Eclipsings
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

Eclipsings depicts a variety of eclipses both emotional and physical. Though they are sometimes dire, their darkness is offset by hope and love and joy.”

Making a Stand
Meditations by Joe Hall

A collection of meditations on farm life, family, and the joys of nature by a man who has spent his life working a tract of land farmed for generations by his forebears.

Transformings
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

This newest poetry collection focuses on a variety of transformations occurring in both personal and public life. The poems avoid obscurity and welcome the reader to engage in poetic conversation, looking for hope in even the most desperate moments and finding much joy in life.

The Prevalence of Mystery
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

This late-life book of poems is a tribute to the author’s recently deceased wife and to the values of holding fast, following the lead of spiritual mentors, and celebrating the natural world. Behind it all is the prevalence of mystery.

A Momentary Stay
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

While not shirking from the worst the modern world throws against us with its violence, its wars, and its racism, these poems offer a stay against the personal, political, and environmental perils that afflict us in these desperate times.

Love in a Time of Lament: An Alzheimer’s Memoir
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

A collection of poems focused on the Alzheimer’s battle and eventual demise of the author’s belovèd wife, revealing that the farther away dementia takes her, the closer his bond with her becomes.

At the Edge
Poems by Gail Moran Slater

In her new book, the poet finds many fulfilling consolations for the sadness at its heart: consolations of the natural world, works of art, mid-life love, and the joys of family.

Armed to the Teeth
Poems by Ellen Hirning Schmidt

The poet faces life's perils courageously, and being armed with the powers of family, the natural world, and a strong heart full of love, emerges victorious.

What Glues Us Together
Poems by Nancy Manning

The poet pulls no punches, depicting the worst that life can hurl, both personally and globally, but she prevails against all odds through the powers of love, family, and the natural world.

Seventy-Two Labors
Poems by Susan KõDõ Efird

Seventy-Two Labors could easily be titled Seventy-Two Astonishments. In it, poet and Zen teacher Susan KõDõ Efird marshals the ordinary and extraordinary. Humor and gratitude, shattered innocence and reverence infuse the whole.

Celestial Conversations
Poems by Barbara DiMauro

These are poems of illumination, appreciation and consolation found in the small moments of life sustained by love of the natural world.

The Habit of Hope
Poems by Dawn E. Morrow

This is a stunning poetry collection in which the poet wears the habit of hope to fend off the assaults of the world. In the book’s insistence on the power of love we find faith and hope. 

Navigating the Poet’s Sky
Poems by Karen J. Ciosek

How fortunate we are to encounter a book devoted exclusively to birds!

another beginning
poems by Catlin Blackburn

These are painful and joyful poems of emotional distress and reintegration.

Enough Like Bone to Build On
poems by Catherine DeNunzio

The poems in this life-affirming and joyful book look the worst squarely in the face and rise above it into a realm of beauty and love.

Wildcat on the Shoreline
poems by Lee A. Jacobus

While not discounting life’s perils, these poems are essentially songs of praise for nature, literature, loved ones, and distant places. Their eloquence and intelligence are a joy.

I’ll Take New Haven: Tales of Discovery and Rejuvenation
essays by Lary Bloom

Lary Bloom's I'll Take New Haven is a sprightly collection of essays depicting the author's transition from a suburban community to total immersion in New Haven, CT.

Pastoral Suite
Poems by John Muro

These new poems by John Muro are wide-ranging and dynamic in their vivid portrayals of the natural world from ocean to garden and in their focus on many of life’s joys and sorrows.

The Unspoken of our Days
Poems by Nancy Manning

These poems describe the author's troubled childhood and love of her own child, travels, relationships, love of nature, and criticism of environmental and political disasters.

The Wages of Love
Poems by Christie Max Williams

Winner of the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry, The Wages of Love ranges widely, delving into the mysteries of love, the complexities of relationship, the joy of family and parenting, and the splendor of the natural world.

36 Views of Fuji
Poems by Kenton Wing Robinson

Robinson’s subject is love in all of its many forms: loves won, lost, blessed, and cursed; love, too, of friends, family, and this Earth.

The Rounding
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

These new poems face down the horrors of 2020-2021, focusing on ways to ride out the storm, finding salvation in the natural world, the arts, and care for others.

