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With none of the cloying sentimentality of some so-called "nature poets," Hada writes of the natural world as we actually experience it. Few poets since Robert Frost have spoken as clearly and movingly about our attraction to and alienation from the natural world that surrounds us even when we can't be said to be fully in it. In these poems, the speaker is both the man standing on his stoop "looking up at stars" as "tree frogs chortle" and the man who hears the birds more distantly now as he walks tiredly back down the road he has helped to clear and to pave. In the haunting, "Two Deer at Twilight," it is the total otherness of the natural world, its inaccessibility to us that makes the poet love it all the more, as if he were a troubadour and nature his cruel mistress. In "Redbirds Balancing on a Cedar Limb" the poet freely admits that "Their song / is a temporary fix, something / to keep other things away." "I am glad he doesn't trust me," he says, in another poem, of the Roadrunner he has frightened from his back door. Again and again Hada finds poignancy in our strained but indispensable relationship with the natural world. This is the book of poems to tuck into your rucksack before heading into the woods, the book to read on your porch on a clear fall evening as the lights dim around you. This is also the book to carry with you on the bus, train, or taxi into the heart of the busy city, where you just might need it the most. -Benjamin Myers, Oklahoma State Poet Laureate 2015-2016

Urged, or How Sex & Death Lift Up My Granny is a book of myths & fairytales, twisted nursery rhymes, monsters & monster mothers & the initiatory stories of grownup life. "Reading Stella Brice's work is like diving into a sea wave and coming up in a dark cave. A cave echoing with voices from the four winds telling stories that are unfamiliar, ragged, horrible, beautiful, and true. And it's somehow also very bright in this space apart. The light hurts and the pain is delicious. The surfaces of things are majestic, but underneath is something pulsing with life. A quiet night becomes erotic, slimy, and hieratic. You're changed somehow. You're a part of some bardic tradition that stumbled into the rusted clockworks of 'all this, ' and emerged in a trance. You speak a thousand languages simultaneously, and you now know what they all mean. It's a 'ravenous abundance.'" -Carolyn Adams, author of The Things You've Left Behind

Joe Benevento's Expecting Songbirds, Selected Poems, 1983-2015, provides readers with the opportunity to sample the very best of the writer's work from his four previous books in poetry: Holding On, Willing To Believe, My Puerto Rican Past and Tough Guys Don't Write, along with some of his most recent journal-published poems collected under the heading "Ode to Pears." Oftentimes narrative, and predominantly free verse, Benevento's poems mirror his Italian-American, working class roots in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood in Queens, but they also look back on his past three decades as professor, editor and writer in the small-town, overwhelmingly white Midwest and the tensions and ironies of having lived the life of an outsider in both settings. Poems delivered with the "plain spoken ease and realism of Frost" (Walter Bargen) and which, "at their best bring to mind the exceptional work of Philip Levine and B.H. Fairchild," (Larry D. Thomas), Expecting Songbirds is an affirmation of Whitman's goal to seek the miraculous in the commonplace. Whether dealing with never quite lost loves, multi-layered lessons gleaned from nature, or a bittersweet but genuine belief in family, Expecting Songbirds stands as testament to over three decades of serious commitment to accessible poetry by a writer who has not underestimated the redeeming value in never taking oneself too seriously.

Alan Birkelbach's tenth book of poetry, Meridienne Verte, is an existential romp through terrain that seems familiar at first - but changes before our very eyes. With each accessible poem, balancing wisdom with irreverence, Birkelbach invites readers in with simple and common language - and then leaves them in an environment not unlike the scientific explorers in his poem "A Little Conversation about Geometers" who have suddenly found themselves in a different place in the center of the earth, all rules of gravity and survival changed. It is their world, yes, but it isn't the same anymore - because someone asked a question that altered everything: "What use was there in measuring the stars...?" In so many of the poems, "When Those Choose to Talk" or "Atlas On His Day Off," for example, Reality (with a capital R) is so far away - but it isn't really. The poems are full of the mysterious minutiae of the reality we all know, transported to mythical and almost unbelievable settings. Whether it is the transient nature of a camisole failing off an invisible shoulder, or the misericordia in a church most of us will never visit, the implicit value of the inherent, far-off, and short-term treasure, and measure, is promoted to be one of hope and exuberance. Life may be short. But based on Birkelbach's poems it is well worth living.

Most mornings for the past decade, poet Scott Wiggerman has walked the trails at Austin's Mueller Lake Park, an urban space created on land that once held the city's airport. Awake to the landscape as he walked, Wiggerman stopped from time to time and jotted a word or phrase for a poem that would come later. Leaf and Beak is the product of these walks, of the poet's ever watchful eye, of the discipline he learned mastering the sonnet. Readers are in good hands here. The sonnets-seventy-five of them-flow so smoothly you can forget you're reading a sonnet and just let the images take you in, the rhythms move you forward. The poems of Leaf and Beak are quiet poems, reflective poems, poems that ask you to walk in stillness for moments at a time, to absorb "the hidden in full view," to appreciate "a lone green leaf / that hangs on like a weekend birthday, deaf / to bitter winds." Wiggerman moves from the observed image, letting some details turn him inward while others lead to meditations on his fellow beings, on the world he walks. "What will / tomorrow bring that now cannot be seen?" he asks. "What change, what wonders to discover?"

