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Kevin's poems turn ordinary events into compelling tales. The conventional becomes captivating; the pedestrian becomes provocative. Full of fact and feeling, and, often, a clever twist, his words leave you thoughtful or smiling, but always well-fed.-Jayne Jaudon Ferrer, Editor, YourDailyPoem.comKevin's poetry delivers meaningful concepts with a gentle touch. His perceptive, often ironic, view of himself and the human condition leaves the reader with a warm awareness of our connectedness. This is why "Kevin's Much-loved Poems," his featured series in US Represented, continues to perform so well with our appreciative audience.-Eric Stephenson, Editor, USRepresented.comKevin Arnold's wisdom, sincerity, and truth shine through in these poems. His love of life and of language mingle like bare legs. You read bareback and are edified by their power and clarity: a life distilled.-Jill Hoffman, Editor, Mudfish Magazine

Naked Beside Fish locates itself firmly in the mystery of what lies between: between poetry and art, words and silence, the minutia of daily life and the infinite expansion of the cosmos. In this surreal space, inner and outer landscapes mirror and converge in surprising ways. Playfully structured around a museum exhibit, this ekphrastic chapbook takes us from art studios to camping under stars, from making mud soup at a children's museum to picking out paint colors in the kitchen. There is even an imagined art gallery translated into words, featuring paintings by Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall, as well as a "gift shop" appendix. With exquisite use of metaphor, color, and imagery, these poems pierce the heart, tunneling beneath the surface of life's canvas to name the emotions lurking beneath. The poet's background as a feminist scholar is evident here, daring to confront the challenges of solo parenting while exploring the complexities of the female body as simultaneous subject and object of a painter's gaze.

Suicide affects those left behind, precipitating a lifetime of memories and feelings borne by family and friends. The poems in INDELIBLE SHADOW by Sandra Berris capture shock, grief, anger, confusion, guilt, acceptance, and ultimately, hope. These poems weave together a tragic story and give a powerful testament to the current national teen suicide crisis.

Mother of 0 by Vanessa Ogle takes a deep dive into the dynamics of parenting and the mother/daughter relationship. The poet urges us to "remember when they tried/ to blame perceived/ flaws/ on mothers." Mothers shape us, even when "mother no longer looks the same." These poems will leave you thinking. -Leah Huete de Maines, Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Northern Kentucky University

Self-Assessment includes poems of noticing, growth, and longing. Who the speaker is and who she wants to be, recognize each other in these poems. Gleaning inspiration from landscapes like the winding roads of the American South and the cold beaches of the Pacific Northwest and placing them alongside surreal, dream-like scenes, the speaker is allowed to openly examine herself with honesty and invites the reader to do the same.

Self-Assessment includes poems of noticing, growth, and longing. Who the speaker is and who she wants to be, recognize each other in these poems. Gleaning inspiration from landscapes like the winding roads of the American South and the cold beaches of the Pacific Northwest and placing them alongside surreal, dream-like scenes, the speaker is allowed to openly examine herself with honesty and invites the reader to do the same.

The poems in Wintering Over-to take shelter through, and within, the dark of the year-wrestle with a sacred yearning to embrace the light in darkness. Poems in the book's first half dwell with the interior lives of contemplatives the Arctic north. Others move from vastness to enclosure--a night swim in polar waters, an anchoress preparing for a special visitor, or a New England field teeming with quiet dramas of life and death. Everywhere in-between, the will to carry on, at times with only the smallest illumination, startles these poems into moments of uneasy revelation.

Photography is drawing with light. Poetry is painting with words. Open the cover of A Murmuration of Words to reveal a gallery of poems illuminating the natural world. The elusive owl ushers you into an exhibition of the passage of seasons through the garden, illustrating the promise of winter, the surprise of spring, the anticipation of summer and the splendor of fall. The soundtrack of the poetry collection is rich with migrating geese, young hens celebrating finding their wings, the barking of working dogs, and wind making leaves noisy. Cold mist descends, swollen with the scent of snow. Vultures observe your progress through the poems as death pays a visit; its icy touch irrevocably alters the garden and its inhabitants. As you close the book after the last poem, perhaps a small taste of the magic of the garden lingers.

