For poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis, the truth revealed through poetry is similar to what she has experienced in the heightened and urgent dramas that occur in health care—those suspended moments in which a dying heart might be revived or unbearable suffering relieved. We are vulnerable, her poems say, and we are dependent on one another—on the ways in which we care or fail to care for one another, in how we love or fail to love. In poems that are sensual, emotionally searing, and yet unfailingly tender, Davis shines a caregiver’s light on the most intimate details of the human body and the spirit within—how the flesh might betray, how it endures, and how ultimately it triumphs.

Taking Care of Time (Wheelbarrow Books)

Davis, Cortney

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Wheelbarrow Books

In this debut poetry collection by an award-winning fiction writer, the longing for God and the poignancy of family life echo each other’s music. The traditional forms of sonnet, sestina, and villanelle punctuate more modern verse forms, this combination being only one of the strands binding past and present. Many of these poems may be read as confessions—of joy, of hurtfulness given or received, of awe at the inescapable reality of love. This volume comprises spiritual writing that remains firmly of this world, part apostasy, part song, reaching out for meaning from both the shifting landscape of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay and the interior places of the heart.

Our Purpose in Speaking (Wheelbarrow Books)

Literature & Fiction

Orem, William

Poetry

In The Infinity Room the reader will find polished, precise poems that are built around the author’s experiences of touring Nevada’s atomic bomb test sites, the Chernobyl disaster site, and Oak Ridge, as well as living for decades near Three Mile Island. These iconic landmarks of the threat of nuclear technology become more than talking points as they provide grounding for narratives of faith and skepticism from multiple viewpoints that employ science, religion, history, myth, politics, and popular culture, including a piece about the author’s experience as a student at Kent State at the time of the National Guard shooting. The poems here are tightly controlled but electric, dark yet vibrant with love and longing, and packed with memorable characters and places that are presented through a singular, lyrical voice that connects us to what it means to be human.

The Infinity Room (Wheelbarrow Books)

Fincke, Gary

Nothing is off-limits in this ultimately American text. Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security attempts to position large academic ideas in shared public spaces, often discovering the absurdity and humor in making such connections. The poems herein take the dizzying influences affecting the post-postmodern American and make poetry of it all, skipping whimsically from the Pixies to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” from the Confederate flag to unisex public toilets, from eggplant emojis to Vladimir Putin stealing Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring. While the volume gives the reader a specific sense of voice and character, it also allows for identification with the author’s collected observations, all the while providing a succinct feel for the twenty-first-century American zeitgeist.

Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security (Wheelbarrow Books)

JOHNSON, Brad

In a stunning and visceral debut, Noah Davis ushers in a new era of poems from the Alleghenyregion of Appalachia. In chronicling the river valley's human and more-than-human worlds through acts of modern myth making, Davis expands the scope of contemporary American poetry. This soulful meditation on a neglected region of America reveals a legacy of lingering violence to land and animal alike. In striking stories and scenes, Davis portrays the spiritual cost of deep poverty, the necessity to ask for forgiveness, and the joy in praising the beauty still found in the steep hollows. These poems will cling to you like water on the soles of your boots.

Of This River (Wheelbarrow Books)

Davis, Noah

Selected by Mark Doty for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize In Not For Luck, Derek Sheffield ushers us into the beauty and grace that comes from giving attention to the interconnections that make up our lives. In particular, these poems explore a father's relationship with his daughters, which is rooted in place and time. There is tenderness and an abiding ecological consciousness, but also loss and heartache, especially about environmental degradation. We are invited to listen to the languages of other beings. Through encounters with a herd of deer, a circle of salmon in a mountain creek, two bears on a stretch of coast, a river otter, and a shiny-eyed wood rat, these poems offer moments of wonder that celebrate our place as one species among many on our only earth.

