These poems tell the story of loss: loss of a father stolen by disease, loss of innocence. And while it could easily stop there this collection doesn't. Instead, it gathers strength and finds its voice and its fight. With wonder and awe and some well-placed anger, we see these poems emerge on the other side with a bit of hope and even happiness.

Green

Literature & Fiction

Johnson, Melissa Fite

Poetry

Riot in Your Throat

This collection takes the reader on a journey through the injustices women face - in their careers, their daily lives, in the way they walk to their cars late at night; to smashing the patriarchy and claiming their rights over their bodies and their ideas; to a love better left remembered; to eventually finding a balance with a love that stands up and fights beside the poet.\nCourtney LeBlanc's Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart understands that the body "is a war / zone," especially, the female body, which LeBlanc explores through the lens of fairy tales, the story of Eve, her own journey through girlhood, womanhood, destruction, rebirth, and self-discovery. Each word in each poem is as necessary and life-giving as a heartbeat.\nShaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, Finalist for the Oregon Book Award\nIn her latest collection, Courtney LeBlanc bravely and fiercely examines the burdens women carry, the societal pressures, the cultural expectations: "the heavy world / digging into our shoulders and slumping our backs." In many of her poems, she takes back agency - that others tried to take away - and never lets us forget the pluck that endures: "ready to bite" and "guns ablaze" and "I'm read / to burn" and "This body / is a weapon." This collection is one that never flinches from hard truths, always insist on strength by revealing vulnerability, and even in its exploration of our human darkness, offers flames of hope.\nShuly Xóchitl Cawood, author of Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning\nExquisite Bloody, Beating Heart traces the path from snake to survival to highlight the complex and often conflicted experiences of womanhood. LeBlanc's voice, both skillfully intimate and starkly blunt, speaks in blood, beauty and burden to show the many hungers and rips in the framework of femininity. With a close examination of the body, from vibrators to "belly gowls," this collection asks us to consider the dichotomy of punishment and pleasure. "I did not have a map to the body" LeBlanc writes and allows this collection to be its own cartography, a new country of strength where every woman can [grow] the fruit. [Be] the vine and the rain and the light. [Be] the dirt." This book is an anthem of urging and unlearning, reminding women to "be the key to her own opening, her becoming."\nKelly Grace Thomas, author of Boat Burned

Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart

LeBlanc, Courtney

Borrowing Your Body is a collection of poems that focus on the duties of being a daughter, sister, partner, and how to survive grief, sickness, and the ails that plague a person. The collection explores the unknown and imagined worlds, the boundless edges of invention, and the creative leaps the brain can make. Tackling themes of illness, death, sorrow, and the vast universe, these poems remind us we are all human.

Borrowing Your Body

Passin, Laura

Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt is a collection of poems that takes the reader on a journey through life as a woman breaking free from the constraints of a quiet, midwestern life, to fighting battles for equality, to raising boys in a harsh society, to teaching students and making connections in a unjust world. These poems are about hope and happiness and heartache and finding your way home.

Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt

Rachkus Uttich, Laurie

Dispatches from Frontier Schools is a collection of poems that pulls the reader right into the brutalities, and beauty, of teaching in a struggling charter school. With humor, wit, tears, anger, exhaustion, elation, and a refusal to give up, these poems highlight the struggles of a teacher trying to maintain her dignity and her identity and do right by her students and her own children-while being pulled apart by a system that doesn't support or defend teachers. More than just an anthem for teachers, however, this collection is a cry for all women who try to give all they can to everything and everyone.\nThese poems are brutal, laying bare the tragic and terrible ways our country is failing us all. But they are also full of moments that are often missing in contemporary education - like humility, compassion, and empathy: "we stand in the hallway as D. tells me / she is pregnant she is due in December She cries and covers her / face with her hands I well up but hide it by biting the inside of my bottom lip." This book should be required reading for career administrators, board of education politicos, and all the legislators who pay little more than lip-service to our nation's educators. These poems-unique in structure and perspective, and full of beautifully orchestrated lyric turns-are a criticism, and a call for a reckoning, to be sure. 
Sarah Kain Gutowski, author of Fabulous Beast: Poems 
In her memoir-in-poems Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Sarah Beddow creates a vital frontline record of American education as it abuts the pandemic. Here, we meet a woman teacher in full, frank embodiment: an educator unwilling to subsume herself entirely to the twinned demands of capitalism and data-driven academic achievement bearing down on her and her students by her charter school employer, yet one who still burns to offer her entire intellectual and energetic self to her under-resourced students. Throughout Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Beddow contrasts the sterile and un-seeing language of corporate education with her own vibrant, devastating personal testimonies and disclosures, granting us an intimate, eviscerating glimpse into the negotiations, struggles, heartbreaks, and joys as lived from her side of the overflowing teacher's desk. 
Rachel Mennies, author of The Naomi Letters 
These Dispatches unsparingly critique not just the institution, but the complicity of every adult working within it, including Ms. Beddow the teacher, who sometimes yells or slams a door. "I listened to my ideas come out of his mouth my own mouth / muted / And it's like I am not here I am / divorced from my / thoughts I am told again and again to join the / team." An institution with incompetent management can tank the best teachers, run the best future leaders out the door. "But no amount of reflection will reveal to me how to be / professional in a system so broken it / shreds me leaves me a corpse in underwear and an ancient / t-shirt spread / on the classroom floor." The students will break your heart, but the administrators will crush it. 
Krystal Languell, author of Systems Thinking with Flowers