The "dailyness" in a Vanessa Smith poem is never dull, and never what's expected. Her west-coast swagger is reminiscent of early Joni Mitchell - "my face, like an interview, / tells the most important / stories first." Her "uploaded anguish," is that of a speaker who "wipes daily dabs of lipstick on the car carpet," saturating the space, making a hole in its place. She sees that a "rolling wave held something back in response to the sand..." and finds a tragedy there. The daughter of a portrait painter, this painter/poet's first collection is clear-eyed and insightful, poetry that points to her inheritance, a vigilant and insistent gauging: "We wait, we dry out into plaster, and become the wall / The dry and cold of a California I never mastered is coming back in plumes."-Elaine Sexton, poet and critic, author of Drive and Prospect/Refuge This is so moving and delicate - the journey from caring for infants to looking after the elderly and their needs, and all the tenderness and sense of employment (and possibly enjoyment) both require. The rhythms of marriage and divorce work so well on the page. Smith is so right in what she says about January - the way it is always twice as long as any other month. I like the sense of the world in which every tiny thing counts for something and the cost of that on the heart and soul and the corresponding yield...-Susie Boyt, author of Loved and Missed and My Judy Garland Life Room Tone is wildly evanescent - traversing expanses of time and space, then spiraling into the palm of Smith's hand. ... [Her] poems are illuminated by a ferocious sense of beauty and tragedy, converging in sublime insight.-Broughton Coburn, author of The Vast Unknown and Aama in America In Room Tone, silence is rendered palpable through Vanessa Smith's hauntingly described scenes of life, love and loss. Whether it's observation or imagination, there's a meditative nature to her writing that will transport you to a state of personal reflection. This collection is a call to open your heart to the mysteries that surround us.-Sara Arnell, author of There Will Be Lobster: Memoir of A Midlife Crisis

Pacific Pieces drifts readers through the beginnings of what an undertaking like crossing the Pacific Ocean by sailboat entails. The sequential poems written by Magdalena Hirt about her family of six and their adventures as they cross the Pacific Ocean is the first in a three-book series. Snug and squeezed into their Westerly 49, Selkie, they emerge from their hurricane hole in Rio Dulce, Guatemala, escape a possible pirate attack off the coast of Honduras, pass through the Panama Canal, experience the Galapagos with Covid, and survive twenty-three days at sea to reach the Marquesas. Poems give detailed bites, moments of moon and stars, terrifying defeat, friendship, love of open water with family, booby bird invasion, equator crossing, fog of Covid, environmental crisis, Dracula sunrises, gothic darkness, perfect breezes, huge swells, endless destinations, and the comfort of mountainous islands.

Beginning with the ancient conquest of Alexander the Great, these poems trace a journey through grief, as the poet mourns a child who did not live to have his name and deeds celebrated. Resisting a neat linear narrative to grief, these poems explore a mother's quest for a meaningful life and even joy in the aftermath of great loss.

Stop and Smell the Fractals (and Everything in Between) explores the connection between mathematics and poetry, focusing on patterns within the natural world and in everyday perceptions of life. Accessible to, math lovers, poetry lovers, non-mathematicians, and even self-defined "math-haters," Stop and Smell the Fractals carries the reader through the human experiences of grief, peace, dissonance, joy, and everything in between, highlighting patterns within oneself and in one's surroundings. The collection, brought to life by Arkansas native Caroline Jennings, is narrative, confessional, and (hopefully) something everyone can relate to. In short, the Stop and Smell the Fractals sends that the message that math is everywhere, laced in the path of floating leaves on asphalt or lingering in the breath of an infant-you just have to find it.

Wellspring is a meditation on the nature of memory, dreams, the natural world, and the depths beneath the surface. The work draws from mythology and psychoanalysis, and investigates how form holds us while we wrestle with grief, hope, creativity, and power. The poems explore our attempts at consolation through relationship, through art, and through nature, as we struggle towards acceptance of the suffering that gives weight to love.

Running Wild collects Patricia McMillen's sonnets, free verse and experimental forms to outline one woman's life and ever-changing perspective: from a 1950's suburban childhood, through a harrowing (but privileged) young adulthood, to middle age and well within sight of "elderhood". Relatable narratives, especially for women, include surviving childhood, marriage (twice!) and infertility treatments; an abortive attempt to form a family with a widower and his reluctant adult children, in yet another Chicago suburb; and the continual emotional and intellectual work of being, well, a smart, educated white woman in America right now. Includes award-winning poems "Yang," "Dark Night," "Smelt Fishing"...and many more!

