The Tender Between negotiates a linguistic terrain at once forming and falling apart. Through fragmented text and deftly recast associations, author Eve Luckring questions the assumptions that define self/world. Her investigation is rooted in the physical and shaped by the influence of traditional Japanese poetic forms. This is a spare, precise poetry attentive to every syllable.

The Tender Between

Literature & Fiction

Luckring, Eve

Poetry

Ornithopter Press

"Object permanence" refers to the early developmental stage in which the child learns that the world exists independently of one's own ability to perceive it. In this, Michelle Gil-Montero's first full-length collection, lyric poems cling to the elusive debris of daily life in order to invoke, paradoxically, its impermanence. As the "spare valuables" of one daily life, these poems summon the liminal world of early motherhood, of early morning, of seasons in transition. In a terrain of post-industrial landscapes at once familiar and not---a space where what *isn't* encroaches on what *is*---Gil-Montero's emotionally resonant lyrics pressure the expressive possibilities of language. Sound hovers on the verge of becoming object. Object threatens to evaporate into sound.

Object Permanence

Gil-Montero, Michelle

Toad's Sanctuary is a book-length work composed of Tamas Panitz's recent poetry, closet speeches, advertisements, manifestos, and ceremonies. These coil and uncoil as they claim the ground of an associative activity within the present. The tongue surprises me again / in the prism of the sentence, Panitz writes in the poem "?Three Tarot Cards." Readers will likewise encounter many surprises spoken into life within his curious texts, which play across genres and eras with startling fluency, and are never quite what they seem.

Toad's Sanctuary

Panitz, Tamas

All art constantly aspires, Walter Pater claimed, towards the condition of music. The poems in Tom Snarsky's first full-length collection Light-Up Swan are animated by twin forces: an abiding love of music, and an equal fondness for the ghostly conversation engendered by quotation. With whimsy tempered by obsessive fascination, the author unfolds an open dialogue with a private pantheon of musicians and poets, both living and dead. These spectral encounters are staged on a far-reaching array of settings, from oceans to virtual gamescapes, starry canvases to comedy clubs. The speaker of the poems is by turns assured and uncertain: in one moment explaining a mathematical result from automata theory, and in the next returning to youthful conflicts and preoccupations. Are we going in circles is a fair question for this cyclical book that wears its obsessions and anxieties on its sleeve, but Light-Up Swan moves towards a helical lift. Like a string of soft lights winding up a swan's neck, these poems are composed of gentle details that welcome readers into a charmingly off-kilter world-once inside, their curiosity will be rewarded by a warm and unusual sensibility that only Tom Snarsky can bring.

Light-Up Swan

Snarsky, Tom

Karen Elizabeth Bishop's the deering hour pushes against the edges of lyric to find the moments and spaces where the natural, object, and human worlds meet. The voice is a decidedly female, at times maternal, engagement that repositions the lived center so that the margin, the edge, and the boundary become rich, inhabitable spaces. These are lush, layered poems that deal in the porosity of multiplying questions, fluidities, and transformations from plant, mineral, and animal to the human. They trade in wings, beaks, and feathers; orogeny, rocks, and subduction zones; the moment when the animal and plant take over. Language becomes its own marker, so that what we know of the human animal is a pause, a call, a limb, and a bloom in the world and on the page.

The deering hour

Bishop, Karen Elizabeth

Reverse Engineer

Colby, Kate

Reclaimed Water

Author's note: Intaglio Daughters is an homage text for the poet Lyn Hejinian. All titles (in italics above each poem) are taken from her book The Unfollowing. In the preface to her book she writes "I wanted each line to be as difficult to accept on the basis of the previous and subsequent lines as death is for we who are alive - a comparison that I make intentionally, since my intention in writing the sequence of poems I'm calling 'The Unfollowing' was to compose a set of elegies." In considering a form for Intaglio Daughters I wondered - what follows loss and rupture? What follows unfollowing? The mourning process often involves a non-sequential experience of time - and many returns, wavelike, in spirals or contractions. In keeping with this idea of rounds, sinuous or labyrinth-time, reaching backward and forward simultaneously, my book is a series of rondels, with the final line in each poem returning to, and resounding Hejinian's language.

Intaglio Daughters

Browne, Laynie

Site of Disappearance

Malone, Erin

Jones Very

Snediker, Michael D.

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