Wild Earth
Poems by Cindy Ellen Hill

The gorgeous sonnets in this book embrace all of God’s creation and are as explosive in content as they are formal in structure.

Little Lives
Poems by Martha Readyoff

There is magic in these vivid and often fanciful poems, with their passionate concern for all that is vulnerable in the world, the little lives of children and all natural creatures

Ribbons of Light
Poems by Lois Mathieu

These poems take us past hardship and loss into a world where redemption and joy spread brilliant ribbons of light across the landscape of life.

The Sixth Sense of Loss
& Poems of Restoration by Betsy Hughes

The Sixth Sense of Loss depicts not only terrible grief at the loss of a spouse but also the restorative powers of the heart and the world of nature.

Mapping a Life
Poems by Susan T. Moss

In Mapping a Life, Susan Moss travels widely and passionately through man-made and natural terrain and through realms of the heart. In poems whose language is vigorous and vivid, she takes us with her every inch of the way.

Not Always Sorrow
Poems by Barbara DiMauro

The poems in Not Always Sorrow are personal meditations, political commentary, dream sequences, or journeys into the ways of love. Always the poems are both accessible and original, moving from joy to sorrow and back to joy.

Virtual Vacation
Photographs and Haiku by Mary Sullivan

This is a stunning collection of color photos from natural settings around the world, each with a haiku relating to it.

The Shearing
Laura Altshul

Laura Altshul's The Shearing is a brave book. The eloquent poems in the book face Loss of all sorts head on, but through the good offices of Love, Courage, and the grace of Nature the message of the book is an uplifting one offering hope in a time of trouble.

Emerging Views: Illuminations in Poetry and Painting
Marye Gail Harrison

Combining the author's poetry and painting, the book ranges from images and poems inspired by the Hubble Telescope to those arising from intimate moments and the beauty of nature. The voice is that of a philosopher.

Eleven Sundry Flowers
Poems by Frank Mundo with illustrations by Keith Draws

A lyrical collection of sonnets written as love offerings over a period of eleven days and illuminated with gorgeous illustrations.

My Oarsman
Poems by Geri Radacsi

The book describes the many joys of marital love interrupted by the author’s anguish dealing courageously with her husband's battle with cancer, and her grief at his death.

Mianus Village
Poems by Jack T. Scully

These are nostalgic and vivid poems depicting the trials and triumphs of growing up in a VA housing project beside Connecticut’s Mianus River in the wake of World War II. 

Animalian
Poems by Norah Pollard

Norah Pollard’s poems are dazzling in their honesty, their vigor, and their eloquent, always scrutable language. They will make their readers more alive.

Shall We Dance?
Poems by Susan K. Hagen

These “Poems of Desire and Meditation” are a treat for the heart and the mind. They are as lush as they are philosophical.

A House of Many Rooms
Poems by Barry L. Zaret

A House of Many Rooms is a glittering memory palace filled with treasures that capture, in splendid poetic words and images, “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Solos: One Hundred Poems, 2017-2020
New poems by Al Basile

Al Basile’s poems have style, joy, and — above all — verve.

Casting
Poems by Robert Claps

Robert Claps has the earned wisdom to find consolation in the small moments, the small victories that sustain us as we savor what we can while we can.

Impaired: The Continuing Crisis for Vietnam Veterans
Poems by Michael f. Lepore

Michael F. Lepore deploys his poetic gifts in the service of chronicling the inexorable wreckage, emotional and physical, wrought by the Vietnam War, and by extension, by all wars.

Postcards Fron Montana
Photographs and Poems by Brooke Herter James

This beautiful hard cover gift book contains gorgeous color photos of Montana scenes, along with vivid poems based on the photos

Light on Water
Poems by John Gearen

Here are ideas that range widely: the experiences not of one life but of generations examined with appealing insight and unerring, spartan clarity.

Joe the Body Pro
Poems by John Gearen

John Gearen has a great ear.  He nails the unique voice of Joe the Body Pro — irreverent, wise, loyal, funny, moving.  Getting to know Joe is a delight.