CARE INSTRUCTIONS is a poetry collection written during a prolonged, complex, and unprecedented time of personal and global turmoil, change, and loss. These pocket-size poems were intentionally written as short and simplistic, the type of healing most of us yearn for during unexpected times. Carry these poems close to you, to be read whenever you need self-care.

Enter into In the Near Distance in the desert where the sounds of a ranch fill the quiet of the day and the night culminates in "a jubilation of stars." Find yourself in geographical locales as well as invisible worlds. Make way for truck drivers, states of being, alcoholism, as well as joy. Stay for a while in Appalachia where voices of family and friends from the long-ago, speak in rich, timbered voices. Stay in grief as long as you need to, mourning those who have passed on, those taken by the pandemic. As sorrow finds its level, transcend with the love of dogs, in praise of children who don't listen, and tree-climbing at 67. At the final stop, humble acceptance leaves space to continue discovering and unraveling the unknown.

"Try picking drops of the ocean with tweezers. Try expressing your grief, rage, fear, love within the tiny, out-of-breath, syllable-stingy form of haiku. Natalie Parker-Lawrence's poems, concocted from the rushing, halting words of women caregivers of veterans, honor the essence. An image, a sound, a memory, a nightmare: capture it: in so few words."-Margaret Edson, author of Wit and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama."Natalie Parker-Lawrence's book of hybrid haiku, householes, strikes a delightful balance between delicacy and power. The poet also walks the tightrope between the personal and the universal, and she does so in such a way that the reader follows anxiously along, breathless and captivated. At turns gentle, at times brutal, but always poignant, Parker-Lawrence has the gift of the simple line that says much. I hope this book portends the start of a long career of verse."-Corey Mesler, author of Cock-a-Hoop, and Take the Longing from my Tongue."In short, impactful verse, Natalie Parker-Lawrence, shares the poignant and often gritty stories of Veteran Caregivers from around the country. The traditional haiku form evokes feelings about the natural world using a structure of stanzas and syllables. As if by necessity, Parker-Lawrence departs from the traditional haiku to share first-hand, vivid and heart-breaking accounts of those who've survived war and those entangled in its aftermath. Their explosive, shattering and gut-wrenching experiences refuse to be confined by poetic tradition and structure. No one touched by war remains whole. This collection has transformative power, taking us from despair to hope, if only in the knowledge that we are not alone."-Virginia Bryan is a retired attorney, arts advocate and free-lance writer. Her work appears in Distinctly Montana, Montana Magazine, Native Peoples and Yellowstone Valley Woman.."householes stitches the weightless Haiku to the gravity of all that proceeds war with thread borrowed from the women yoked in the collateral damage of the military-industrial complex."-C. (Christine) W. Lockhart, PhD: LT, USCG (retired), Disabled Veteran & Caregiver, author of Blanket of Stars: Thru-Hiking the Camino de Santiago and Walking with Buddha: Pilgrimage on the Shikoku 88-Temple Trail

Tricia Knoll's The Unknown Daughter dedicates itself to the incredible work of Making Known: of naming and describing the complex experience of being a daughter, of asking who we might be as a culture and a country if we took it upon ourselves to honestly do so. Knoll's book is a beautiful, taut series of linked poems filled with myriad voices, each a pebble dropped into the silencing waters of family and history, each helping to recover not just one daughter, but all. These wise and deft poems are conversation, chorus, and community all in one: they speak right to us; they invite us in. They give crucial instruction in Making Known: "sing when the first impulse may be to whisper."-Annie Lighthart, Author of Pax.Tricia Knoll's The Unknown Daughter is an un-portrait, individual and collective, historical and visionary, composed by multiple voices constellated via the titular character. This poem sequence strikingly shapes absence from so many presences. It's a timely reminder that the more things change-socially, culturally, politically-the more they stay the same, and "the unknown" must claim her own narrative.-Marj Hahne, Writer, Teacher, MFA in Creative Writing.The Unknown Daughter is a worthy monument to a monument that ought to exist. This connected series of poems offers acknowledgement and tribute to those women who didn't fit the pattern and made major contributions in science and art. In these vivid poems about the symbolic unknown woman, her family, the watchwomen at the memorial, and even an Uber driver (who says dismissively, "You won't stay long./Tell me if you want me/to drive you somewhere else."), Tricia Knoll makes her own important contribution.-Penelope Scambly Schott, Author of On Dufur Hill

