Tshaka Campbell
Blood At The Root: An Nkisi
El Martillo Press, 2025
$20
Playlist:
Blood at the Root is a lyric braid of poems and stories tracing generational trauma, racial violence, and the everyday courage of Black life in America. Echoing Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” it confronts how oppression shapes bodies, families, then refuses to let that be the final word. I wrote it to name what gets buried, to honor those who endured, and to give my daughter language for both warning and wonder. Moving between ancestral memory and present-day.
Aileen Cassinetto
An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders and Bodies of Water
Paloma Press, 2025
$16
Playlist:
An Immigrant’s Guide to Navigating Borders & Bodies of Water is a study of movement, migration, and the shifting landscapes of identity. Rooted in common rites and daily ritual, these poems trace what we carry and what we leave behind in the ongoing work of negotiating borders within ourselves and across the world.
Poems read:
“Catalog of Cures in Ordinary Time"
“To Want the Wide American Earth"
“Great Expectations at Race & Auzerais"
Soundtrack:
Claude Debussy, “Clair de Lune" (1905)
Saunder Choi, “Wide American Earth" (2023)
Simon & Garfunkel, “Cecilia" (1970)
Dean Rader*
Notes
The Economy Press, 2025
$15
Playlist:
When Anthony Opal, the brilliant editor of The Economy Press, contacted me about doing a chapbook, I did not think I had anything chapbook-ready. But, when I started poking around, I found all these poems that had music at their center—poems about musicians, or poems with song titles as their titles, poems in the form of musical structures, threnodies, lullabies, etc. So, this is a collection of poems that sing along with music. One note, “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Ginger Rader, who died in 2023 from complications related to COVID-19.
Poems read:
“Creation"
“Oh Sweet Nuthin'"
“Lullabye"
“Nocturne (Lasciere Sonare)"
*former DMQ Review Contributor AND Associate Editor, 2008-2012.