Two recent collections express documentary impulses in contemporary poetry… read more

A Stranger’s Mirror demonstrates Hacker’s continued formal mastery; she effortlessly spins one sonnet into two, then three, then seven, leaving readers always breathless for more…. read more

Celeste Gainey’s debut collection, The Gaffer, is a triumph of nouns—of people, places, things, and ideas presented to us in the most trenchant and timely ways…. read more

When I Was Straight offers a look into Wade’s “before and after:” the first half of the book tackles her life before coming out, and the second half details people’s reactions to learning that she’s a lesbian…. read more

“Observant songs of history and elegy, these poems turn our faces to what we can do with love and language, and what we can’t.”… read more

How do you sleep when the siren is your own exhaled cry: “Oh Christ” –From “Only Kissing”, by Suzanne Parker As a queer literary community, we often are tasked with the responsibility to address collective trauma: coming out, dysfunctional family dynamics, the AIDs crisis, hate crimes, suicide. The list is longer than we can imagine,… read more

“Clarke is a provocative poet who never asks permission to make her voice heard.”… read more

The demise of many long-term relationships are rife with familiar battles: the nostalgia for romantic times gone by, the gratitude for space to breathe and grow, the rage and regret of suffocations and daggered encounters, the ambivalence in moving on, and the combined reticence and joy in new beginnings. In Breaking up with Los Angeles,… read more

Ellen Bass pays witness to our small but remarkable lives, and that reverence makes her book a success…. read more

“McLane has made me appreciate the artful ways that ‘high’ and ‘low’ diction co-exist in her own work—and more than co-exist: the ways her idiosyncratic approach to poeming thrives through deft and playful juxtaposition.”… read more