Poetry. To what degree do the Civil War in ancient Rome and the civil rights struggle in the United States resonate in our present moment of clashing public interests and disparities of race and class? In Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die, his first book, Joel Felix grafts Lucan's Civil War to Virgil's Georgics to yield marvels of Tennessee drive- throughs, Selma, Montgomery, and Chicago. "To utilize the earth / choice apples must be found, / named, and securely lashed / to the forest drained of accident."

Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die

Literature & Fiction

Félix, Joël

Poetry

Verge Books

Poetry. Mnemosyne as memory is mother to the nine muses, who bring us forgetfulness of evil and rest from pain, according to the epic poets. But what does the lyric poet do with the mother of the muses, when his language is plosives and assonance erupting from thickets? "This scriptlessness // will be about subsistence, it will become / the centerpiece of a belief," announces Eric Elshtain near the outset of his remarkable first full-length collection, an antic assembly of highly-wrought hymns and Linnaean hexes in which memory narrows and billows, "while we go headlong / to eat the arms of charlatans // rescuing every rickety magician / from salvation."

This Thin Memory A-ha

Elshtain, Eric

Poetry. Keeping vigil through the night in the realm of the Terra Lucida, which, according to Islamic scholar Henry Corbin, is "the land that secretes its own light," Joseph Donahue's DARK CHURCH lures a pilgrim fraught with memories of modernity and childhood, and who aspires to stand in its temple where ritual adherents drowse in dreams of healing and oracular pronouncements intimate a destiny belonging both to this world and the next. "Long ago, / the truest part of you… / began to approach / the condition of stone." At once vatic, nostalgic, cryptic, and clear, DARK CHURCH is a book of unremitting visionary power.

Dark Church

Donahue, Joseph

Poetry. On a scale extending from the minutely observed to species apocalypse, from the daily facts of raising children and housekeeping to the premonition that "cancer is tending / to erase the fathomable / wartech mindmanacle," Alicia Cohen gives her attention to the righteous labor to make sense of an incoherent world where "housekeepers fix mess and wreck / unnoted among / galaxies of perfume earth" the Eleusinian mysteries long ago foretold. In Cohen's COHERER, "longing is the only / belonging."

Coherer

Cohen, Alicia

Poetry. In Patrick Morrissey's WORLD MUSIC, the poet turns the crank on the machine made of words to reveal it as a music box providing an artful tune to accompany pictures of a shifting world, with city scenes of New York and Chicago, with garbage trucks in alleys and power lines crossing a view of the sky, and with waves crashing on the limestone blocks at Promontory Point. These are poems of eye, ear, and mind harmonizing their frequencies in tune with the nature of an urban world observed in radiant gist and luminous detail. "These poems are small in scale, modest in statement. Yet they open a window onto surging, complex occasions: the welter of the phenomenal world, a braid of water or voices, traffic of all sorts. Their delicate syntax graphs forces at play. Their metaphors find reciprocity between interiors and exteriors. They do so with quiet wit, but also with a deep awareness of how we draw music from noise, feeling from precision, and meaning from the flux of daily life."—Devin Johnston

World Music

Morrissey, Patrick

About the Author\nEd Roberson's eleven previous books of poetry include JUST IN: WORD OF NAVIGATIONAL CHALLENGES (Talisman House, Publishers, 1998), CITY ECLOGUE (Atelos, 2006), THE NEW WING OF THE LABRYRINTH (Singing Horse Press, 2009), MPH AND OTHER ROAD POEMS (VERGE Books, 2021) and the Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist and Kingsley-Tufts Award runner-up To See the Earth before the End of the World (2010). A former Special Programs administrator at Rutgers University's Cook Campus, Roberson has lived in Chicago since 2004 and is an emeritus professor in Northwestern University's MFA creative writing program. He has also held posts at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Cave Canem retreat for Black writers. His honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the African American Literature and Culture Association's Stephen Henderson Critics Award.\nPoetry. Edited by Andrew Peart. In 2015, while, in his words, "dismantling my house in New Jersey and preparing it for sale," Ed Roberson discovered in some envelopes in his attic a manuscript he thought lost, drawn from the experiences of the summer of 1970, when the poet, along with two friends, rode cross-country from Pittsburgh to San Francisco and back on two BMW motorcycles. The recovery of this manuscript‚--over forty years later--alerted Roberson to the fact that he had been relating to its material ever since, yielding for him work that "calls across the span of a lifetime." MPH is Roberson's epic, serial road poem, decades in the making, stamped with and guided by the talisman of its title. "one thing visible every day / any time 24/7 / for 3 months 8000 miles / was mph // on the speedometer. / a small petty thing. / a pin. / down of a larger / limiting. // a sighting an ideograph / even more than a picture beyond word."

MPH and Other Road Poems

Roberson, Ed

"Tirzah Goldenberg's LIKE AN OLIVE opens a space for me interior to the word, moves by some expansive mobility anterior to the letter, at once unfurling and embroidering, at once a hermitage below image and a vessel whose play of absence carries, like an archeological fragment, the forms and questions of our inheritance. This k'zayis, like an olive, is a shiur I want to show up for again and again, a book which presses with sensitive longing the pressing particulars of a present. How to live, where to live, how to be with others, how in a fractured overlapping and doubling of diasporas might we construct our communities and futures? Offered is a rhyme between ancient and contemporary, between personal and mystical, possible because of what's allowed in the word as Goldenberg writes: a past and present embellishing the measure of themselves in a pun far deeper and larger than wit. --Lewis Freedman Poetry. Jewish Studies.

Like an Olive

Goldenberg, Tirzah

Literary

Patrick Morrissey's latest collection of poems. In LIGHT BOX, Patrick Morrissey's third collection, the poet explores the mysteries and intimacies of life in the city as they intersect with the pleasures and realities of family life. In lines of lyric concision, Morrissey observes miniature dramas play out in apartments, on sidewalks, and behind the wheel. Emotionally vivid and intellectually complex, these carefully measured poems transform the most familiar things into marvels, where "a filigree of shadows tossed on the wind reassembles itself." Poetry.

Light Box

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