POETRY

SHOULDSPEAK DISEASE- The Shouldspeak Disease takes the reader on a harrowing journey through the glass ceiling of community peer pressure and gender silencing. In an age of purported liberation for women, there remain barriers within the supposedly progressive metro-normative model. Poet Elynn Alexander rips the curtain off these suffocating hypocrisies, showing little has changed since Betty Friedan's groundbreaking work in this field over 50 years ago.

FORCED HUSH OF QUIET- It's one to read multiple times. It is crafted with expert precision; each poem lingers in the mind with stunning and haunting imagery that creates a powerful yearning within the reader. Bell takes us on a journey of the human experience with pieces like “The sweetest honeybee in the hive,” a poem that is like consuming a piece of rich chocolate as it slowly melts on the fingertips. In contrast “I’ve given up on sunlight,” casts a familiar coldness, while at the same time letting the reader know they are not alone. This is a collection to slowly devour and savor. - Marisa Silva-Dunbar, author of "#becky"

ROADS DON'T LOVE YOU- In The Roads Don't Love You, Kendall A. Bell stays true to his voice, and the honesty and openness he has written with in the many chapbooks he has released over much time. It is a bare and vulnerable voice that is both uncompromising and free of pretense. In these poems is humanity, compassion and the need for deep connection. -Taylor Emily Copeland, author of Monarch and Caffeine kisses and long sleeves

WE SHOOT TYPEWRITERS- This book has it humor and its witticisms, but it's the wisdom found in the plainly stated and curiously observed that offers up the hard truths needed to shake the reader into awareness, and wake 'the chutzpath / to call ourselves mirrors / worthy of human reflection."—Arisa White, author of DEAR GERALD (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2015) and Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize Finalist "Paul Corman-Roberts writes poems that are tired from working two jobs, poems that are sick of moving, exhausted from gentrification; these are poems that have lived in more than their fair share of cramped studio apartments and packed all their worldly goods into milk crates ... Word by word, line by line, poem by poem, WE SHOOT TYPEWRITERS is a collection that remembers what it was like to be there, in the moment-and what it's like to have made it out alive."—Allie Marini, author of AND WHEN SHE TASTED KNOWLEDGE

SHE USED TO BE ON A MILK CARTON- Between body and spirit, place and soul, love and trauma, and logic and magic, Kailey Tedesco finds herself between two worlds in this stunning collection of debut poetry. Treading the line between the dual nature of our human spirit, this collection brings to light what our physical, and then spiritual, selves' place is in the cosmos and the realm beyond our immediate sight. Through images of Catholicism, heavenly bodies, caul births, dark magic, serpents, and God, Tedesco challenges what it means to be Woman in a world so clouded by opposing truths, illuminating herself and elevating our human experience.

LET X=X- Cleveland Wall’s collection of poetry has been described as "an illumination of all the ways we live our lives as a series of words echoing in lines of “let,” “if,” “then,” and “why” statements like those in mathematical proofs. It is a study of cause and effect, chance and unexpected."