Poetry. Women's Studies. In TREMOLO, Kelly Hansen Maher explores the strange grief and strained sensibility that arose from years of recurrent miscarriages. Questioning the bodily and psychological confusion of bearing one living daughter amid several lost pregnancies, Hansen Maher resists the sentimental even as her lament is inevitable. She situates her poems in wildernesses both urban and remote, with a lens that moves from the cultural to the intensely intimate. Against imagery of loons and lakes, residential gardens and city boulevards, she deflects metaphor even as she evokes it. Told in six sections that work as an anchoring score, complete with an Overture, TREMOLO guides the reader to listen for, and hear, meaning in the invisible. In the long poem "Loon Calls for Winifred," written for a stillborn daughter, Hansen Maher uses four varying loon calls and her travels through Minnesota's Boundary Waters as a structural sequence for grief. Her language is, in turns, musical, philosophical, patterned, and plain. TREMOLO tells a cyclical story of unseen loss and private mourning.

Tremolo

Literature & Fiction

Hansen Maher, Kelly

Poetry

Tinderbox Editions

Poetry. VENTRILOQUY brings together four poem sequences that throw the author's voice in different directions. "Garden of Tongues, Garden of Eyes" sings, in formally similar poems, of many flowers through imagined myth and stories. The poems in "Divination," also formally similar, consider whether it's possible to divine characters through action. A third sequence of formally loose poems treats human desire, foible, and obsession through imagined saints—the saint of big data, the oil saint, the citizen saint, the sorry saint, and others. A final sequence of short prose poems depicts still life paintings and how they point away from the stilled objects on display out to a beautiful and imperfect world. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes surreal, VENTRILOQUY explores human longing for control, wonder, and meaning.

Ventriloquy

Kildegaard, Athena

Poetry. In BURIED CHOIRS, Katharine Rauk invites us into a landscape of sea glass, licorice wheels, and coins kept beneath the tongue. Her lines turn and break in surprising ways, sometimes unsettlingly so; these poems might be absolutely true at the same time they are delectable lies. Nevertheless, this collection is driven by a restless hunger to connect—with the dead, an imaginary friend, a lover—whoever or whatever might be just beyond reach.

Buried Choirs

Rauk, Katharine

Literary Nonfiction. Kevin O'Rourke's debut collection explores what it means to be both the subject and the performer of the gaze. His essays demand answers to the questions: How do we lift up the surgical drape and what do we do with what is found there? How do we manage the space between the subject and onlooker? What happens when the body gazes back? In these essays, the body becomes a medical object, a dying musician sends missives into the blogosphere, we witness the strained interview on the radio of a hip-hop star. The writer and his corona of family are not excused from such scrutiny: O'Rourke recounts the experience of losing his mother to cancer, his own childhood maladies, and too, his longings, and his own gaze onto the great scaffolds of Art. Kevin O'Rourke joins the community of skilled essayists that include David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Leslie Jamison, his own voice full of wit and ballast.

As If Seen at an Angle

O'ROURKE, Kevin

Essays & Correspondence

Poetry. "This is a great American poem. Jordan tells the truth of a life as split open by the world--by life on this earth with other kinds of beings, human and other, with dreams and ghosts, machinery, mythology, between the visible and invisible. The language is thick, allusive, rich, dense. She turns scalding materials into gorgeous art. These poems make me think of Hart Crane, of Blake in his visions of heaven and hell, of Whitman at his most woven, and of Gerard Manley Hopkins by which I mean this poetry reaches me like theirs and reminds me of why it matters so much and urges me on."--Adrienne Rich

Hunger

Jordan, Judy

Fiction. "Every day more pressing and relevant, PERIODIC COMPANIONS is a novel that points to the conditions that allow for generative as opposed to violent work in the face of tragedy and loss of hope. Its characters, based on the periodic table of elements, are constantly in dialogue with how we react, what we give off, and what it means to subvert our existing conditions. They remind us that while we have innate and proscribed capacities to act, the ways these come into being in relationship not only remains flexible but also matters most. PERIODIC COMPANIONS asks, what does it mean to live from what we know and what we are, and what does it mean to change? How do we relate to inherited and learned characteristics? What allows us to generate, re-generate and co-generate? The sheer weight of it was paralyzing but it did not exist without us, Browne writes, and so we are invited in to our complicity and agency. PERIODIC COMPANIONS' conversations and contradictions are a both mythologies and instruction manuals for the evolution and dissolution of contemporary stuckness--and these days, who doesn't need to be un-stuck?"--Leora Fridman