The Rail Stop at Wassaic
Poems by Don Barkin

Like the poet’s previous book, this new volume is “both domestic and fierce, accessible and resonant."

In the Lilac Hour
Poems by John Muro

These deft and heartfelt poems trace our connections and disconnections to nature, community, and family while amplifying and celebrating life. 

The Gate
Poems by Ann Marie Gearen

Poetry for the soul and senses, Ann Gearen’s The Gate is a collection that is accessible in its empathetic treatments of love, loss, and witness, but is multi-layered as well.

Coming Through
New Poems, 2019-2020, by Rennie McQuilkin

These poems comprise the fourth volume in a series of books whose poems are presented in chronological order. This new collection looks for ways to prevail despite the multiple crises we face.

I Hear Their Voices Singing
Poems New & Selected by Cortney Davis

Cortney Davis’ vocation as a poet has allowed her to take liminal moments, or hours, with sick and dying patients and turn them into poems written with fearlessness, clarity, and compassion.

On the Edge
Poems by Nancy Mattoon Kline

Nancy Kline’s poems speak to us compellingly of time, nature, love, and loss.  Often in traditional poetic forms, they ring all the changes from grief to delight to unexpected whimsy.

Moon Dance
Island poems by Susan Deborah King

Susan King brings an array of emotions to her verse chronicle of Great Cranberry Island, “this beautiful complicated place.” The people, places, and events she describes are extraordinarily vivid and depicted with a rare level of truthfulness and deep humanity.

The Order of Things
new & selected poems by Katharine Carle

The Order of Things weaves Katharine’s wisdom with her tenderness and reverence for memories as touching as they are wise. These poems, both new and selected from earlier books, are both heartbreaking and joyous.

Even Here
Poems by Michael Cervas

Each poem in this book is a rigorous act of examining a life that has been both singular and ordinary.  Honesty, intelligence, plain-spoken brilliance, and a generous heart have been harnessed to poems we readers will wish to read again and again. 

Simple Absence
Poems by Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely

Prepare yourself for a wild, even shocking ride through the poems and meditations of this roller coaster of a book depicting a multitude of moods and truths. Seldom has a poet pulled so few punches or mixed such whimsy and wit with such ultimate honesty. .

Reportings
Poems by Tom Gannon

These are vivid, highly readable poems introducing you to a truly Renaissance man.

Footnotes
Poems by Douglas Hyde

It is hard to say which calls to the poet more keenly: the details and wildness of the natural world or the workings of the heart as it reaches its core truth that “love is not loss.” This collection is an investigation of both landscapes.

Bagful of Bags
Poems by Paul Scollan

We rarely see poetry like this any more: gritty, direct, burdened by what’s genuine, what’s human, what counts.

Looking Out
Poems by Laura Altshul

Laura Altshul views the world with a discerning eye, finding art and metaphor in the sublime as well as in the everyday world.

Seabury Seasons
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

The author describes his new book as “A Book of Days Celebrating Local Heroes, Customs and Habitations at Seabury Life,” the retirement community where he now lives and works. Without overlooking its dark side, he focuses on the joy that makes old age in some ways the best of times.

Forest Bathing: Shinrin-Yoku
Poems by Betsy Hughes

The sonnets of Betsy Hughes take us all over the world, from antiquity to now, from the horrors of mass shootings to the serenity of a forest.

Spring Took the Long Way Around
Poems by Brooke Herter James

This is a beautiful collection, each poem resonant with the strum of country life. These are poems of gentle reverence, skirting on the “dark edges of... wildness,” the awareness of shadow giving each moment depth.

Strange Birds
Poems by Vicor Altshul

Strange Birds is a marvelous book of poems. The author is not afraid to offer up his own vulnerabilities so that the reader may gain insight into the human condition.

The Readiness
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, Rennie McQuilkin celebrates the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds.

The Orchard House
Poems by Richard Shaw

The Orchard House is a transcendent book replete with lyric poems not just regarding the human interface with nature but something infinitely more.

Fire in the Hand
Poems by Karen Torop

Torop’s poems tell us that we must pause, look beyond habit, in order to love the world in all its glorious contradictions. This is a stunning debut collection.

