Dec 01
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 …
Nov 24
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 …
Nov 24
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 …
Nov 16
Trying to Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World by Steve Henn (Arroyo Seco Press) Steve Henn’s Trying to Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World is a raw, funny, and unflinchingly human collection that feels like both personal diary and public confession. The poems …
Nov 06
From Womb to Word: The Spellwork of Briana Muñoz’s Matriarchy Briana Muñoz’s Matriarchy (El Martillo Press) is a collection that insists on the sacredness of creation—in every sense of the word. Her poems braid the biological and the political, the ancestral and the immediate, the sacred and the profane. The voice that emerges here is …
Oct 08
Fatherless Children by Michael D. Grover, Roadside Press Michael D. Grover’s Fatherless Children reads like a long, ragged hymn to absence — to fathers who didn’t teach, to a country that promises and extracts, to poetry itself as both refuge and condemnation. Structured as numbered vignettes rather than conventional poems, the chapbook forms a single sprawling …
Oct 01
Poet, Sleuth, and Scout: The Noir World of Clay Blackburn Owen Hill’s The Giveaway: The Clay Blackburn Story brings together three novels and a short story featuring the poet-sleuth-book scout Clay Blackburn—a singular character navigating the margins of Berkeley, California, where radical politics, literary ephemera, and existential mystery intertwine. This omnibus serves as both an …
Sep 10
With Her Hair on Fire by Christy Prahl (Roadside Press, 2025) Christy Prahl’s With Her Hair on Fire is a collection of prose poems that read like dispatches from the liminal zones between memory and invention, confession and fable. The chapbook brims with domestic detail—laundromats, hibiscus bushes, yellow houses, hummingbird feeders—yet each poem veers quickly …
Aug 28
Miss Experience White by Milo Johnson, illustrated by John Seabury Milo Johnson’s Miss Experience White: A Poem Cycle is a blistering, hallucinatory journey into the heart of whiteness, privilege, and the monstrous machinery of supremacy. Framed as an illustrated poetic cycle and disguised in the familiar wrapping of a children’s book, this radical autofiction detonates …
Aug 16
The Screw City Poems by Richard Vargas (Roadside Press, 2025) Richard Vargas’s The Screw City Poems is a fierce, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest collection that captures the dissonant beauty of working-class life in America. With a voice that blends raw grit with lyrical sensitivity, Vargas delivers poems rooted in lived experience—poems that hum with the …
