March 2025

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Frangible Operas
Gunpowder Press, 2024
$18

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The diversity of forms and subjects in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s Frangible Operas is breathtaking. With grace, precision, insight, and care, she engages nearly every aspect of our world—the political, the natural, the theoretical, the familial, the theological, the personal. One section of the book is devoted entirely to poems about works of art, ranging from Rembrandt to Diane Arbus—a fitting metaphor for the expansive reach of her vision. —Dean Rader

Poems read:
“Moon Bee"
“Photograph of Your Father Sewing Needlepoint at Precinct Headquarters, 1956"
“After the War"
“Passing By"

Sarah Lyn Rogers

Cosmic Tantrum
Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025
$18

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Cosmic Tantrum is a tragicomic exploration of transactional relationships, myths, masks, rituals, and what happens when we reject the stories we've inherited about our worth. I wrote parts of it while going through my Saturn Return and reexamining everything I thought I knew about how to be "good" and "worthy"—and who decides that. Sometimes all we have is our refusal, even in small ways, and our ability to laugh.

Poems read:
“A Toast to the Dismay of Certain Industries"
“It's the Local Beast, Charlie Brown" “Cosmic Tantrum"

former DMQ Review contributor

maw Shein Win

Percussing the Thinking Jar
Omnidawn, 2024
$22.95

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In Percussing the Thinking Jar, her third full-length poetry collection, Maw Shein Win reveals how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Through deft braiding of the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in a human body, Win has developed new forms which carry the reader to realms that are both deeply personal and universal. This generous collection includes 16 Sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher. Reflecting on our strange times, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book that invites readers into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience.

Poems read:
“Catalog”
“Hyphen Log”
“The Thinking Jar”
“Hyphen Log”

February 2025

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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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.

January 2025!

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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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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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