Alex Van Huynh’s first collection takes us into the deep inquiries of a mind fully engaged with both the known and unknowable. Informed by mythology, history, religion, and science, these poems explore “the whole world in miniature,” where the “pores of the earth pull beneath the sands,” as well as the vast expanses of sky and sea, where “drifting things must come naked.” Huynh’s subjects are often reminded “our condition is temporary,” but he is a voice who is establishing a permanent place for himself in American poetry.

The poems in Jeffrey L. Johnson’s collection, Babylon, trace paths we travel and describe places we occupy happily as pilgrims, adventurers, natives and citizens, and uneasily as refugees, captives, prisoners, and exiles. Even when we feel settled and at peace, circumstances and time move us to strange and foreign locations. These poems explore aspects of our perceptions of place.

An invitation into the lives of women in the church—prophetesses, wives, saints, mothers, martyrs, daughters, and anyone who has been a tender of a family or community.

It’s This contemplates relationships, identity, love, loss, and radical transformation, finding acceptance, joy, and growing peace, as the speaker practices meditation, and falls more deeply in love with her wife. Employing spare, musical language and humor, and suffused with light, these vivid poems

So, we find ourselves here, in this book where you can split the meta-verse as often as you’d like, jumping around the various poems that I wrote during the pandemic. These poems reflect what my life was during those first fifteen months: scattered, overwhelmed, whimsical, nostalgic, pissed, political, exhausted, diseased, smitten.

You may, of course, read straight through (if you dare), but if you do jump around

At first glance, the Christian merchandise populating Jesus Merch: A Catalog of Poems (such as “Christian pumpkins,” “emoji angel necklaces,” or “personalized cross lollipops”) may seem solely humorous. In addition to delighting in this humor, Jesus Merch also sees its items as more than trivial or frivolous.

Since their inception on Planet Earth, humans have had to deal with meaningless, dulling, repetitious, man-made wastes of time (dust) and sudden, frightening changes (dragons) that create both calamities and opportunities, depending on a person’s abilities and wisdom.

From its “Cover Letter” to readers, Now in Contest invites us to listen to America’s many voices and how they are divided from each other and our history. From the many in contest, it listens for one hope to go forward into today and tomorrow. Consider the young Black veteran pulled over “One Night in America,” and the immigrant day laborers who endure stereotyping so their kids… grow straight American teeth.

The Glue Trap and Other Poems is a volume in which range should be read as trajectory, the personal and the social as reciprocal metaphors, in which my speaker’s voice aspires to the credibility of a masterful monologue and my monologues aspire to the credibility of my truest voice, spoken and formal language converging in artifice as sincerest sense, the genuine.

She Calls the Moon by Its Name, a powerful and haunting series of poems, follows a nineteenth-century farm woman in spiritual isolation as she finds strength in naming what is alive around her—or even hidden in plain sight. She seeks the names of moons, of animals, of fields and stones, of children and lost babies, and in the process, what is solid and earthborn learns to live patiently with what is not.