Barbara Crooker

Full Worm Moon

Arts & Literature

“The full moon rises each month throughout this moving collection, shining down on ‘the gritty corridors/of [a] long marriage,’ as we watch it painfully unravel. . . Because the book ends with ‘as you take each successive step,’ we know that she’s safe on her journey, a path she didn’t choose, a woman newly and bravely alone. Beautifully crafted and artfully wrought, these poems will sear themselves on your memory long after you close the book.”

Life List

Arts & Literature

“How do I love the poetry of Janet McCann? Let me count the ways: her wicked sense of humor, her clear eye, her choice of organizing this book around growing up and growing old in mid-century America, and her refusal to give in to despair, though loss is all around. I loved every single poem in this collection, and you, dear reader, will too.”

Local News from Someplace Else

Arts & Literature

“Marjorie Maddox brings us Local News from Someplace Else, a 'brief alphabet of grief,' 'where loss . . . flies fastest / in the smallest of words': hurricanes, fires, school shootings, mine cave-ins. But she is also a reporter of joy: births, barbecues, retirement parties, hotel rooms with 'the hundred-plus / channels of cable / deliciously at our command.' 'We are in love / with room service at midnight,' Maddox writes, and you will be too.”

Pattern Evidence

Arts & Literature

“A forensic specialist examines the evidence in front of him, such as patterns, details, eyewitness accounts, expert testimonies. In his new collection, Pattern Evidence, Michael Reilly assembles his own patterns of evidence from his rural Pennsylvania life. . . . Riley gives us evidence of what it’s like to be alive and awake in this fractured and sometimes confusing world, noticing everything.”

Second Bloom

Arts & Literature

“‘To bloom is so foolish / that it must be wisdom,’ Anya Silver writes, in poem after stunning poem about living with cancer and still finding words to praise this beautiful and ephemeral world. These are the bravest poems you’ll ever read, by a woman at the top of her artistic game. Even though she knows that winter is coming, Silver’s words put out fresh green shoots. These poems will crack open your heart.”

Slender Warble

Arts & Literature

“All of the poems in Slender Warble by Susan Cowger are fully engaged in the search for God: attempting to know the unknowable, trying to grasp the intangible in our always-failing human hands. We teeter between the daily paradox of suffering and beauty, all too often unable to see or sense God in the struggles of our quotidian lives. . . . Highly recommended.”