In Conversation

McDannold, Michele (2025). Collected Poems 2005-2025 (Poetry Collection) Roadside Press 279p. $20.00 (Paperback) Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems 2005–2025 is a bruising, beautiful chronicle of two decades lived on the raw nerve of experience. The voice here is equal parts survivor, witness, and outlaw philosopher—one who has been scorched by the world’s indifference yet still refuses …

Dexter You’re streaming that show everyone was talking about ten, twelve years ago, the one with the detached unemotional guy working as a forensic, Los Angeles PD, blood splatter expert who spends his free time hunting down rapists, murderers. You find it easy to root for Dexter as he straps tonight’s serial killer to the …

FARMS R.I.P. drizzle drifts along the hilltops dogs growl fearlessly behind rusted gates in each rotting farmhouse are the seeds of its own dissolution the forest looks green and new but humanity is old in these parts a doleful face stares out of a cracked upstairs window not with accusation just the knowledge of what …

Montpelier Song I used to go to The Black Door every Friday to see Nicole. She was tall and slightly nordic or nordic once removed, a nose like a golden shovel of all the best lines, eyes in a dream state cor cordium, fearful symmetry. One night when the streets were dead and the moon …

Stuffing: A Thanksgiving Play In One Act (True Story 2009) Players: Son: A loutish bearded hack in his early 30s. Mom: Early 50s. A million miles a minute. Setting: Mom and Son are perched on a power line like two strange black birds. They sit high above their Indiana neighborhood. The sound of a ringing …

What Kind Of A Bird Is This? I have this idea for a poem I hope it’s a poem it wants to be a poem it’s gonna try to be a poem but maybe it won’t be a poem maybe it’ll just be a hybrid with a handicap an aspirational prose— a bastard mixed breed …

Pella Felton Reviews Streetlamp Nautilus by Catharine Batsios Batsios, Catharine (2025). Streetlamp Nautilus (Poetry Collection) Luchador Press 98p. $13.00 (Paperback) By the time the I made my way through the first page of Streetlamp Nautilus, I’d witnessed an aneurysm at a local diner, a bullet hole in the glass, and a long line of Buicks. …

Holy Toledo (pt 3 of 3) My wife would like me to mention straight away that I got lost several times on the way to Culture Clash Records the morning of the Lit Fest. That is simply not true. I turned down the wrong streets several times. I wasn’t lost, I just jumped the gun, …

The Long Road to Self: Kathleen Florence’s Prayers With a Side of Cash In Prayers With a Side of Cash: Poems While Driving Across America (MoonTide Press, 2025), Kathleen Florence reinvents the road poem for a restless new century. The journey begins in New York and ends in Los Angeles, but the true destination is …

Echoes of Survival: The Music and Memory of Rich Ferguson’s Somewhere, a Playground Rich Ferguson’s Somewhere, a Playground (Moontide Press, 2025) announces itself with a street-level hum. From its opening pages, the collection pulses with the noise and nerve of lived experience — the friction between beauty and brutality that defines much of contemporary urban …