Marjorie Hanft's gorgeous poems in Scrutinizing the Dust create a sensuous world of sound and taste, as well as sight and touch. Both the American Midwest and Ancient Greece come alive in the "complex sweetness" she uncovers as she surveys a forest, a rainbow, the biography of a famous painter, and "the first color in language." Sometimes touching on the comic (such as impersonating the Statue of Liberty) and, at times, the tragic ("My father takes...a new dip...into the river/of forgetfulness," these poems, filled with quirky information, shed light and music on the animals, fruits and thoughts that pepper our world.-Austin Alexis, author of Privacy Issues and For Lincoln & Other Poems. Marjorie's poems epitomize beauty and brilliance in their impeccable attention to details that place us in the moment. We see her daughter's "scars / that turn from crimson to the color of her own skin." We hear the "small sounds cluck / in her throat." And always we learn. In the poem describing persimmons she perfectly yokes the intellect with the sensuous, "in Greece / what are called date-plums are bigger softer / with smoother skin..." Hers is poetry at its most remarkable, as her imagery enables us to reach perceptions we have never imagined, "Locate the meaning / of yellow & you will find that it blinks & flickers/ with intuitive intellect in the REM world of dreams." Together her poems weave a journey through memory, history, art and the vision of words, showing us the delicacy and elegance of language. In her poem "Note to Emily," Marjorie grudgingly accepts "a sightedness" she "didn't choose." Her acquiescence to that muse, despite herself, has gifted us with luminous and transcendent poetry.-Olga Abella, author of two books of poetry, Watching the Wind and What it Takes; former editor of Bluestem and Karamu

You may know someone in this book. In fact, you might be in this book. The men-and women-who fill this book are crushes and soulmates and midlife besties and the occasional fellow you'd risk a morning walk of shame for. It's all numbers, not names, and just enough detail to make you wonder. A boy old enough for a Stoli and a man who cooks by ear, they're both here. A catalogue of crushes, a natural history of noticing, these are portrait poems, some poignant, some punchy, some impossible, all beads strung on a line of prose reflections that make you smile to think about your own secret history.-Ed Madden, professor of English at the University of South Carolina and served as Poet Laureate for the City of Columbia from 2015 to 2022.Kristine Hartvigsen's poems, part micro-memoir, part lyric, part palm "on the curve where hip meets buttock," ultimately choose us. We never forget soul mates and how the "empty chalice echo truths" in a world of sensation, disappointment, and joy." These poems arouse expectancy, explore attraction's belonging, and peer across the room with courage and heart. You'll find yourself on the list.-Tim Conroy, author of Theologies of Terrain (2017, Muddy Ford Press Laureate Series) and founding board member of the Pat Conroy Literary Center.Kristine Hartvigsen's new book is a delight. Her poems (and stories) take the reader on a poetic ride through her life of love and adventure. It covers the gambit of her creative life, her love of poetry and music, and introduces the reader to friends past and present. The Soul Mate Poems are not to be missed.-Jane Zenger, author of Night Bloomer (2022, Muddy Ford Press Laureate Series).Kristine Hartvigsen's The Soul Mate Poems is a must read for lonely hearts who want to learn how to recognize their soul mate at a dog park or in a checkout line at Big Lots. Kristine says what many won't. There is no 1 in 3 billion soul mates that you need to find to be happy. If you know Kristine, buy this book and see if you made her list.-Al Black, author of I Only Left For Tea (2014, Muddy Ford Press) and Man With Two Shadows (2018, Muddy Ford Press), and was named Columbia's Literary Artist of the Year by Jasper Magazine

KS started writing Kyivsky Waltz in 2014, at the start of Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity (a.k.a. the Maidan Revolution), to answer the question she was asked more and more as the invasion grew into the monstrosity it has become: why did she love Ukraine so much? Kyivsky Waltz is a hybrid chapbook that uses poetry and artwork to tell the story of how KS experienced Ukraine from 1994 to 1996: arriving at 22, alone, completely lost and unable to communicate, yet somehow managing to find a home and people to love in a new nation with an old history. All of the author's proceeds will be donated to Razom, a nonprofit organization committed to raising funds for Ukrainian humanitarian aid.

Poems in Ear to the Ground remember Stratton's father and mother and draw from the lifestyle that like an album of fading snapshots backgrounds her upbringing on a Colorado cattle ranch. There, she learned to remember on a cultural level, too. Traces of things forgotten in have led her to study prehistoric language; pictures written on stone, petroglyphs and pictographs, and marks left on the surface of the earth. In the blender of language remembered and forgot, she strives to interpret the code. As Lawrence Raab writes, "the past isn't over until we understand it".

