A Man's Reconciliation with Nature's Cycles reads as a meditation on a man’s journey through life’s myriad challenges, and healing through becoming one with nature and its cycles. Cottingham’s muse is the family and land that raised him, and each of these poems act as a patchwork in making an overall warm and nostalgic reading experience ..read more

Nature as a Deep-Running Source of Comfort  Stephen F. Austin State University Press Nature is boundless: it covers just about everything we know. And yet, as modern technology progresses, nature has somewhat morphed into a monstrosity in our everyday lives. Many people today fear the unknown depths of the natural world and shy away from exploring it too closely. What might we be missing out on by avoiding nature in all of its pure and chaotic glory? Adam Tavel’s Green Regalia answers this question, among others. Tavel explores the more comforting aspects of nature through fresh metaphors ..read more

Growing Up in a Negatively Charged Household If coming-of-age stories are your preference, but you’re looking for a new twist on the genre, then look no further than Arisa White’s latest title  . This poetic memoir presents a modern take on growing up, from adolescence to adulthood. Arisa White’s story told through narrative poems gives readers a taste of living under an unjust set of fathers. But it’s not all doom and gloom as Arisa interjects a style of humor that complements her own sensibilities. Even though readers are meant to view this story through the perspective of a young Black ..read more

For the Soft Rage Inside Us All Carefully balancing lyric poem conventions with a bold delineation of human emotion, Jennifer Soong plays with different aesthetic forms in her most recently released collection, . Soong explores a variety of poetic compositions–it is a project of the mind, a submittance to raw emotions in exchange for a curious, but risqué, visual sorting of thoughts ..read more

The Mental Deterioration of a Tired Character Archetype Katya Zinn’s first published full-length collection of stories, essays, and poems, titled is an extreme exercise in examining the damage done to women by capitalism, social constructs, neurodivergence, and the patriarchy—to name a few.  Zinn is hardly the first woman to notice that gender—and the stereotypes it forces people to contend with—can have a tragic impact on females. Women, after all, are to be sexually assaulted, have undiagnosed mental illnesses, and be victims of intimate partner violence. Zinn’s collection, which is bro ..read more

, the most recent chapbook from poet and essayist Dani Putney, opens with this dedication. Simple and effective, they give no other preface before diving into 20-some pages of raw, emotional poetry where they break down their own mixed-race heritage, the history of their parents, and tear into colonialism with sharpened teeth. While runs rife with various  themes about identity and family, there is one through-line that can be felt in each and every one of these poems ..read more