Lifelines
Poems by Linda Spock

Linda Spock’s gracious gathering of poems offers each of us a lifeline.  Here, in the midst of life’s challenges, much joyful solace is found. 

Afterword
Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

Selections from the daily poems written by CT Poet Laureate McQuilkin during 2016 and 2017.  They reflect a joyous gloaming in his late life, offering praise more often than disparagement and spiced with wit.

Lizard Season
Poems by Norah Pollard

The stories contained in these new poems are so consistently and impressively compelling, and so wonderful in their narrative and emotional range, as to achieve a worldly, universal appeal and power.

How I Learned To Be White
Poems by Tricia Knoll

This book describes how the author’s ancestry, education, childhood and work experiences contributed to her understanding and condemnation of white privilege in a world where discrimination runs rampant.

Old is Not a Four-Letter Word
Poems by Alexandrina Sergio

The poems in Alexandrina Sergio's Old Is Not a Four-Letter Word are as expansive of heart as they are witty and energetic.

Snow Raining on Glass
Poems by Lois Mathieu

By turns joyful, melancholy, angry, and hopeful, these are honest, vivid, sensual poems that are revelatory and replete with startling images.

Ode to Numbers
Poems by Sarah Glaz

A fascinating mixture of poetry and mathematics in which each bespeaks the other. This is as passionate a book as it is erudite. Sarah Glaz moves naturally between the visceral world of strong emotions and the mathematical world of Commutative Rings.

Bodies Passing
Poems by Laura Altshul

This deft foray into the terrors and joys that are the essence of human experience is a gift to those hungering for honesty and compassion in a complex world. Here, zest and energy are joined to high intelligence and rare humanity.  

Hope Is a Small Barn
Poems by Gregory LeStage

These are poems that refuse to accept easy answers to the all-important issues with which they deal but nevertheless harbor an essential optimism concerning the human condition.

When You Can’t Do Any More
Poems by Barry L. Zaret

Barry L. Zaret's second poetry collection is again informed by his work as a cardiologist, his enormously generous spirit, his love of the arts, and his passion for the natural world.

North of Eden
New & Collected Poems by Rennie McQuilkin

This is the author’s 15th poetry collection. Containing his best work from previous books, it demonstrates his love of the natural world and rebuttal of the worst life can throw
at us.

Dogs
“Dog-poems” by Rennie McQuilkin with drawings by Don Nace

This is a poet’s and artist’s answer to Cats. The dogs of Dogs (each whimsically illustrated) sing many "Songs of Myself." But are these truly dogs, or all of us in disguise?

Close But Not Touching
Poems by Jean Sands

This posthumous collection of poems written after the publication of Gandy Dancing is wonderfully various, humane, and uninhibited.

Dancing in Eurynome’s Shoes
Poems by James B. Mele

These poems are informed by a passion for the wild places and things of the world as well as high intelligence and appreciation of cultural history.  James Mele is a purely American poet unknown for far too long.

Ellen Rachlin’s new book is intriguing, ingenious, and deftly wrought, a delight to the mind and the spirit.

The sense of loss informing the elegies in Allen West’s new book is countered by the tenderness they express, the beauty of their lines, and the resilience with which the poet continues to sing, keeping night at bay. 

These beautifully delicate poems are informed by a deftly conveyed sense of loss, but they also contain moments of delicious wit and sudden, unexpected illuminations of joyful light. They make us look more closely.

These are beautifully wrought poems by a poet-musician whose music rings clearly in every line and whose energy informs his verse so fully that it all but leaps off the page.

Writing in a style that is straightforward and conversational, with an eye that captures every nuance and with a wit that doesn’t suffer foolishness, “Cora Ekwurtzel has written extraordinary poems about the metaphysics of ordinary life.”

Consisting of the author’s journal entries and later commentary, this is a harrowing report on people and conditions in 1938 Germany just prior to World War II, when the author spent a summer there, traveling on bicycle and foot.

This is a book that rings all the changes: from nostalgia to satire, from melancholy to joy, from the personal to the ekphrastic, from the traditional to the whimsical. It is as various and as fascinating as life itself.

This photo-illustrated book is in the great tradition of the odyssey, as presented by authors from Steinbeck to Kerouac. In their cross-country bicycle trek, the author and her sister endure all sorts of hardships and see both the best and the worst of the U.S.

