Detailed Cultural Chronology, 20 Articles on: 1960s Mimeograph Revolution, Performance Poetry, Slam Teams, Black Poetic Society, Independents, University Writing Programs, Presses & Magazines, Poetry Web Presence, Poetry Organizations, Lists of Cleveland Area Poets, Publishers, Venues, Photos from Jim Lang, Pete Dell, and Others, 40 Poet Anthology with Statements from the Poets: From Hart Crane and Langston Hughes through d.a.levy, Daniel Thompson, Alberta Turner,to Kelly Harris, Bree, and Adam Brodsky

And So I must Imagine is about my sense of place and family heritage, my city as I reflect on its past, present and future. Families and friends, homes and second homes, and cities where one has lived most of a lifetime draw ones unique lifelines. I lengthen my lifelines everyday. [A Poem from the book] Letters There is something about opening an envelope from a friend written in hand stained with a raindrop slipped through the door so the dog will not run out barking and leaping. I sit at the table to read and reread. I know the handwriting read what I want to hear say what I think to myself, and put it in my drawer to season. I will discover new words tell you about friends who have missed you give you that recipe I said I would send plan as if tomorrow were yesterday and you lived around the corner. I will pick up the pieces that made us friends and dust them off, gently.

Celebrating the Soul of Cleveland summarizes a life in Cleveland, a city whose very identity provides sustenance and support to all who welcome it into their heart. The project started with a simple discussion. The premise of this book and for the projects described in it is: Evolution. Community Arts Leader Nina Gibans loves our collective "aha" moments, when we "get it" and roll along - excited - together. Using images, stories, poems, interviews, reflections, and reminiscences Nina weaves together a new gestalt, a whole that is often present long before the pieces are put into place. A lifetime of experiences, encounters, discussions, are the parts of this, a multi-tasking of the mind, combined until they find the parts make sense and there is a city - a community. "Here is to all of the men, women, and children who have stuck with me through my life of joyous adventures and to the support of a loving caring husband and friendly critic whose bloodstream ran in the same direction as mine." - Nina Gibans

Literary Nonfiction. "In OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE, Hsiung orchestrates a symphony of voices past, present, and prescient: time (and with it, history) compresses and expands, yielding long poetry sequences reminiscent of Myung Mi Kim's sonic terrains and C.D. Wright's documentary poetics."--Diana Khoi Nguyen "In this shifting assemblage of verse, prose poems, scenes, performance scores, charts and maps... Hsiung's speaker emerges through clashes of language and its structures--its traumatized syntax, its colonialist dictionaries, its abusive evasions, its obfuscating corporate speak, its xenophobia and its patriarchalism, and its capacity to scorch and dazzle. Out of the urgent "confrontation of language," OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE issues an utterly new invitation into and beyond language."--Lauren Russell "There's a kind of disease to speaking in Hsiung's OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE. Like it's hacking something up out of the psychic, xenophobic, (neo)colonial bullshit that is English. Like it ingested history and agitated, agitated, agitated it."--Aditi Machado "Hsiung's OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE is densely synaptic, a rewarding cascade within the confines imposed by our well-realized but half-understood systems of meaning, living, and language-making... Hsiung shows us that very connection has an impact, and every encounter changes us. To read the world through outside voices please is to feel challenged and also to feel seen. Are you ready to enter?"--Ginger Ko "OUTSIDE VOICES, PLEASE moves the mundane and intimate violence of English-as-axis-language outside, where it plays out as gash, ripple, unforgivingly abrupt verses, fragments, and something loud enough to disrupt the propriety of colonialism."--Raquel Salas Rivera

In one of his letters Hart Crane wrote, "Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio," comparing—misspelling and all—the great French poet’s cosmopolitan roots to his own more modest ones in the midwestern United States. Rebelling against the notion that his work should relate to some European school of thought, Crane defiantly asserted his freedom to be himself, a true American writer. John T. Irwin, long a passionate and brilliant critic of Crane, gives readers the first major interpretation of the poet’s work in decades. Irwin aims to show that Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge is the best twentieth-century long poem in English. Irwin convincingly argues that, compared to other long poems of the century, The Bridge is the richest and most wide-ranging in its mythic and historical resonances, the most inventive in its combination of literary and visual structures, the most subtle and compelling in its psychological underpinnings. Irwin brings a wealth of new and varied scholarship to bear on his critical reading of the work—from art history to biography to classical literature to philosophy—revealing The Bridge to be the near-perfect synthesis of American myth and history that Crane intended. Irwin contends that the most successful entryway to Crane’s notoriously difficult shorter poems is through a close reading of The Bridge. Having admirably accomplished this, Irwin analyzes Crane’s poems in White Buildings and his last poem, "The Broken Tower," through the larger context of his epic, showing how Crane, in the best of these, worked out the structures and images that were fully developed in The Bridge. Thoughtful, deliberate, and extraordinarily learned, this is the most complete and careful reading of Crane’s poetry available. Hart Crane may have lived in Cleveland, Ohio, but, as Irwin masterfully shows, his poems stand among the greatest written in the English language.

2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.In The Sunflower, Wang follows the sunflower's many dream guises-its evolving symbolism in literature, society, and the author's own dream life using a mathopoetic technique to generate poems using the Fibonacci sequence (a pattern found in the seed spirals of sunflower). The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void embodies what Wang calls oneiric poetry: a poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams. Although dreams, in psychoanalytic discourse, have been conceptualized as a window into the unconscious, Wang's poetry emphasizes the social dimension of dreams, particularly the use of dreams to index historical trauma and social processes.

Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Like nesting dolls, the poems in I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First contain scenes within scenes, inviting the reader over and over again to sharpen focus on minute details that, though small, reveal much about human perception and imagination. Angie Mazakis handles these layers of revelation with great tenderness. Her poems wander in the way that a curious mind wanders, so that even though they often end very far from where they started, they are anchored in the familiar, referring to experiences we all share: a moment of distraction in a coffee shop imagining a conversation with someone across the room, or a narrative built around the expressions of the cartoon people on the airplane seatback safety guide. I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First is a testament to the notion that whether through a cosmic or microscopic lens, “You just see one moment; you just see now.”

On May 10th 2018, Jim Gibans, Nina’s husband of more than 60 years died. In April of 2018, when Jim’s health started to decline, Nina wrote to him, she wrote him poetry. She wrote him a poem almost every day. And she read them to him. Rosepetals: towards memory… is a collection of poetry by Nina Gibans in honor and celebration of her late husband Jim Gibans.