Jan 15
Letters That Breathe Fire by Margaret Randall, New Village Press Letters That Breathe Fire is not merely a book of correspondence; it is a living archive of how literature once moved through the world—slowly, stubbornly, and with moral urgency. Drawn from the letter sections of El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, one of the …
Jan 09
A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst by Deborah Ketai Citizens for Decent Literature Press 2026, Winner of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize Deborah Ketai’s A Matter of Taste is a collection obsessed—in the most productive sense—with appetite: for food, for sex, for meaning, for language, for life itself. Hunger is not merely …
Jan 01
The Scary Parts by Allan MacDonell (Punk Hostage Press) The Scary Parts is a compact, sharp-edged book about fear—not the cinematic kind, but the quiet, professional, social, and existential varieties that accrue as life narrows its options. Allan MacDonell approaches fear the way a seasoned essayist and fiction writer would: circling it, baiting it with …
Dec 12
The People Are Like Wolves to Me by William Taylor Jr. William Taylor Jr.’s The People Are Like Wolves to Me (Roadside Press) is a book steeped in the wreckage and radiance of contemporary life—an unvarnished, booze-stained hymn to the broken, the searching, and the almost-resigned. The collection reads like a long walk through San …
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 …