Readers of Wild Rain will discover a poet of uncommon originality, sensitivity and talent. Margaret Rooney's unique connection to the natural world and her keen understanding of human possibility and vulnerability, yields poetry enriched by mind bending metaphors and phrases replete with sound, color and clarity. The insightful messages contained in Wild Rain will challenge your mind and open your heart. Find a comfortable chair, curl up with this book, maybe in a wild windblown rain and treat yourself to the hidden treasure of Ms. Rooney's imagination.

Hard Feelings, Elizabeth R. McCarthy's second poetry collection, is filled with close observations of birds and other wildlife found in the Vermont countryside. Through metaphor and simile, form and imagination, the poet transforms these observations into the language of poetry. In the title poem, the last wild apples of the season are likened to grudges that linger and ferment, becoming "sour little/hearts that/rot in place." In "Scuttled Memories," an extended maritime metaphor evokes the sense of time passing when we leave our grief and regrets "stuck in the wooden hull/of memory." Yet these are ultimately celebratory poems, full of the joy of discovery, like the old milkweed seeds that "burst open/the pod door-escaping/to whorl and dance/in the autumn sun."-Angela Patten, author of The Oriole & the Ovenbird, In Praise of Usefulness and other books.In Elizabeth R. McCarthy's beautiful, new collection, Hard Feelings, we enter a world of sandhill cranes, field crickets, spring peepers, odd cats, and cleansing rain. Present and thankful for ordinary moments, McCarthy shares her deep connection to nature and the whispered wisdom she receives. She speaks to us of her preferred world, "where understanding / is the sunrise." Reverently hanging items of laundry in the summer sun, McCarthy writes about, "pinning them in silent prayer," and we experience the day through her appreciative eyes. These are poems that offer solace, even when processing grief. Above all else, these are poems of hope, "for those who / believe in destiny / delivered in the night / of each new month."-Cristina M. R. Norcross, Founding Editor of Blue Heron Review; author of The Sound of a Collective Pulse and other titles

Pack your hemp fabric Hawaiian shirts, pop tarts, and petticoats, and join the family in Kimberly Sailor's Holy Week in Cave Country for a pandemic Kentucky vacation! Progressive hip meets traditional rural in an intoxicating mash-up complete with Dollar Store meds and Facebook healing crystals when you need a little soothing after a long day's sight-seeing. Sailor's impressionistic, sound-drunk, tour-de-force lowers you down a zip-line into the rich poetic depths, from which you'll emerge enlarged, newly alive, and thankful you've been "fortunate enough to find caves / below your family's foundation." -Christopher Citro, author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the SunKimberly Sailor's Holy Week in Cave Country carves meaning into shark teeth in cave tops, and dares to ask: how did we get here, above and beneath all these fossils? She enlightens us within her rich text, showing us how we can all learn from children, especially our own. She shares with us, "My daughter talks about Heaven so casually / you'd think she visits after school." A moment so tender and light, you're grateful it was put to paper. Holy Week is bark, bite, and salve, all rolled into one. A must read. -Han Raschka, author of Splinters

Through a collection of poems that read like intimate confessions, Villa paints a portrait of longing, connection, and the complexities of relationships. The verses capture the essence of longing, distance, and the bittersweet beauty of fleeting moments.Through vivid imagery and poignant reflections, the author navigates the landscapes of love, loss, and self-discovery. From the vibrant streets of Zambia to the quiet intimacy of shared spaces, each poem invites readers to explore the intricacies of the human experience.This Is What Bodies Do is a heartfelt exploration of the human spirit, inviting readers to delve into the depths of emotion and find solace in the beauty of connection. Readers will find themselves drawn into a world of longing, love, and the undeniable power of the human heart.

Maeve Holler's debut collection, HOW TO LEAVE YOUR FAMILY, inspects the idea of family, the creation and destruction of it, and what being part of one really means. The book poetically and speculatively retraces the life story of Holler's late grandmother-who grows up in Mississippi, escapes an abusive relationship, and flees to Georgia, only to leave her two children behind-and the mass of folklore that has always surrounded her. Holler's poems follow the aftermath of this story and pick up the pieces her grandmother left behind, and together, ultimately taking the shape of a multigenerational, coming-of-self narrative of witness.