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”