Not For Luck (Wheelbarrow Books)

Sheffield, Derek

The first-ever poetry book set on a llama farm, Daniel Lassell's debut collection, Spit, examines the roles we play in the act of belonging. It is a portrait of a boy living on a farm populated with chickens sung to sleep by lullaby,&nbsp; captive wolves next door that attack a child, and a herd of llamas learning to survive despite coyotes and a chaotic family. The collection in part explores the role of the body in health and illness and one's treatment of the earth and others. A theme of spirituality also weaves throughout the collection as the speaker treks into adulthood, yearning for peace amid the decline of his parents' marriage. Driven by a "wish to visit / some landless landscape," the&nbsp; speaker eventually leaves his&nbsp;family's farm, only to find that return is impossible. After losing the farm and the llama herd to his parents' divorce, the speaker wrestles with the role of presence as it relates to healing, remarking, "I wish enough, / to have only // these memories I have." Unflinching at every turn, the collection pushes the boundaries of "home" to arrive upon new meaning, definition, and purpose.

Spit (Wheelbarrow Books)

Lassell, Daniel

Product Description A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the of Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon’s prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner with Hades, these are haunting poems of loss and unearthing, equally bold, personal, and tender. From “Dinner with Hades”: He shows me a birthday cake, candled. My name is written in pomegranate seeds. It’s like vertigo. Just before he seeks to devour, he halts to birdsong— sound of goldfinch, bluebird, hawk, lilting of sparrows. Of whippoorwill and dove. Wings flap, so many wings, a cool breeze as leaves unfurl into a once forgotten green and I am back on earth, held in my mother’s arms. Review In Late Self-Portraits Mary Morris writes of bodily experiences that cannot ultimately be arrested. Celestial and earthly, peeling back ordinary conceptions of time and space, her poems reach from imagining the interior of the body to experiences of disembodiment. Here, the body is a directional signal pointing outward beyond itself. Her overarching visions, attuned to marvels, create an almost otherworldly sheen in these questing, exacting, deeply realized poems that are radiantly elegant and—in the best sense—unsettling.—Lee Upton, author of Visitations: Stories and Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the BottlesIn the spirit of the great painter Artemisia Gentileschi, the poet Mary Morris, in her luminous Late Self-Portraits, takes on medicine and illness, aging and death, art and spirituality, releasing from the darkness a profound light of transcendence and revelation. She reconciles the body that always betrays us, with the wholeness of nature and our place in it, energy temporal in forms but eternal in belonging. Through masterfully crafted and emotionally complex poems, many of them portraits of herself through the lens of strong women in history, like Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman, and the deconstruction of great men, like Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Morris brings together the soul and physical body into one great mural of the self in cohesion with others, the universe, and the divine.—Heathen (Heather Derr-Smith), author of ThrustLate Self-Portraits is a ravishing memento mori by a poet in whose skilled hands death, lost love, even her own epileptic seizures become occasions for wonder and rhapsody. Mary Morris refuses a faith that sanctifies guilt and renunciation, conjuring instead a new religion where “bloody icons” are replaced by sunlit mountain temples. She is a poet who sings in the pyre. Like her beloved Joan of Arc, she is “aflame for our world.”—Frank Paino, author of Obscura About the Author MARY MORRIS is the author of two previous books of poetry, Enter Water, Swimmer and Dear October, and is a recipient of the Rita Dove Award (2008), Western Humanities Review’s Mountain West Writers’ Prize (2019), the New Mexico Discovery Award (2005), and the National Federation of Press Women’s National Communications Contest Award (2021), and is a finalist for the 2021 International Book Awards.

Late Self-Portraits (Wheelbarrow Books)

Morris, Mary

This collection chronicles coming of age as a queer millennial in a twenty-first century&nbsp;America defined by the internet, climate crisis, and a growing disconnection that the poems within work to resist. Here, everyone and everything serves as a potential reflection for&nbsp;something larger than the poet can understand: an unknown debit card thief, the cartoon teacher Ms. Frizzle, The Weather Channel, an RV park, a dead poet. These poems seek to&nbsp;make something of the spaces between and reach toward a sense of the ecstatic just beyond. They are poems of imagination and vision that strive to look rather than look away,&nbsp;that attempt to capture a nebulous feeling before it is gone for good. Swan Hammer is an&nbsp;instructor's guide to connection-making, of seeing and then seeing again, in ways that have&nbsp;been redefined in the age of the internet. Here is one poet's wandering relationship to their&nbsp;own sense of what it is to be alive and queer at a time when there is so much on the brink of&nbsp;disappearing--and what a queer experience it is.

Swan Hammer: An Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors (Wheelbarrow Books)

Graber, Maggie

Ice Hours (Wheelbarrow Books)

Boyer, Marion Starling

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