Upon reading Milk for Gall, the debut poetry collection from Natalie Louise Tombasco and winner of the 2023 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press, I was immediately struck by the poet’s use of humor to drive poetry into deeper understanding for readers. Take these opening lines from the collection’s first poem, “Drawbridge […]

Beckoned Back by Hell-Bent Blackbirds, Broadstone Books, 2025 Spring comes to me always as a reminder—in these tense March weeks before the crocus pierces its green dart through the dirt—that time is still also other than the accumulation of countless hours, but is a circle as much as it is a line, a return to […]

It is a shame that reading calls for a silent, sitting period. It is difficult, if not impossible, to go for a walk, to talk with a friend, to identify plants, while reading. Instead, one must incorporate reading into a life’s alternating rhythms—read, walk, talk, remember, see, and so on. Each act a distinct opening […]

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal Is Chemical is a poetry collection in which generational trauma, global history, illness, and the ways in which an individual copes and medicates—literally and figuratively. Bar-Nadav’s poems rely on a variety of figures and people, ranging from the malevolent spirits in Jewish folklore, to family members, to members of the Nazi […]

Jessica Poli’s debut collection, Red Ocher, stirs with its reverential questioning of ritual, boundary, and expectation. Though the collection modestly labels itself as the red paint of a barn, Red Ocher unabashedly opens into an intimate search for the true meaning of knowledge and the missed acts of closure following a first love. Poli’s collection […]

Pam Rehm’s seventh collection and her first with Wave Books, Inner Verses, gifts the reader with luminous lyric poetry whose probing speaker ranges across inner and outer landscapes in search of what persistent vision might, through gentle attention, render. At forty-seven pages, this slim collection is a rich result of its ephemeral precision. In a […]

Nicholas Yingling’s debut, The Fire Road, is a place-based poetry collection focusing on Western wildfires and their myriad effects on California’s landscape and human psyche. Many poems describe survival and coming to terms with ecological ruin and human consumption; the metaphor of fire extends from ecological and economic consumption into the human body. Specifically, a […]

Driven by an infectious curiosity even amid calamity, Mom in Space explores the stunning insights that arise when arranging opposites side by side: the intimate alongside the faraway, the space program alongside the human animal, and mothering alongside civilization. Lisa Ampleman’s third poetry collection imparts stories of inhabiting a woman’s body—particularly a mother’s body—everywhere bodies […]

Erica Reid’s “Ghost Man,” an imaginary man who held the speaker’s place on bases during wiffle ball games with her father, continues to run “toward & away / from home, toward & away from home.” So, too, does Ghost Man on Second, Reid’s brilliant debut poetry collection which plays skillfully with themes of grief, home, […]