"With a music prowess both deft and ferocious, these empathetic poems in Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment woe and terrify simultaneously. Terrible things happen in this book and it's wonderful—such is the redemptive power of poetry this exquisite."—Dean Young This heart-wrenching book examines the tensions between the harshness of violence and the beauty of everyday life. There is a discourse with the wreckage in these poems that infiltrate life after trauma and violence as it perpetuates onward, pulling us into the speaker's domain and the endless cycle of attempting to overcome—without forgetting—the past. Alessandra Lynch is also the author of Sails the Wind Left Behind and It was a terrible cloud at twilight. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. Alessandra was born on the East River and now lives with her husband and sons by a stony creek, two hackberry trees, and a magnolia trio. She teaches in Butler University's undergraduate and MFA programs.

In Lynch’s fourth collection, we carefully navigate the fine line between terror and beauty as we face palpable trauma, heartbreak, and wild astonishment through the raw and personal poems. The genuine, delicate voice works to examine who we are, after everything.

“In Surgical Wing, you will find yourself in phone booths, county fairs, fishing boats, and among ghosts. Strange birds will enter hospital waiting rooms. You will be seduced by knot-makers. You will witness illness, grief, and healing. Finally, the book itself will become the wings that steer you to a greater understanding of yourself and the world.” —Anna Silver In Surgical Wing, surrealistic poems visit an experimental hospital ward, manifesting visions of winged angels and medical tests, as we bear witness to a doctor’s’ meddling and miracles. Robertson’s poems challenge the internal and external metamorphoses of the human condition and the juxtaposition between death and life by personifying the soul through images of birds. From “You’re About to Fold a Paper Airplane”: Build evidence of air. Pull the results of your blood test from the mailbox. Fold in half: you have wings already. Abnormal? Fold again. You can’t see the inner-workings of an aircraft. And when you’re folding, you can’t study much else. Book your tumor markers a flight to Bora Bora. Vector, Victor. Clearance, Clarence. On any scrap of paper write carry. Write heavenward. Write I choose this over you. Replace this. With flying. With peregrination. Or write I can’t fear you another morning. And fold. Kristin Robertson is a native of East Tennessee, and she graduated with a PhD in creative writing from Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, Third Coast, and Verse Daily, among other journals. Kristin lives outside Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

In It was a terrible cloud at twilight, Alessandra Lynch reflects on personal, social, moral, and historical terror. These ambitious, imagistic poems move through subjects of violence and loss that are both deeply personal and elegantly public. The elegiac poems in the final section are dedicated to the poet's friend, author Lucy Grealy, whose plight might also be said to embody terror. Lynch's poems are tactile and visual, coining wordsand phrases in surprising ways. They engage in intimate conversations that are both dark and whimsical. Selected by James Richardson from a field of more than six hundred manuscripts as the winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, this is Alessandra Lynch's second collection.Piece by Piece He Went for BillFirst, his blue toe.Then, his calf up to the hipbone.He thinned to a frame.Fireflies faltered, lit intohis bony lattice, the fretted ribs, matingbetween collarbone and pelvistill the whole leg fell off and insidehe was all air and brightness and treefrogs -- (bluethroated crickets struggled through his beard,a meadow rose from the cave of his stomach) -- we tried to catch their tender bodies,their thrumming heartsthat longed to be let backinto the wild yellow grass -- no matter howrotten with dew, no matter howdarkened by rain, no matter.

"Monica Hand's me and Nina is a beautiful book by a soul survivor. In these poems she sings deep songs of violated intimacy and the hard work of repair. The poems are unsentimental, blood-red, and positively true, note for note, like the singing of Nina Simone herself. Hand has written a moving, deeply satisfying, and unforgettable book."—Elizabeth Alexander In an intimate conversation with the "High Priestess of Soul," Monica A. Hand surveys the places and moods of alienation through poems that are as musical and stylistically diverse as Nina Simone's work. Hand readily embraces a "mass hypnosis" style, putting "a spell on [us]" with her intensely passionate cries and commitment to embracing both tragedy and exuberance in these insightful poems. From "Dear Nina": I am not recession depression oppression compression crooked line broken line polka dot parking lot or spot I am a Gift from God I know that I am an un-kept solo song Monica A. Hand is a poet and book artist currently living in Harlem, New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aunt Chloe, Black Renaissance Noire, The Sow's Ear, Drunken Boat, Beyond the Frontier, African-American Poetry for the 21st Century, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry and poetry in translation from Drew University and is a founding member of Poets for Ayiti.

As Kurt Vonnegut, Indiana's most famous writer, once remarked, "Wherever you go, there is always a Hoosier doing something important there." A Flame Called Indiana features 65 writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry who have all had the pleasure of being Hoosiers at one time or another. Curated by the Indiana University Bloomington creative writing department, this diverse anthology features everything from the immigrant experience to the Indianapolis 500 to science fiction. Altogether, the work stands testament to the vibrancy and creativity of this Midwest state. An excellent gift for your favorite reader and an important resource for creative writers, A Flame Called Indiana serves as both a chronicle of where Indiana's writing is today and a beacon to those who'll take it where it's going next.

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary. Antique Book The sky was crazed with swallows. We walked in the frozen grass of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep. Trees shook down their gaudy nests. The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow. I was jealous of the river, how the light broke it, of the skein of windows where we saw ourselves. Where we walked, the ice cracked like an antique book, opening and closing. The leaves beneath it were the marbled pages. Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

Jill McDonough’s latest collection is fiercely unapologetic, transforming mundane moments into witty and provocative insights that closely examine the flaws in our quick-moving society. Using dark humor, the poems address the impermanence of life and how we should always find reasons to re-evaluate ourselves as empathetic beings over our selfish tendencies. ”Here’s Jill McDonough, Here All Night, belting out an endearing song of herself that is, as Whitman’s is, tuned in to some thrumming undercurrent of joy in all the mess that is America. The poems’ catalogue of the unwieldy stuff of domestic life ultimately insists that things are pretty good—love endures, friends come through, there’s plenty of gin. Unabashed and boisterous, McDonough’s voice also coos with gratitude and aching tenderness. A vital book in multiple senses: read it and feel more alive.” —Maggie Dietz

Recommended by Cosmopolitan, USA Today, Shondaland, & Book Riot “It’s not often that fat women feel such thorough representation of themselves not only in poetry but in any media and not only in the beautiful moments but in the sorrowful ones, ranging throughout life. James does a brilliant job of portraying this and all her themes brilliantly; highly recommended.” —Starred review by Library Journal The raw poems inside Song of My Softening studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. Poems open wide the questioning of how we express both love and pain, and how we view our bodies in society, offering themselves wholly, with sharpness and compassion.

These quiet, descriptive poems blaze with an inferno of lamenting and loving muses as a son helplessly watches his father suffer from a debilitating illness. The inquisitive voice of the speaker gently paints an emotional landscape ranging from childhood to the present, while trying to find glimpses of happiness in the imminent sorrow.