Periodic Companions

Browne, Laynie

Poetry. In COURSE, Kildegaard traces the course of her mother's life and death, and of her own grief. At the same time, it follows the course of the river where her mother's ashes were placed. "The poems in Athena Kildegaard's COURSE contain multitudes: garter snakes, bats, herons, wild rhubarb, 'the thousand / reed-hidden / black-birds.' But their central concern surrounds the complex life and death of a mother, and attendant mourning for her. Trust and doubt coexist in these pages, and the natural world offers solace but never complete reassurance: 'How vain to seek certainty,' Kildegaard writes. Indeed, the book ends with a poem comprised of spacious questions. As readers, we are caught in the current of this marvelous book, which is as honest and deep-flowing and eternal as the river that passes through its pages." -- Connie Wanek

Course

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. 16 PILLS opens in the hospital as Moore navigates the medical gaze: becoming spectacle as she is videotaped walking down the hall, talked about as if she were an object, wondered over her body as she drifts, unmoored, before surgery. Moore's essays explore with intimacy and candor the experiences of a contemporary feminist exploring the worlds of co-parenting, the absurdities of online dating, the art of mothering in a time of protest, the complexity of prescription drugs, and reflecting on generations of men and women in her Swedish- and Cuban-American family. Moore's book is at once thoughtful and honest, and is ultimately an investigation on making spaces for ourselves and meeting the desires of our own bodies. For readers of Leslie Jamison, Roxane Gay, and Lidia Yuknavich.

16 Pills

Moore, Carley

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Taking the form of "the world's smallest encyclopedia" of American culture, the prose poems in NANOPEDIA explore concepts coined in or corrupted by (or both) America from vantage points that are both deeply personal and politically charged. "Charles Jensen's NANOPEDIA is a lovely book of ironies and experiments about the history of a nation that can't seem to be honest about its history. As is his fashion, Jensen reinvents our idea of what the political poem is and what it can do through an adherence to artifice that seems to wonder what is real. This is a stunning book!"--Jericho Brown "If NANOPEDIA is the smallest American reference, then Charles Jensen is the smallest American reference librarian. In Jensen's book, a prose poem crawls into the shell of a dictionary definition and comes alive there, wandering off to unexpected places from Domestic Terrorism to Online Dating to White Privilege. These tiny poems are part aphorism, part parable, part history, part memoir, part comedy, part tragedy. They are the shards of 'a bomb that detonates inward.'"--Stephanie Lenox "Charles Jensen's second book of poems is brimming with humor and pathos packaged into small prose poems with titles as varying as the material within the poems. These are poems by poet who observes the world, takes it apart, and puts it back together in different forms. What lucky readers we are to witness this mind at work and what a good laugh we might get in the process."--Victoria Chang

Nanopedia

Jensen, Charles

Poetry. "'Not the drowned girl but the swimming one,' Rivara writes in ANIMAL BRIDE. These poems are written at the crossroads of womanhood: to be a woman in captivity or a woman breaking free. Like a 21st century Persephone, the woman at the heart of ANIMAL BRIDE journeys out of the underworld of a violent marriage to find strength in her animal self. Bride, wife, mother, lover--Rivara wrestles with many forms of being female, and summons the natural elements of fire and ice, air and water, to become a shapeshifter. I found myself reveling in the lyric energy of these lines, and how the voice grows brasher, more authoritative, more courageous. Poem after poem, there's a gathering strength and resilience. This is a powerful story of womanhood and transformation--between hell and hope, fear and freedom, silence and singing."--Ansel Elkins "'Listen: Living takes such courage,' confides Sara Quinn Rivara in ANIMAL BRIDE. These poems are relentless, shaped in fire and spoken as resurrection. They delve into the dark, the feral, the fierce transmutations needed to break from the cold waters of a disastrous marriage, to become, finally, oneself. Their motivation: a ferocious love for the speaker's son and, eventually, herself. Their mechanisms are myth and fairytale--Persephone's escape from Asphodel; a baby 'half wolf, half bird...mouth like an open wound.' And their language is a knife-edged liturgy--words risen blazing from the ruins, 'overcome with blood, with blossom.'"--Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

Animal Bride

Rivara, Sara Quinn

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