Dispatches from Frontier Schools

Beddow, Sarah

All Possible Histories

Greenfield, Sonia

Little Beast is a collection of poems that remind us that brutality and beauty are often two sides of the same coin. Does love exist without savagery? What is the difference between motherhood and miracles? Wildlife, witchcraft, and wonder are found throughout these poems, and each pull the reader into the magic they hold. Weaving folklore with survival stories, this collection informs the reader when to fight back, when to run, and when to trust shelter when it's finally found.Sara Quinn Rivara's dazzling new collection Little Beast is the fire and the cauldron. These poems "unzip [their] woman's skin." In language at once precise and ferocious, these poems sizzle and writhe, and yet they rise, anew, clean of every abuse, every patriarchal gaslight that sparked their death, their rebirth. They are housewitches and snaked, smart, double-edged women-Eve and her progeny disavowing the gardens and wilding their own. Taut, tightwire, sharp, and utterly gorgeous, these poems mother themselves and a whole new generation of powerful girls and women with "a kind of hope that borders on the obscene." These little beasts unleash the feral spells within us all. - Jenn Givhan, author of "Belly to the Brutal"In the poem "Witch-wife," Sara Quinn Rivara writes, "This is a woman's story. You know how it ends." But we don't. Rivara deconstructs and reconstructs mythology, fairy tale, allegory, and history, turning each tale upon its head. In "At The Far Edge of Paradise," while "Adam named the animals, [. . . ] Eve swallowed their names like pomegranate seeds before she slipped into the underworld." I kept reading and rereading to untangle each poem, to learn what would happen next, to delight in each retelling, to follow the string through the labyrinth, which is really a tapestry of Rivara's making. I know I'll come back to this collection again and again. - Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask (Winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Oregon Book Award)

Little Beast

Rivara, Sara Quinn

Bad Animal is a collection of poems about the body, about violence, about safety, a meditation on love, sex, and death. It explores the body's changing relationship to desire in the aftermath of incredible sexual trauma, and how we societally reconcile the beauty of the world we live in with intense emotional pain. Bad Animal is a collection of poems that remind the reader we are all made of flesh and bone and while flesh is temporary and fragile, bone is hard and resilient: both are needed to be whole. Nature is present throughout these poems which echoes the real world-a world that needs both vulture and carcass, a world that needs both dark and light.***It's a miracle for a poetry collection to wind up so smart and so moving at once. I read Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal in one gulp, then reopened it and started over, for it rewards study. Brave new offering to the literary world, and the first of many books I'll buy from this astonishing young poet. Buy this book! ~ Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liar's ClubOh, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal is a marvelously macabre and bewitching book! Here is a poet who plunges headlong into haunting intersections of faith, nature, sex, and violence, evoking for us the allures and the horrors of death, enlivening the body and stirring up questions about the future. These poems unfold a menagerie of incisive, visceral images you won't soon forget. Bratt-Pfotenhauer's language glows and pulses like an ember in the dark.~ Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas GoatBad Animal is fierce, smart, knows language as a kind of mating dance with the reader, a lever into the interior, and a demon possession. It's aware of its body as text and texture, a source of hurt and a source of rapture. It has a hawk heart and a crow mind. Bad Animal is memorable for its avidity, its "renegade" desire, it's scholarship of "little violences". It puts you under a spell. It gallops inside you. ~ Bruce Smith, author of Devotions

Bad Animal

Bratt-Pfotenhauer, Kathryn

Avoiding the Rapture is a collection of poems about survival-surviving childhood, religion, and the ways girls are taught they should behave. Karen J. Weyant opens the Rust Belt to the reader and shows them what life is like there: hard and grizzly, but with hints of tenderness and hope. We meet troubled boys and adventurous girls, we meet the survivors of a difficult life, we meet those who are scraping by and those who aren't. This collection shows that even the difficult can be beautiful, that even the hard can contain softness. Ultimately, this collection shows the reader that to survive, one must be willing to fight for it, but if they do, they're rewarded with a lush and vibrant life. 
** ﻿﻿Karen J. Weyant dedicates Avoiding the Rapture, "to all the Rust Belt girls" who did as the title suggests: survived looming fear of physical bodies of the righteous ascending to heaven. Weyant distills, in expertly crafted, evocative verse, a splendidly defiant girlhood that comes in shirking that fear to embrace base yearning for pleasures like cigarettes, cool clothes, and flavored Chapstick. This collection is a Biblical masterpiece. It captures the loss and longing of survivorship. You, too, will feel the Rapturous pull out, but will want to stay here-just a little longer. 
Sara Moore Wagner, author of Swan Wife and Hillbilly Madonna 
Road map and field guide, Avoiding the Rapture documents a coming of age during the devastating effects of deindustrialization. Karen Weyant's poems reveal the hardscrabble existence of prescient girls who "smell water before the rain swells" surrounded by adults that "should have been listening." Among broken beer glass and roadkill, where the night sky is "splattered with rhinestones" and "the town river is thick brown, too dark to see," These are poems of compassion written with an unflinching gaze. A testament to survival, full of sharp edges and wonder, Avoiding the Rapture leaves no one behind. This is a remarkable debut.\nSuzanne Frischkorn, author of Fixed Star 
The Rust Belt has already seen the rapture-several, in fact, and those left behind each time continue to tell new stories. In Karen J. Weyant's Avoiding the Rapture, we meet girls who've "lived among the dead" wearing craft store glitter and vanilla bean Chapstick, who've had to learn survival by listening to the river and looking for answers in the fields, whose indomitable spirits were forged where "god smelled like burned paper." Through stunning imagery and music, Weyant paints with the colors and textures of a post-industrial landscape that reflects more than simple nostalgia. This is poetry for anyone who knows that "when everyone disappears, everything you see will be yours," but only if you claim it. Rochelle Hurt, author of The Rusted City and The J Girls: A Reality Show

Avoiding the Rapture

Weyant, Karen J

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