The Lioness Awakens is an illustrated work of short poems with a bite. Lauren Eden writes provocative poetry about love, sexuality, heartbreak, and feminism, combined in a creative expression of female empowerment and confidence... I was always suspicious of those Happily Ever Afters disappearing without a trace with no other pages as evidence.

Poetry. The poems in NO EDEN merge the landscapes of a rainy girlhood in the American South and the mythic world of Noah and the Flood. In these poems, a backyard stretches between a mother and daughter—the lessons of "distance tender and biblical." The Carolina yard opens to hold the fruits of Eve and Lilith, the flight of Noah's raven and dove, the small terrors of curbs and classrooms. These are poems of "a family awake through a storm," an intimate theology of floods, loss, and betrayal. But NO EDEN suggests a source of possible comfort, of slow quiet mercy and forgiveness. Perhaps there once was an Eden, even if it is no longer there. Its having possibly existed offers us hope that there may still be an Eden within, one we can somehow attain through beauty, luck and hope.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Like Tennyson's In Memoriam, Teare's book sees within a personal loss evidence of an epochal shift at work, a shift at once historical, political, and cosmological. Asserting the lover's body as a lost Eden, revisiting again and again the narrative of "the fall" its iconic imagery as well as Gnostic reinterpretations the book also records the eventual end of mourning and a return to the ecology not of myth but of the literal weather and landscape of California. The book is haunted throughout by the task of "writing the disaster" of AIDS; its lyrics link emergency to inquiry in an attempt to make a memorial "in language sufficient/to pain: not in itself the world: the thought of it."

I Used to Be the Sun is Valeria Eden’s debut collection of poetry and prose. It is a summation of her experiences with love, loss, hope, and her journey through brokenness and the healing that came from it. I Used to Be the Sun takes readers through a roller coaster of emotions that leave you on the other platform with the message that despite the ups and downs, we have survived it all.