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”
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”