Both domestic and fierce, accessible and resonant, Houses includes many poems that have the audacity to follow traditional patterns of rhyme and meter. Published in many of the country’s leading literary journals, these are poems you won’t want to miss.

Showing how the cauldron of grief and despair can produce hard-earned joy wrought on the anvil of courage and faith, the poet has forged a book to inspire all who yearn to move past seemingly insurmountable losses.

In their lively combination of wit and wisdom, these poems ring every change from jubilation to grief, with love for all of creation as an underlying continuum.

How rich an experience it is to share the superbly presented jubilations, griefs, thrills and shocks of recognition in Ina Anderson’s journey into the space of a life lived to the hilt.

This is a sprightly excursion through life's foibles and joys, the dark and light of the world in which the author lives with extraordinary verve, insight, and exuberance.

By focusing on the history of the First Congregational Church in Old Lyme, CT, Marilyn Nelson presents not only ecclesiastical history but also a report on slavery and bigotry in a presumably enlightened part of the Union. Her dismay is leavened by generosity of spirit.

These poems pull no punches, delineating graphically life’s difficulties and losses but also savoring its saving graces. Delicious leavenings of humor and joie de vivre permeate this new book by an author who has lived life to the hilt.

“This may be the most unusual and entertaining Lives of the Saints ever written.” – Eamon Grennan.

This is a devastating and inspiring book that depicts the depths to which the human spirit can descend but also exalts the courage and humanity of that spirit in the reactions of many to the Salem witch hunt of 1692.

Opposites cohabit happily in the poems of Just Above the Bone: the wild and the civilized, sorrow and joy, intellect and sensuality. Reading this cornucopia of poetry will leave you more aware, more in love with all the world has to offer.

Though death is a constant and joy hard-earned in these poems, the joy they present is so gorgeous that we leave them as uplifted as the mountains and western expanses that inform this remarkable book.

Margaret Rogers grew up in a large family in a small town on a prairie in Minnesota, lively and free-spirited. But in high school, God called her, and in 1963 she entered a convent to become Sister Zoë. And then she was called again. This is her story.

These poems juxtapose opposites in startling ways: joy and sorrow, the new world of Connecticut and the old world of India, the life of a renowned pathologist and the life of a poet. The uncertainty sometimes described in the poems is belied by the self-assurance of their lines. Such clear, vivid work is a joy.

These are courageous, finely wrought poems expressing anguish, love, and hope following the loss of a husband after many years of blessed marriage. They are imbued with faith in the natural world and belief in the importance of family.

The early poems in Ankle Deep and Drowning express a sense of loss and yearning but are dispelled by a breakthrough of “the goodness of it all.” In the end, the poems in this exhilarating volume affirm the power of love and the “glorious abundance” of things.

In this new book, a fascinating foray into medical and scientific lore is combined with a highly charged, moving series of elegies which morph toward poems offering ways of prevailing over grief.

Extremes of feeling permeate these poems, which run the gamut from sheer grief to pure joy. Happily, they move out of the darkness and into the light of full blown love.

The poems in this fine first book balance deftly on a high wire stretched between outlawing and “inlawing,” between distrust of establishmentarianism and a passionate defense of all those treated unfairly by circumstance.

These poems ring all the changes, all the joys and sorrows of a life lived to the hilt. We are gifted with love poems, praise poems, ekphrastic poems and moving elegies. They are formal, they are free; they are very Italian, they are entirely American. They are a blessing.

These poems vividly depict a lowland place and its people in the farthest northwest corner of the country. As Kevin Craft writes, “The poems are informed by the determined if contested optimism of someone who knows the ground she walks on and its potential to yield both bounty and treachery.”

If you are not bi, you may want to be when you finish these beautifully bi-attitudinal poems ranging from battle frenzy (“ríastrad”) to gentleness, from hurt to courage, horror to humor, disillusion to hope for a better world.

The poet sees clearly the grime, the grief and danger of the world, but her vision is essentially a redemptive, celebratory one. Her poems are informed by moments of reunion and by childhood joys. We are offered epiphanies that find beauty in the midst of turmoil.

