A refreshing book, I thought – a collection of short stories that this reviewer started from the beginning rather than picking and choosing which story to read next, based on the title. The titles are intriguing and the tone of several stories is not exactly threatening or scary but placed me back in my childhood as I reminisced the feelings and thoughts I once had.

Diane Thiel’s third collection of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, comes after an interlude during which the poet devoted her energies to a travel memoir (The White Horse) and the translation of contemporary Greek fiction. Her first two collections (Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies) garnered acclaim, including the Nicholas Roerich Award, for their intelligence, wit, wordplay, and attention to form.

The evolution of blank verse from Milton to Wordsworth, via Cowper, was not solely a change in diction and subject matter. Even as classical and biblical themes were displaced by a sense of personal mythos—and even while plain speech triumphed over grammatical inversions—so, too, was there a recalibration of meter. At least as riveting as Milton’s engagement with Shakespearean blank verse, Wordsworth’s conduct of the Miltonic line took it into tranquil waters, where fewer metrical irregularities could obstruct a clear view to the bottom.

A POET KNOWN for his narratives, like Ludlow, the acclaimed historical-novel-in-verse turned opera, David Mason curates the archipelago of intensely satisfying lyric poems in Pacific Light with the skill of a consummate storyteller. His imaginative sweep is evident in “The Air in Tasmania,” set in his adopted home of Australia, where “the land / takes flying lessons from the air / and the air’s great cleanser, the sea,” and where we traverse “from person to bird and back,” but it’s the details that matter. The collection is rich in these details, providing readers with a definite sense of place, yet at the same time, like the birds of the air, we are forever in flux.

Koertge inhabits – and endows – his various subjects with insight and humour, dealing out poems in the voices of car crash dummies, Aphrodite, Mickey Mouse, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Bride of Frankenstein, among others.

All this sounds as if the collection is a laugh-a-minute, superficial thing. It’s not. It is funny, yes, but also affectionate, quirky, surreal, and occasionally pretty dark.

“Paired with artist Patricia Wakida’s haunting illustrations, the book’s rich, lyrical language evokes both cultural eloquence and California’s seasonal beauty. Poignant and reflective, Secret Harvests is a family saga of quiet endurance and bittersweet triumphs.”

— Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews

The title of your book Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, seems to be an ironic one. The protagonist’s nostalgia is seemingly running havoc on his own life. He can’t escape revisiting the past and all the losses he has incurred: losses in love, familial losses, and the loss wrought by the AIDS epidemic.

Though Marybeth Holleman is the author of several nonfiction books centering around environmental issues and her chosen home of Alaska, tender gravity is her debut collection of poetry. Its title is drawn from its opening poem, “The Beating Heart, Minus Gravity,” wherein the speaker experiences a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, of “diving / to the blue depth” and then rising:

Dead Can Dance have long been a deeply resonant, exploratory presence on the outskirts of alternative music. Never comfortably existing in one genre or another – no surprises there, given their incomparably wide range of musical influences – they have nonetheless formed a kind of breathing and thinking space for an array of punks, goths and even metal fans who, on occasion, want and need to step outside the usual.

The American ghost, in Khalisa Rae’s narrative, is a chimera—a multi formed, multi-faceted reflection and mirror of society, of survival, and suspense, of waiting to see what the future will unfold as the collective holds its breath, hoping for that cathartic release. 

Rae shows an incredible attention to form and design, her work structured around the five elements of Fire, Wind and Water, Earth and Spirit. Each element exhibits rage, elation, fear, and hope; each a kind of presence that builds up to a full and complete understanding of housing the ghost(s) one may venerate, invoke, or hope to understand. 

Poet, essayist, and librettist David Mason grew up in Washington State, worked for many years in Colorado (where he became the state’s poet laureate) and a couple of years ago moved to Tasmania. Pacific Light, his new collection, is largely about that transition and his getting to know the landscapes and cultures of his new country.

While Mason is to be welcomed as an Australian poet (the acknowledgments here feature several Australian publications, including Australian Book Review), he is still very much an American poet, an heir to the great tradition of modern American poetry beginning with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, going on to flourish between the wars and through to the 1970s. To those who know and love that tradition (including this reviewer), it’s a great pleasure to feel some, if not all, of those poets continuing, in a sense, to speak through him – despite Mason’s clear originality.

Full of warmth, terror, and underhanded humor, If I Were the Ocean, I’d Carry You Home, Pete Hsu’s debut story collection, captures the essences of surviving in a life set adrift. Children and young people navigate a world where the presence of violence and death rear themselves in everyday places: Vegas casinos, birthday parties, church services, and sunny days at the beach. Each story is a meditation on living in a world not made for us — the pervasive fear, the adaptations, the unexpected longings. A gripping and energetic debut, Hsu’s writing beats with the naked rhythms of an unsettled human heart.