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”