Jun 12
The Things You Can’t Remember Become the Things You Can’t Forget by Lori Jakiela (Roadside Press) Lori Jakiela’s The Things You Can’t Remember Become the Things You Can’t Forget is subtitled “an object/memoir in verse,” but that description hardly captures the ambitious emotional and intellectual terrain this remarkable collection traverses. Beginning with a tarnished silver …
May 25
California Roadkill2 by GenX Core from Mystic Boxing Commission GenX Core’s California Roadkill2, the follow up to California Roadkill from the same publisher in 2022, is not a comfortable book, nor does it pretend to be. It operates in a raw, unstable register — emotionally, stylistically, and philosophically –rooted in what the novel repeatedly names …
May 11
Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader edited by Dan Denton & Michele McDannold There’s something refreshingly unvarnished about Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader — a book that refuses polish in favor of presence. As the publisher’s note makes clear, this is not a curated “best of,” but a living cross-section of a small press …
May 04
Pots of sun by Moe Shapiro from xPress of San Francisco Moe Shapiro’s collection Pots of sun from xPress of San Francisco reads like a restless map of consciousness—part road journal, part spiritual interrogation, part wry, self-aware performance. Taken together, the poems you’ve provided suggest a poet working in the long shadow of Beat lineage …
Apr 23
Things to Say When You Have Nothing to Say by Kerry Trautman (Roadside Press) Kerry Trautman’s Things to Say When You Have Nothing to Say is a collection that quietly dismantles its own title. These poems are anything but empty — they teem with observation, sensory immediacy, and a restless, searching intelligence that turns the …
Mar 30
Here on Earth (New York Quarterly Books) by Tony Gloeggler Tony Gloeggler’s Here on Earth (New York Quarterly Books) is a collection that refuses distance. These poems don’t observe life so much as remain pressed up against it—breath, illness, memory, regret, tenderness—all unfolding in real time. What emerges from the selected poems is not a …
Mar 08
The Broken Buddha by Johnny Cordova (Roadside Press) Johnny Cordova’s The Broken Buddha is a restless, confessional pilgrimage—one that moves through Southeast Asia and India before circling back to the American West, to fathers and daughters, to addiction, grief, music, and memory. Published by Roadside Press, the collection reads like a spiritual travelogue written in …
Feb 26
The Enemy Sleeps by David A. Romero (El Martillo Press) David A. Romero’s The Enemy Sleeps is a suburban California thriller with the pulse of social realism and the teeth of a morality tale. Set in the fictional city of Harper, the novel unfolds like a slow camera pan across a quiet cul-de-sac—until the camera …
Feb 19
Zirconium Ash by Jimmy Vega What Books Press Zirconium Ash reads like a book written from inside the burn—after the ignition, after the damage, when the speaker is still warm with impact and fallout. Jimmy Vega’s poems move through freeway sprawl, bodily collapse, and spiritual exhaustion with a voice that is jagged but lucid, streetwise …
Feb 13
Quiet Underpinnings by Aleathia Drehmer (Roadside Press) Aleathia Drehmer’s Quiet Underpinnings is a collection deeply attentive to how life accumulates—through seasons, through grief, through the small, human gestures that tether us to one another and to the land. These poems are rooted in lived experience, where ecological awareness, love, and loss are inseparable, and where …
