Forty years sober when he neared the end of his life, Jack McCarthy gives the world something special in his final collection of poetry and true stories. This is his legacy to the people who saved his life. Jack McCarthy's poem "Drunks” has gone around the world on recovery websites and is one of the most popular poems on the harsh climb out of alcoholism to date.

We Will be Shelter, edited by poet and activist Andrea Gibson, is an anthology of contemporary poems that addresses issues of social justice. Unique to this anthology is its focus on creating positive social change through gorgeous, gusty poetry. Alongside and embedded in featured poems are concrete ways to address social and political issues raised. The goal of We Will be Shelter is to raise awareness, encourage critical self-reflection, and call readers to action.

A beautiful exploration of grief by one of the top selling poets in America. Anis Mojgani's In the Pockets of Small Gods explores what we do with grief, long after the initial sadness has faded from our daily lives: how we learn to carry it without holding it, how our joy and our pain touch, and at times need one another. His latest collection of poetry touches on many kinds of sorrow, from the suicide of a best friend to a broken marriage to the current political climate. Mojgani swings between the surreal imagery and direct vulnerability he is known for, all while giving the poems a direct frankness, softening whatever the weight may be. A book of leaves and petals as opposed to a book of stones, In the Pockets of Small Gods encapsulates the human experience in a way that is both deeply personal and astoundingly universal.

Lino Anunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water is layered and balanced with a dark beauty that readers will be haunted by long after putting this book down. This debut poetry collection is a faulty navigation system that guides you through the unforgiving griefwater. These poems use serene, yet haunting imagery to tackle the legacy of our pasts and the lineages we owe our lives to. He uses his experiences in loss and trauma as a black boy in America to show how long this journey towards liberation and livelihood can be. He doesn’t want you to forget the names of the things we’ve lost, the progress left to be made. Still, even though there is so much work to be done, Lino reminds us that the only way out is through. He respects his audience enough to know, that we already know how we hurt. Lino's poetry sees us and meets us where we are: proximal to the pain. He isn't crafting or crawling into the coffin– Lino is beside us, tossing his best flowers onto it. His poetry sees us in our Sunday best when we're at our worst, and reminds us that we are still alive. With poems highlighting the sea, fresh flowers, birds, and the nature around us, this collection is very much alive, and enjoying this life with you, not in front of you, but next to you.

Open Your Mouth Like A Bell is ultimately a book of love poems to poetry itself, or rather, to the gift of language and its powerful mercury. "Sincerity is the only currency I bring," writes Mindy Nettifee in her haunting poem "Election Eve," a piece composed in a state of not-knowing, just days before the 2016 U.S. election that delivered the presidency to Donald Trump. In this third full-length collection of poetry, Nettifee's powers are on the wax. The book follows a course of descent, tapping wells and constructing thresholds to underworlds. She's plumbing the dark unknown, in search of wild memory and buried trauma and the stories of the dead. She is seeking the roots of the personal, familial and cultural madness blossoming aboveground. Her studies of the unconscious mind, archetypal psychology and western mysticism are in conversation with punk chaos, feminist politics, and the evolution of kissing. The lineage of poems as spells is humming and cracking beneath the surface, asking questions about what it takes to imagine, create and enact change. Nettifee won't banish the mystery, but does not leave us in the dark. By the end of the book we are led up and full circle, reinitiated into the bright, light-filled, mundane world. Only everything has changed. Here, in the surreal real and the strange and sacred ordinary, we must use our own voices to emotionally echolocate, to sense new landscapes both inside and out. We must tell the stories it is impossible to tell. We must speak until we feel the ring of truth.

Lyrical and dark, Lauren Sanderson’s Some of the Children Were Listening begins with witness. With a voice uncommonly young and impossibly certain, these poems climb out of bed and sit on the stairs, eavesdropping on a world that wasn’t meant for them. In quick turns and tight threads comes the violence of nature, the nature of violence. Sanderson moves fluidly across the personal and the universal, venturing into a world beyond witness; where the trees fall when the girls scream and everyone’s daughter is a king.

A Constellation of Half-Lives is a collection of poems that attempt to reconcile the crisis of living on a collapsing planet with the unreasonable joy of loving and the pleasure of being alive. With careful precision and an exquisite eye for detail, poet Seema Reza examines what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and an American in a time of war. Through second-person poems she questions whether the beauty of this world outweighs its fragility and risk.

Brown is our modern-day Neruda, hailed as the king of the fast gut punch and champion of the unforgettable line. Here is a brilliant imagination working at its highest level of creative force and naked, cinematic intimacy. Winner of the 2013 Texas Book of The Year for Poetry and owner of Write Bloody Publishing, Derrick C. Brown, author of UH-OH (“...a rekindling of faith in the weird, hilarious, shocking, beautiful power of words.” Joel Lovell, The New York Times) and Born in The Year of the Butterfly Knife, elevates his newest collection of writing in Hello. It Doesn’t Matter. with short burst of dazzling light, dark humor and longer bouts of sorrow and rise. This road-traveling bard fearlessly delivers on laughter and unashamed romance.

Derrick C. Brown is a comedian, poet and storyteller. He is the winner of the 2013 Texas Book of The Year award for Poetry. He is a former Paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne and is the president of one of what Forbes and Filter Magazine call "...one of the best independent poetry presses in the country," Love is the only war with dying for. This collection contains all new work from All The Energies of Death and the best works from Derrick's previous works: Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife, Scandalabra, Strange Light, Our Poison Horse, and I Love You is Back.

Dive bars, gas stations, bedrooms, and snowfields comprise the setting as the speaker asks: What do we feel? What should we feel? Who gets to feel what? In his moving debut collection, Jackson Burgess examines heartbreak, depression, and empathy through a lens of rigorous introspection. Atrophy’s poems vary in location, mostly between Los Angeles and Iowa City, with reoccurring characters serving as touchstones, forming the book’s narrative. Much of the collection is about or directly addresses an ex-lover, Lily. In the wake of that failed relationship, Atrophy wrestles with loneliness, substance abuse, and dissociation, utilizing lists, letters, prose poems, and free verse. These poems celebrate the past while mourning it, armed with the advantage of retrospect. Prescription drugs, dog fights, dance parties, love letters, and ghosts—the world depicted is at times dark, at times humorous, but always human. Atrophy is vulnerable and cinematic, a series of manic meditations exploring what it means to love and be loved, to hurt and be hurt.