August 2022

Rebecca van Laer

How to Adjust to the Dark
Long Day Press, 2022
$16.00

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How to Adjust to the Dark is a prose-and-poetry novella that follows narrator Charlotte as she looks back on the poems from her early 20s to dismantle her young adult belief that falling in love and making art have to hurt. In this video, Rebecca reads from the chapter “Fisheyes."

former DMQ Review Contributor

Kathleen winter

Cat's Tongue
Texas Review Press, 2022
$16.95

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Welcome to this short reading of three poems from my 2022 chapbook, Cat's Tongue.

Poems read:
“Force of Habit"
“Cat's Tongue"
“Memory Fruit"

The book is a trajectory of a woman's early life in Texas, laden with plenty of mixed feelings and delivered in a variety of poetic modes and voices. The title poem is a prose poem, surreal, and as feline as I could make it. Vivas to DMQ Review and Texas Review Press.

Richard Wollman

Changeable Gods
Slate Roof Press, 2022
$17

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Changeable Gods is a remarkable book in which Wollman creates poems at once complex and intimate. The gods he speaks of don't always inspire trust, but do, however, inspire lyric poetry of sheer beauty.
–Alfred Nicol

Poetry that soars. Vast, varied, ever-shifting, creating its own world, our world…Wollman…is deeply attuned to the colors, cloudscapes, streaks, and nightdomes…. A depth of love and connection, and the gaping void of loss, is implicit, and… it makes sense that Wollman’s attention is aimed at the sky—its endlessness the only place vast enough to house the feeling of what’s gone.
–Nina McLaughlin, Boston Globe

July 2022

A. Molotkov

Future Symptoms
The Word Works, 2022
$20

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Playlist:

“Blood Exercise”
“Optimism”
“First”

Former DMQ Review Contributor

amanda moore

Requeening
Ecco, 2021
$16.99

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Engaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, Requeening explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, the book brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love.

Poems read:

“Opening the Hive"
“Domestic Short Hair"
“Afterswarm"

daniel nester

Harsh Realm: My 1990s
Indolent Books, 2022
$18

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This is a reading from my new book, Harsh Realm: My 1990s. This book collects poems and prose poems that center on the decade of fax machines and grunge through the lens of a speaker coming to terms with young adulthood and trying to make their way as a writer in New York City.

Poems read:

“I met Liz Phair once"
“The Drummer in Our Band Tells Us He's a Virgin"
“On Realizing the Chords to Poison's ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn' is the Same as the Replacements' ‘Here Comes a Regular'"

June 2022

Rajiv Mohabir

Cutlish
Four Way Books, 2021
$16.95

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These are mostly chutney poems based on chutney music from the Indo-Caribbean communities of Trinidad and Guyana, specifically Sundar Popo's “Kaise Bani" and
“Scorpion Gyul."

Poems read:

“Cutlish”
“The Po-Co Kid”
“Indo-Queer I”
“Dove (or Tell Me the Number of Your Plane)”
“Dantaal, An Instrument”

former DMQ Review Contributor

Paul scully

The Fickle Pendulum
Interactive Press, 2021
Print AUD26; E-book AUD13

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The Fickle Pendulum assays belief and doubt through three historical figures —St Thomas the Apostle, Galileo Galilei, and Laura (Riding) Jackson, and uses them to pivot into wider worlds in langauge that is thoughtful, exploratory and never weighed down by its subject matter. The reader ineluctably mixes his or her own meditations with the poet's.

carol westberg

Ice Lands
David Robert Books, 2022
$19.00

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Former Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl calls Ice Lands “a luminous and stunning book, blending grief with wisdom and awe.” Says UVA professor Lisa Russ Spaar, this book “reads like a gathering of koans, a breviary for navigating the second decade of the twenty-first century. Whether confronting the imperiled planet, the eroding political landscape, the ambages of late middle-age…the poems move with an insomniacal attentiveness through all manner of ‘ambient threats too huge to take in.’”

Poems read:
“Once More with No Feeling”
“Bitter House”
“Inch by Inch”

former DMQ Review Contributor

May 2022

todd davis

Coffin Honey
Michigan State University Press, 2022 $19.95

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In Coffin Honey, Todd Davis explores the many violences we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named “Ursus” navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world.

lisa dordal

Water Lessons
Black Lawrence Press, 2022
$16.95

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Water Lessons addresses multiple dimensions of grief arising from my mother’s alcoholism and eventual death, my father’s deepening dementia, and my own childlessness. Against the backdrop of these personal griefs, I scrutinize the patriarchal underpinnings of the world I grew up in as well as my complicity in systemic racism as a white girl growing up in the 70’s and 80’s.

Poems read:
“My Mother Is a Peaceful Ghost” “Grief”
“Daughter Poem”
“I Love”

former DMQ Review Contributor

Jennifer martelli

The Queen of Queens
Bordighera Press, 2022
$18

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Just after I graduated from college in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro was nominated to the vice presidency. The Reagan administration was reveling in its greed and cruelty; the AIDS epidemic was being ignored; people were needlessly dying.

When I started writing The Queen of Queens, we had not yet been plunged into a pandemic, which would be ignored by another feckless administration, nor had Kamala Harris been nominated to the vice presidency (this is the good news).

If I were to give The Queen of Queens a shape, it would be circular, like the pearls Geraldine Ferraro wore at her nomination.

former DMQ Review Contributor

April 2022

Daniel biegelson

of being neighbors
Ricochet Editions, 2021
$15.00

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“The sheer velocity of the collection of being neighbors made me feel like I was riding a kayak on a tsunami. These poems charge forward, asking big questions and taking enormous risks, bringing together the ecstatic and the intimate, while remaining grounded in erudition and ethics. The book wants to know how to live in human community, how to commune with neighbors, how to return to the commons that have been privatized out of existence. It continuously opens up onto inquiry, rather than arriving at answers, and yet it is precisely the guide I need now.” — Jason Schneiderman

Caroline Goodwin

Matanuska
Aquifer Press, 2022
$20

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John Goodby writes, “This is a delicious, disturbing, and deliciously disturbing poetic sequence, that takes its name from the Matanuska River in south-central Alaska where Caroline Goodwin spent her childhood. Matanuska eschews sentimentality even as it champions sentiment, its melee of different threads encouraging the reader to work for sense (and senses) while relishing its sonic and paratactical dance, a dance with is often mesmerizing. It is precisely in not pulling its punches and in refusing to wallow in doom or bien-pensant piety that Caroline Goodwin manages to create the space for poetic invention.”

Jan LaPerle

Maybe The Land Sings Back
Galileo Books, 2022
$16.42

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These poems, some written in east Tennessee before moving to Kentucky in 2018, document the joy and pain of marriage and motherhood, separation and reconciliation, cancer, work-life (most of which was on active duty for the U.S. Army) and the domestic.

Poems read:
“This Thing Like That”
“Shiloh”
“Little Weeping Day With Trees Inside”

March 2022

jon davis

Above the Bejeweled City
Grid Books, 2021
$16.00

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Playlist:

“The Ghost of Denis Johnson” “Above the Bejeweled City”

For this reading, I decided to read two poems. I have no idea—beyond being in the grip of the pandemic—why I dreamed these particular dreams. Perhaps my obsessive reading of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Romance Sonambulo” informed the dreams. In both cases, I woke and scribbled notes, then went straight to the computer in the morning. Because writing a poem is like dreaming, I’m not sure, now, how much was dream, how much imagination.

I should say something more about “The Ghost of Denis Johnson.” I first met Denis in 1983 in Montana, and we remained friends until the end.

susan nguyen

Dear Diaspora
University of Nebraska Press, 2021
$17.95

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Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora introduces us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese diaspora.

Poems read:
“Letter to the Diaspora"
“Wish List"
“Suzi Searches for Ecstasy"
“Letter to the Diaspora"
“Unending"

julia wendell

The Art of Falling
FutureCycle Press, 2022
$15.95 paper $2.99 Kindle

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“ ‘Come off a horse enough times/and you learn how to fall.' With its crescendos and diminuendos, this book is concerned not just with falling but also art and its making, paying homage to persistence and survival through music and musicians, paintings and painters, books and their characters. . . The Art of Falling offers an enduring wisdom and reminds us that “Sometimes you just have to let things toughen.”

—Amanda Moore, National Poetry Series Winner, 2021

Poems read:
“First Tomato”
“My Never Ending Katzenjammer”
“The Anorexic Teaches Her Children”
“Dear Home”

February 2022

Jennifer jean

Object Lesson
Lily Press, 2021
$12

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Jennifer Jean reads from her poetry collection Object Lesson which explores sex-trafficking and objectification in America. She hopes to raise awareness about this persistent human problem. Some poems are based on interviews with survivors at a safe-house where Jennifer volunteered.

Poems read:
“When I taught poetry at the safe house”
“Bird”
“Dear Jasz”

james Gering

Staying Whole While Falling Apart
Interactive Press, 2021
$16 (U.S.)

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Staying Whole While Falling Apart is a playful yet serious exploration of loss and grief, of trying to find balance and stability amidst a giddying welter of experiences. You’ll laugh and cry with Aaron Auslander, a kind of everyman, as he tries to make sense of the flux and tumble of his life. The poetry is sharp and it cuts right to the bone, exposing the vulnerabilities and the precarious provisos under which we all can live. This is a potent book animated by courage and finely-honed craft.

—Judith Beveridge, Recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry 2019

John Sibley Williams

The Drowning House
Winner, Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2022
$17

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In The Drowning House, John Sibley Williams grapples with ghosts, the predators outside and in, those closer than our own hearts. In American landscapes haunted by nooses and wolves, burning crosses and floods, Williams holds a light before his path. These are keen-edged poems, kneeling before us, asking forgiveness for what our ancestors have done and have had to live through. He offers himself as a sacrifice for our sins: “here, love, is the tree of my body // to learn to climb. Far from here. From me. To touch / whatever's still up there, beautifully above us."

—Philip Metres

January 2022

Linda Nemec Foster

The Blue Divide
New Issues Press, 2021
$16.00

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I'll be reading from my new poetry book, The Blue Divide, which one reviewer described as a collection that “navigates the edges and depths of worlds both here and beyond--through currents of art, love, war, dreams, history, language, family--to map what flows between us." It pays close attention to what can heal and redeem our common journey-- “...pointing out the places where the heart breaks, and where it mends." Specifically, I'll read from a sequence of ekphrastic poems, "The Artist's Notebook," that was the first runner-up in New Letters' Poetry Award and was subsequently published in New Millennium Writings.

jae kim

Translator
Cold Candies: Selected Poems of Lee Young-Ju
Black Ocean, 2021
$16.00

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Playlist:

“Mooncoming”
“The Ritual to Come of Age”
“Nine Steps”

Jenny Qi

Focal Point
Steel Toe Books, 2021
$16.00

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Winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award, Focal Point is a scientist’s unofficial dissertation, a daughter’s faithful correspondence, and a coming-of-age story. Written largely while Jenny Qi was a young Ph.D. student conducting cancer research after her beloved mother's death, the collection turns to “all the rituals of all the faiths,” invoking Western and Eastern mythology and history, metaphors from cell biology, and even Jimi Hendrix, as Qi searches for a container to hold grief.

Poems read:

“Point At Which Parallel Waves Converge & From Which Diverge” “Biology Lesson 1”
“Biology Lesson 2”
“Penelope Looks Back” “Contingencies”