Humanity, divinity, and wit underlie these “nature poems,” which belie the term, since their energy and occasional descents into darkness are not common in poems about the beings of wood and field the poet celebrates, along with friends living in harmony with nature. This is a field guide for life we should all carry with us.

Having lived many lives, Tom Gannon sees with the eyes of a priest, journalist, attorney, and artist. He is a Renaissance poet journeying through a world that fascinates, appalls, and delights him. His long-awaited first book is rich in variety, wit, and passion.

Not shirking the heart of darkness, Michael Cervas still glories in ecstatic moments such as the vision of a "plain white van"� on the Mass. Pike advertising 1-800-RENEWAL. He celebrates renewals of all kinds, his words aptly joined by gorgeous lotus photographs by Jane Tomasello Toner.

Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the poet’s hometown stands for more than itself. In all their vivid specificity, its people and places achieve mythical dimensions, though always in down-to-earth language. The same is true of all the unsung heroes in this set of entirely American praise songs, which depict the pain and joy of life in unvarnished terms.

In a series of exceptionally honest, revealing, emotionally charged poems, we are taken from the joyful though sometimes troubled childhood of a young German girl through difficult trials as an adult and finally on to a balanced life combining writing, family and friends.

Honest, concise, witty, and heart-felt, these poems are as intelligent as they are humane. They move from delight through loss and grief, arriving in the end at a lovely raison d'etre.

In these poems, we experience a chronicle of loss, deeply moving in its honesty and courage. Yet the poet continually delights in the sensory experiences of life, which leads naturally to poems of quiet joy and acceptance.

What a courageous, sad, joyful, honest, and passionate book this is! The poet is Everyman in his experience of childhood's joys and dismays, young manhood's delights and tragedies, and the saving grace of love amidst the beauties of the natural world.

The poetic vignettes in this memoir of a warrior are the work of a man who fought and bled for his country, a country that betrayed him but which he continues to love as he loves his fellow marines, though he suffers from PTSD, which has made his life a bunker to defend against the continuing onslaughts of an invisible enemy.

These poems burst with love—for mountain and lake, for the joys and mysteries of childhood and early love, for friends and family members lost and for those who sustain the poet in his later years: children, grandchildren, and most of all the poet’s wife of many years, to whom the book is dedicated.

In this terrifying, beautifully written, entirely unconventional history in verse, the senseless and brutal murder of the author’s beloved grandmother is depicted from many perspectives, sparing no one but also being entirely fair to the perpetrators and presenting a loving tribute to the author’s namesake.

Mims Butterworth tells of friendships with felons of several stripes, friendships based on her belief that felons share the hopes and fears common to all humanity. She makes a compelling case for reforms in our judicial system, informed in part by observation of prison systems in Central America, which she visited often.

These are poems culled from a life passionately lived. Their wisdom comes from a man who sees clearly the atrocities life visits upon us and still has faith and philosophical resolve enough to call life the greatest show on earth. Curt Plaskon sings praise songs in the face of disaster. Here, love is stronger than its Adversary.

Joyful and anguished, witty and lyrical, passionate and philosophical, this second book is a romp, a descent into the Abyss, a flight into song, an outcry against the willful ways of the world, and a lover’s shout-out. Always, these poems have the utter honesty of one who knows by heart the depths and dancings of the human spirit.

The angels in this newest book by Lana Orphanides are both worldly and otherworldly: lovers, newborns and nereids as well as visitors from another sphere. The delights of “heavy, soft bellied earth,” with its sensual intoxications and local habitations are set against the omnipresence of an extraterrestrial dimension. Both are “what give the heart ease” in a book that is a universal celebration.

In this generous collection of verse from a richly varied lifetime, Dr. Giosa looks facts squarely in the face, accepting with good grace and wit the brevity of life and primacy of nature, but also praising the glories of our brief residence on Earth. In poems both philosophical and visceral, richly allusive and down to earth, he values love above all else, decries the folly of egoism, and calls on us to seize the joys of the day.

In her third book, Katharine Carle presents us poems by turns raucous and religious, witty and lyrical, iconoclastic and philosophical. A tomboy become a devoted mother, she looks back to the past nostalgically but forges into her 85th year with “a joy, an exulting.” A continuing undercurrent in the book is the belief that though “we’re made of different colors…no one [is] below, no one above.”

In this much-awaited first book, we are rewarded with poems which refuse to flinch at life’s inevitable disruptions but also revel in its manifold joys. How splendid to find such juxtaposition of honesty and empathy, head and heart, wit and sentiment, philosophy and sensuality!

In these beautifully crafted and deeply felt poems, Susan Moss tells of much that has been lost but also of all that remains a solace: the saving grace of memory, the world of nature, and the continuing presence of good friends, all that allows her to come in from the dark.

Despite their courageous facing of dire fact, these poems open vistas filled with childhood delight and love. While passing through an Inferno portrayed in Dantean detail, they also demonstrate the restorative powers of travel, the ocean, and wild nature. The song of joy, muted at times, always returns.

These poems take us from the tribulations and terrors of the poet’s early years through a series of losses that call forth her powers of empathy, finally arriving at “gusts and expectations of rapture.” This is indeed the record of a quickening.

The voices of the five high school poets appearing in this chapbook sparkle with fresh insights.

These posthumous poems ask questions that many are afraid to ask and express an idealist’s dismay at the world’s destruction of ideals. But they are also in love with a world the poet was about to leave. Alex Kochkin was a philosopher who loved to tango.

These poems take us on an expansive journey across ranges of emotional terrain spanning loss, love, nostalgia, and wonder. Danny Dover writes like a prospector, examining any crevice of human nature that might yield a glimpse of something rare and immutable.

If ever there was a book which is pure epiphany, this is it! We are presented with the blessings of an island where motorcars are not allowed and where forebears, family, and all manner of islanders (dogs, horses, and bats not least of all) are intensely alive, whether past or present.

As the title suggests, these poems can be witty, irreverent, lots of fun. But they can also be nostalgic and lyrical. In short, this book – one that includes translations and a good many poems inspired by fly-fishing – is a work for all seasons by a poet whose intelligence matches her poetic sensibility. And she actually rhymes!

Childhood joy, the delights of long marriage, moments of quiet reflection, the losses attendant on aging, and the life-saving gifts offered by the natural world and grandchildren—they are all here in a book that is in itself life-saving.

Seldom does a book as important as this one come along. Paul Petrie’s work is greatly admired by many of the country’s major poets and was published in leading journals and magazines, as well as in his eleven poetry collections. The work is astounding in its emotional depth, range of emotion, and variety of form.

Focusing on the twin holocausts of Multiple Sclerosis and the Final Solution of World War II, the poet shows that being doubly bereft has led to double blessing through her determination to survive and the very act of recording the past in poems that make this book such a blessing.

Joan Hofmann’s first chapbook looks loss squarely in the face but also depicts the restorative powers of the natural world in lush detail. At its heart is a hard-won joie de vivre.

In the gorgeously honest, passionate and vivid poems of The Overgrown Copse, Jane D’Arista records her lifelong search for an Eden, a home—however temporary—and the mixed blessings that come with that search. In the end, joy trumps distress.

These are the poems of a humanist who embraces all arts and sciences, one whose desire to know moves her closer to family both past and present, then expands outward to focus on the lives and work of artists and sages. Her world view excludes neither the terrors of war nor life’s manifold joys. This book is itself a manifold joy.

These brilliant poems consider life’s emotional and physical migrations. The author counters the sometime perils of such migrations with the consolations of the natural world and memories of less unpredictable times.

Like Frost, Jeanne Weston Cook has been one "acquainted with the night." But despite the sorrows darkening her book, she has been stunned by the illumination of the world’s beauty. In the end, her book is a Song of Joy.

What a generous selection from the poet’s several books written over a long writing career, including “Water Ouzel,” which received national acclaim after appearing in The New Yorker. We are fortunate to have this compilation from one of the country’s foremost poets.

These poems “ring the changes” from joy to sorrow to irony, but beneath such variety the world of nature remains a saving grace. There is a generous spirit creating the music in this most harmonious of books.

These are strong, honest poems that do not shy away from the pain life doles out, but face that pain with such philosophy, joie de vivre, and generosity of spirit that they have much to teach us.