The deftly rendered poems of Raby s new collection are a powerful testament to a life fully lived (and, of course, fully living ). They are paeans to the magical people/animals/things which are integral to human fullness: to childhood memories; to the family dog, Caesar; to a father who spent more time with books and collections than his growing children; to a giving mother brave in life and death; to long deceased grandparents; to the incessant longing for children and grandchildren too far away for frequent visits; and to old poets. Raby s poetic forays into the natural world, of which there are many, are especially insightful and memorable sketches of bears, snapping turtles, hummingbirds, juncos, mourning doves, house finches, deer, squirrels, and mountain lions. Few poets writing today can match Raby in capturing, with accessible yet exquisite language, the joy, mystery, and fleeting beauty of simply being alive. The title poem of the collection, In Memoriam, aptly demonstrates Raby s mastery of poetic craft. In this poem, as in so many other poems of this collection, subject, language and earth are seamlessly fused in epiphanic utterance. The protagonist, martyred / to burnt bones, rests in her earthen grave: Her body is bronze, / her hair is moss / beneath green rain. / Cool water cascades / over her shoulders / here she is quenched liquid. / Here she is solid grace. Raby s skillful execution of the poem and seamless merging of subject, language, and earth bring to mind Seamus Heaney s Bog Queen. Raby s imagery, like Heaney s, will resonate in the reader s mind long after the book is placed back on the shelf. -Larry D. Thomas (2008 Texas Poet Laureate)"

Saul Bellow wrote that "Death is the dark backing a mirror must have if we are to see anything." Carol Hamilton's Such Deaths shines the dark radiance of that mirror on what makes us human in seventy six lyric poems that dance with death, staring back at angels staring "from hospital beds, / long awaiting better days or death, / faces etched in furrows / on parchment paper skin, / their pale eyes reaching the stasis / of another smile." They take us to the stockyard, where "we clatter up the planked / cat-walk to look down on endless / pens of mud and writhing hide," reminded that what makes us human also places us in the company of "Creatures stampeded / into herds before / an amphitheatered crowd..." "I have," she writes, "given up / the belief that I am invisible / when I close my eyes." And in "The Comediennes," eyes wide open, she writes of childhood friends playing Chopin's "Funeral March," dressing death up and laughing "at her garish ways." They "shed real tears, / comforted one another / at the funerals of our kittens. / Now we send cards and notes / of condolence, and occasionally, / once in awhile, we forget / how to laugh." Hamilton remembers, and readers who join her in this dance will thank her for the clarity this brings.

Several years ago, I stumbled across the Diary of Mrs. Joseph Duncan (Elizabeth Caldwell Smith), edited by her granddaughter Elizabeth Duncan Putnam, under a pile of yearbooks at Prairie Archives Book Store in Springfield, Illinois. Born in 1808 in New York, Elizabeth Caldwell Smith lived on Pearl Street, near the Battery. She married General Joseph Duncan, then followed him to Jacksonville, where he served as the sixth governor of Illinois. The diary, in fragmented entries, covers the period from 1824 to 1848. Written by a woman whose attitudes toward educating women and freeing the slaves far exceeded her peers, the diary fascinated me. I started writing poems in the voice of Elizabeth Caldwell Duncan, following the approach of historical fiction. Not only did I write about events which her diary and letters document, I also created situations which captured the spirit of her life and times. Nevertheless the poems demanded their day in the sun, and I had promised Elizabeth that I would bring them forth, gathering them in In This Glad Hour. -Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody

Barbara Crooker's sixth collection of poetry, Small Rain, is an exploration of the wheel of the year, the seasons that roll in a continuous circle and yet move inexorably forward. Here, gorgeous lyric poems praise poppies, mockingbirds, nectarines, mulch and compost, yet loss (stillbirth, cancer, emphysema), with its crow-black wings, is also always present. In poems that narrow in on the particular ("a cardinal twangs his notes of cheer; he has no truck with irony and post- / modernism"), poems that focus on aging and the body ("how many springs are left on my ticket?"), poems that open out into the larger world of politics, war, global climate change, Crooker's work embodies Wendell Berry's words, "Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts," reminding us that sometimes we need to stop in wonder, look at the natural world, which we are close to ruining forever, and let "our mouths say o and o and o."

I love the title of Patricia Goodrich;'s new book, Woman with a Wandering Eye because the best poets are, by nature, restless, even - thank goodness! - promiscuous. They trust the eyes' indiscriminate passion for the world, and so we wander in this book from the Stojacks' back yard to the Great Dunes of the Merzouga Desert to Port-au-Prince's dusty streets to the Shoshone River and in our wanderings encounter a desert tortoise, a beetle that feeds off camel dung, a .45 Glock, a red Kawasaki, a note in Arabic tied with string and pressed into the poet's hands, a rubber sole picked out of rubble, voodoo figures inscribed in walls, a four-breasted woman with a mysterious yellow flower, and crows waiting sentinel for the poet's return home. I know of no poet who is as faithful in her wanderings and who stands as courageously in solidarity with her fellow citizens of this planet, be they a waiting room full of amputees, the women of Ouezzen, a thirteen-year-old Moroccan boy holding up his first painting for sale, the artists of Saint Soleil, or an indigo nub in whose "quiet brave company" she revels. This a book that dares to believe there's goodness in our often treacherous world, in this perilous life. We need more poets with wandering eyes! -Chris Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms