanding of the math behind them lacks. I adore the scientists who do. Some of their beautiful equations are featured, over a backdrop of fractals, on the cover I created for this book, Chaos Theory for Beginners.

Poems read:
“The Photographer Who Made Sense of the Universe”
“Sonnet with General Relativity”
“It was the year of time travel”

Current and former DMQ Review contributor.

Molly Tenenbaum

The Arborists
MoonPath Press, 2023
$16.99

Watch here:

Playlist:

The Arborists studies ephemera—notes, letters, and artwork that particular lives leave behind; and also sensory ephemera of a life—the taste of pie, the depths of flowers. The book visits with family and friends, some passed on, and wants to know what “map we would make / if you attached a flame to us and filmed us in the dark” (“Equation”). In The Arborists, hornets eat the wood of the house while the people in the house continue making themselves as best they can into mattering.

Poems read:
“There Will Be Beauty"
“A Cat Is Always in the Room"

Former DMQ Review contributor.

March 2023

Tim Hunt

Voice to Voice in the Dark
Broadstone Books, 2022
$18.50

Watch here:

Playlist:

We often talk about the need to construct a usable past, but even more we need to discover a usable present, and that’s partly a matter of reimagining the past to understand how we lived it and how it lives in us. The poems in Voice to Voice in the Dark try to explore this dialogue.

Poems read:
“Song of the Open Road”
“A Grammar of Things”
“A Photo You Meant to Take”
“The Story”

Jessica Murray

Breakfast in Fur
Galileo Press, 2022
$16.42

Watch here:

Playlist:

“Aristotle claimed learning gives the human animal the liveliest pleasure. Breakfast in Fur celebrates this strange gift. The pleasures of this book surprise and delight as they defy conventions of self-searching and introspection. Jessica Murray plumbs discordant sources in our strange world, from pornography to ceramic art, from marriage to childbirth to friendship to fleeting glance. A spiritual autobiography of great daring that celebrates the well-made mistake rather than protecting the untaken chance, at its best moments, it is coldly wild, and full of vivid experiment.”
–Katie Peterson

Poems read:
“The State With the Prettiest Name" “After Reading Sally Mann's Memoir"

Adam Scheffler

Heartworm
Moon City Press, 2023
$14.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

“Adam Scheffler's addictively re-readable poems take us into the daily jumble of Walmarts, dogparks, and the alluring, dubious friendliness of the internet. The "heartworm" of this book's title solicits attention and, even, prescription for all that gnaws at you. These are poems to read when you can't tell excitement from agitation. You are not alone.”
–Elisa New, Director and Host of PBS’s Poetry in America

Poems read:
“I Want to be Jeff Goldblum”
“Dear Florida”
“Florence, Kentucky”

February 2023

E. Ethelbert Miller

How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask
City Point Press, 2022
$9.99

Watch here:

Playlist:

I’m going to be reading from my book How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask. This collection of poems is the third book of my baseball trilogy. The titles of the first two books are- If God Invented Baseball and When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery. All three books are published by City Point Press.

These poems from How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask are not just about the American pastime, they are also about the human condition.

Poems read:
“Every Buddhist Is A Baseball Player”
“Radio”
“How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask”
“The Change UP”
“Beer”
“The Slump”
“The Shooting”
“Just Be Young For Me”

former DMQ Review Featured Poet

Margaret R. Sáraco

If There Is No Wind
Human Error Publishing, 2022
$15.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

In If There Is No Wind, I explore themes of family, love, and activism by unearthing grief and exploring beauty. The randomness of human brutality can be overwhelming. “Quiet Moment" and “Invocation" offer ways to get through the day.

Poems Read:
“Unleash the Trauma of Our Lives” “Love Valley”
“The Venetian Blinds”
“Canadian Immigration Site Crashed”
“Living in an Age of Fear”
“Invocation”

Jessica L. Walsh

Book of Gods and Grudges
Glass Lyre Press, 2022
$16.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

I wanted to share poems that mark the property of this book: restlessness, anger, survival, fear. What I created in writing this book was a space for all my battles to play out, a dingy basement for a bare-knuckle fight between all the versions of myself who have allowed me to be here. I'm endlessly grateful that I'm able to share Book of Gods and Grudges with readers, and I thank you.

Poems read:
“On the Pere Marquette”
“No Trees For Shade”
“You'll Be Disappointed”
“When my daughter tells me I was never punk”

January 2023

Joanne Durham

To Drink from a Wider Bowl
Evening Street Press, 2022
$15

Watch here:

Playlist:

James Crews writes about To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize: “What she has drawn for us here is nothing less than a map of how to navigate our days with honesty, grace, and a deep mindfulness that leaves nothing unnoticed. Her richly layered and musical poems bear the contours of every phase of life… This is a beautiful, timely book you’ll want to pick up again and again.”

Poems read:
“Old Folks”
“Reset”
“Brothers in Arms Valentine’s Day Gun Sale”
“Where They Go”
“Maps”

Kashiana Singh

Woman by the Door
Apprentice House Press, 2022
$12.99

Watch here:

Playlist:

“For Kabir”
“How a woman delivers hope” “Finding Prayer”

Richard Tillinghast

Blue If Only I Could Tell You
White Pine Press, 2022
$17.00

Watch here:

Playlist:

“The Boar": Inter-species communications fascinate me. The challenge here was to try and comprehend the thinking of this wild boar, and how to translate his squeals and roars—and even his thoughts!— into English. It's all whimsical, of course; but I relished the attempt. “Boat": weather and how a Taoist understanding fits into everyday life. “Blue If Only I Could Tell You": I went to art school when I was younger, my girlfriend is a painter, and the meanings of colors play an important part in my understanding of things.

December 2022

Rebecca Foust

Only
Four Way Books, 2022
$17.95

Watch here:

Playlist:

“Only relishes in the daily discoveries that make life endlessly mysterious. The author has a gift for rhythmic imagery in poems finely weaving contrasting subjects, sensually recollecting earlier life while casting a hard, penetrating look at identity, politics, family, and the climate crisis. In these beautifully crafted and ecstatic pages, Foust celebrates the strength of memory and the interconnectedness of all people.” –Starred review in Publisher’s Weekly

“Music made from the gifts and griefs of a life.” —David Baker

“Richly imagistic and achingly lyrical.” —Ellen Bass

“Foust is writing some of the most important poems of our day.”—Peter Campion

Current DMQ Review contributor

Dewitt henry

Foundlings: Found Poems from Prose
Gazebo Books, 2022,
$19.99 (plus S&H from Australia)

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“These are truly original and often ludic works that gesture honourably and sometimes insouciantly toward the literary traditions that Henry both refers to and shrewdly recasts. Even as Henry acknowledges that many of his words originated with others, he demonstrates the extraordinary alchemy that engaged and creative intertextual gestures allow—and the wonderful way in which fresh and beguiling contemporary poetry may emerge through inventive acts of homage.” —Cassandra Atherton

Poems read:
“Home Birth"
“Such A Thing"
“Hospice Visit"

Babo Kamel

What The Days Wanted
Broadstone Books, 2022
$18.50

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“This is an extraordinary collection of poetry: Kamel enters, without flinching, the myths and tales that govern women’s life patterns—and changes them, not by rewriting but by re-living, allowing the story to enter, then leave her, and us, changed. She goes further, takes us into contemporary America, sidewalks, streets, borders, encompasses the political while never leaving the poetry.” —E. Alex Pierce

“Babo Kamel’s new book sparkles with purity of feeling, ‘like pieces of a brilliant glass bird, falling from a whitening sky.’ Here are poems drawn from grief and dreams and the extraordinary daily.” —Deena Linett

November 2022

Susan Cohen

Democracy of Fire
Broadstone Books, 2022
$16.50/$22.50

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Ellen Bass writes: “A thread of elegy runs through Democracy of Fire, Susan Cohen’s wise and wonderful new poetry collection....Cohen shows us our interconnectedness, a reminder of both the beauty and value of what’s at stake. Yet, paradoxically, this vision makes Democracy of Fire a deeply comforting book.”

Poems read:
“Science News: Dogs Were Domesticated Once from a Lost Population of Wolves”
“Science News: Dung Beetles Navigate by Storing Star Maps in Their Brains”*
“Report on the State of the World’s Children”
“Fire Season with Rolling Blackouts at the Bodega Bar & Grill”

former DMQ Review Contributor*

David Ebenbach

What's Left to Us by Evening
Orison Books, 2022
$16

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This reading features the following election-focused poems, all from my new book What’s Left to Us by Evening which is fundamentally about the simultaneous beauty and brokenness of our world.

Poems read:
“City of Sides”
“Election Day”
“Election Night”
“November Shabbat Morning”

And that mural behind me is by the great artist David Guinn.

former DMQ Review Contributor

Jenna Le

Manatee Lagoon
Acre Books, 2022
$16

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The third full-length collection from physician and poet Jenna Le blends traditional form and the current moment. In Manatee Lagoon, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a “failed georgic” weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence. A recurring motif throughout the collection, manatees become a symbol with meanings as wide-ranging as the book itself.

Poems read:
“November"
“Dispatch From Hanover, New Hampshire"
“Patti Smith, 1976"
“Purses"
“The Reader"

october 2022

Adam J. Gellings

Little Palace
TAMU Press, 2022
$18.00

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This metropolitan yet nostalgic collection brings the reader into new places and experiences while reminding them of familiar truths about human connection, the fugitive feeling of travel, and the universality of art.

Poems read:
“Prompt”
“Airplane Mode”
“Fillet -Le caquet”
“Past Life”
“Chemin Vert”
“Impression I (In lieu of)” “Impression III”
“Back to Life”

former DMQ Review Contributor

Sharon suzuki-martinez

The Loneliest Whale Blues
The Word Works, 2022
$18.00

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The poems I will read from my new book find enlightenment in taco shops, gather seaweed within striking range of Moray eels, and long for the company of only the Sun.

Poems read:
“Taco Shop Haibun"
“The Beach Recollects the Crunch"
“The Loneliest Whale Blues"

pamela Wax

Walking the Labyrinth
Main Street Rag, 2022
$15.00

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Walking the Labyrinth was a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Poet Jessica Greenbaum wrote, “If you want to know the powers of poetry to transform experience—and how a rabbi transforms grief—follow the thread of Wax’s revelatory intellect through this accomplished, complex, and spiritual book.” In it, Wax confronts her own mortality as she explores the death of her brother by suicide, as well as the death of her parents and other family members.

Poems read:
“Howard”
“Approaching Zeal: A Run-On Abecedarian”
“In the Background”
“The Woman Who: a found poem”

September 2022

paul hetherington

Her One Hundred and Seven Words
MadHat Press, 2021
$21.95

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“A 107-course meal that speaks our bittersweet limits and our sweetbitter need to live intensely before the end of the feast. It’s a gorgeous book.”—Professor Tony Barnstone

“The reader is held rapt in the to-and-fro … it is a gorgeous labyrinth of love, allusion, and absolutely luscious language.” —Moira Egan

 Poems read:
“Ballet”
“Lepidopterist”
“Keats”
“Griffin”
“Bed”
“Popinjay”
“Bibliophile”
“Lollapalooza”

former DMQ Review Contibutor

wayne koestenbaum

Ultramarine
Nightboat Books, 2022
$19.95

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Ultramarine is the third volume of my trance poem trilogy. The first two volumes, also published by Nightboat, are The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018). In this video, I read the final five pages of Ultramarine.

Daniel Swain, in the American Poetry Review, summarizes my book: “The real political stakes of the text...are the way Koestenbaum uses aesthetic play to disturb given orders and hierarchies. When we join him in his trance state, snap judgments give way to free association, commodified logic to the pleasure principle...exploring the hysterical drives of our culture in their most distillate form."

Leonora simonovis

Study of the Raft
The Center for Literary Publishing, 2021
$16.95

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Study of the Raft explores the consequences of colonization in today's world, and in particular, the capacity of language to represent the complexity of lived experience when it involves more than one language and culture. The poems in this book wrestle with questions of life and death, with what remains after the loss of land, stories, and loved ones, and with how we as humans, constantly change and adjust in the face of uncertainty.

Poems Read:
“Water Rituals"
“Coup de Folie 2"
“Arches"
“What Happens When We Die" “Bedtime Stories"

(Winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry)