Salon Blog — DMQ Review

Jessica Cohn

Gratitude Diary: Poems
Main Street Rag, 2024
$15

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Jessica Cohn will tell you she landed on the title of her first collection because Gratitude Diary seems generic enough to be disarming. Cohn has long written nonfiction but finds poetry can say more about some of the harder facts we’re facing in post-truth times. In her poetry, nature serves as a lens on a political thematic. In this book, the speaker marks a way forward with rocks, feathers, and dark spots. These three offerings explore sub-themes of family and survival.

Poems read:
“The Birds”
“Transplants”
“How to Read the Summer Sky”

Hilary king

Stitched on Me
Riot in Your Throat Press, 2024
$17.00

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Playlist:

My book, Stitched on Me, is about growing up as a woman in the South, wearing expectations and learning to discard those expectations. It's about women coming into their own, in power and comfort. These poems are about mothers, daughters, Jennifer Lopez, Ginger Spice, and what to ask for at Christmas.

Poems read:
“Stitched on Me"
“If My 1970s Childhood Had an Instagram Feed"
“Edgestitch"

former DMQ Review contributor
Current editor, DMQ Review

Nancy L. Meyer

The Stoop and The Steeple
Frog on the Moon, 2024
$15.00

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In The Stoop and the Steeple Nancy L. Meyer introduces us to Mel, a Jamaican artist she met on a New York stoop, and Zebulon, a man her ancestors enslaved in Massachusetts, a man who climbed a steeple and crowed!

Poems read:
“Zebulon on the Steeple”: the shock of this information drove the book.
“Medicine Box”: the speaker responds to diary excerpts of her 8th great grandmother, the enslaver. This poem explores the kinds of power we exert over another.
“Recant": using the lens of race, class, and culture, the author revisits her interracial/intercultural marriage which ended in divorce 45 years ago.

Caroliena Cabada

True Stories
Unsolicited Press, 2024
$17.95

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This book is a kind of fusion of two different poetry collections I was writing and thought were distinct: one collection was about extreme weather and climate change, and the other was about isolation during the pandemic. I soon realized, though, that many of the same images, feelings, and experiences were echoed across both collections. For the poems read here, I tried to choose ones that exist in the bridge between the two halves — ones that are a little bit stormy and a little bit lonely.

Poems read:
“Futile Denial”
“First, Ask”
“Inflorescence”
“Geo Logic”

Tim Hunt

Western Where
Broadstone Books, 2024
$17.00

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Playlist:

The stark, moody poems of Tim Hunt’s latest collection Western Where put me in mind of a Paul Simon lyric, “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike / They’ve all come to look for America.” Though in Hunt’s version the highways are out west; the mood prevails, only the scenery changes. By the time we get to the exquisite third section, I felt as if I was in a Cormac McCarthy novel: vast wide-open, sun-bleached plains, arid deserts, desolate, and unforgiving. The journey is all about searching for what we have already found within ourselves. —Alan Catlin

Poems read:
“Still Life: Barbed Wire With Tumbleweeds (Owens Valley, CA)”
“Silver Mine (Tonopah, NV)”
“In This America (sections 1 & 21)”
“Rodeo Ride”

Alison Stone

Informed
NYQ Books, 2024
$18.95

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Playlist:

Informed addresses contemporary subjects in traditional forms, including pantoums, ghazals, villanelles, and a jeweled sonnet crown. Love, loss, family, mythology, music, and current events are placed within these structures to add pressure to the subject matter. Stormy Daniels, Sandra Bland, and Echo all have their say, as does a small-town girl struggling with suburban conformity.

Poems read:
“Visit”
“Home to Roost”
“Say Her Name”
Poem Inspired by a Line by Natalie Diaz