Laurie Klein

Love and other Mysteries

Arts & Literature

“’Tell us your mysteries. Start with joyful.’ There is so much love here! Megan Willome’s poems inspirit saints, wilderness trails, road trips and rosaries, birds and blooms. From canticles to elegies, words are beads in her cradling hand: ‘she kneels tall … sings gems.’ Perhaps the young park ranger sums it up best: ‘You wouldn’t believe how these things reveal themselves.’”

Mining the Bright Birds

Arts & Literature

“‘Lean into the love between the lines.’ Poet Jody Collins writes with psalmic sensibilities, often underscored by longing. In attending to people, creatures, and seasons, she attunes the ear and heart to everyday moments of resonance. Her grateful hymn to living bids me join the chorus: ‘. . . all gift. / All God.’”

This Teeming Mess of Glory

Arts & Literature

“‘Behold. Be held, the spirit whispers.’ With aching transparency Matthew Pullar’s poems traverse marvel and anguish, inner chaos and the depths of mercy. Grappling with the complexities of faith, memories, home, and colonization, he invites the reader in—where do we settle, and at what cost? ‘Life miscarries. Lives / carry on.’”

Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation

Arts & Literature

“Cracking open this book feels akin to witnessing the split sternum. Wondrous workings. Visceral shocks. Dark, intricate passages. Maddox speaks to us “out of the nicked vision that splinters.” “Dissected into five sections, Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation vibrates with muscle and music, wordplay and riddle, occasional ode—even moments of farce. The reader acutely senses “the jolt that joins us at the organs.” Several startling and ingenious shape poems emerge.” “A poet of fierce curiosity, Maddox incrementally parses daily life and loss through art and science underscored by faith. Courageous beholding evokes the becoming. I’m still savoring her sleight of hand—and heart. The sinewy energy and the hush.”

Trial By Ordeal

Arts & Literature

“Bemused, unsparing yet tender, Karen Mobley’s poems juxtapose human suffering alongside nature’s ‘raw and present’ beauty in this moving anatomy of sorrow. Equally attuned to small birds and searing questions, Mobley shows us that no matter what befalls those we love, no matter our souls’ myriad pains and hungers, we are gently propelled toward ‘astonishment / with a side of salt and honey.’”