“Before Paradise Eve lived with her sisters, the ribs,” begins the poem Parable (I) in Alice Wickenden’s chapbook To Fall Fable, and this enchanting image made me smile. Yet, it also signals a coming darkness, where sisterhood is disrupted to satisfy God and man. “Won’t it be lonely?” Eve asks. And for the women in the collection’s poems, it often is, with the natural world and opposite sex sources of both attraction and betrayal. The “yellow roses in the sun” are beautiful but also “sneering.” The hurt is clear in the title of the poem A Prayer, That You Might Remember Taking My Virginity. Wickenden ends with a crown of sonnets that shows how the abused remain entangled with their abuser long after the violent mistreatment occurs. It is a stunning finale to a journey through a magical world simultaneously lovely and full of thorns. To Fall Fable can be purchased here.

Robin Rosen Chang’s The Curator’s Notes is vibrant with the energy of “things that curl,” and “pulse” and “intertwine.” The mother is “a river, torrid/and trying to flow uphill.” Overripe plums fall to the grass and are “carpeted by a platoon of ants.” Bees swarm, “sticky before pollinating/the many fruit trees.” An injured chickadee fledgling tries to fly and is “batted against asphalt.” Even dying is described as motion, with the mother, at the end of her life, spiraling “toward oblivion.” Yet, in the midst of all this activity, Chang also offers the calm of observation and reflection on the agency of women, what it means to love and lose a difficult parent, the dynamics of marriage, the times we hold back or our voice fails us, and what helps us keep going. It is a journey beautifully told. The Curator’s Notes can be purchased here.

In this collection of powerful poems about racism and sexism, Khalisa Rae juxtaposes seemingly opposite images to convey a landscape complicit in inflicting pain even when it offers something resembling a blessing. The image of an oak in the title poem illustrates how the cool respite taken beneath the tree on a hot day can’t be separated from the tree’s horrific association with lynching: “We spin a web of shade and make it/a place to rest under—broad oak that it is.” In Southern Georgia Libretto I, “Feet bleed like sweet juice/gushing from that Georgia peach.” And writing about the termination of a pregnancy in the poem Morning Glory, Rae ends with “I wish I knew of Morning Glory/how it can be a surgery and baptismal/all at the same time.” There also are gorgeous poems about the ache for release, including Wind Dance, Wind Watching, and Moving Mind. The suggestion in Wind Watching that maybe Dorothy (from the Wizard of Oz) welcomed the tornado is rendered so beautifully: “The swirl approached and she went/willingly. Threw her head and arms back, and let it consume her.” Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is available here.

I was drawn to He Says I’m Fierce by Richmond, Va., poet Debbie Collins after hearing her read from the collection, and I’ve found myself returning to its pages again and again. The poems are bracingly honest and spare. They do not shy away from facing head on the struggles of addiction and the ups and down of relationships. Yet Collins’ language and imagery weave a magic that pulls you in. I was at the bar, nursing/a martini of broken men, she writes in the poem “Entertain Me.” In “The Third Saturday in June,” the poet describes seeing an old lover with his new wife, saying Pity? No thanks,/I’ve got plenty, tangled/in her veil and in/his laugh. “The sky is in a hurry” in Please Leave. And in “such a good boy,” two lovers argue about the ties holding them together in the produce section of the grocery store,/as we set ourselves on fire in front of the tomatoes. This wonderful debut left me hungry to read more of Collins’ work. He Says I’m Fierce can be purchased here.

In “Feather,” a poem that appears early in Angela Narciso Torres’s book What Happens Is Neither, she describes trying unsuccessfully as a child to make a mark on the “the pebble-/washed floor” using a goose feather. “The point/is not that when night fell/there was barely a scratch. The point/ is how, armed with a feather,/I believed I could make a mark.” This collection takes us on her journey through challenges we are all helpless to prevent—the grief of losing our parents, the heart-tugs of raising a child and then sending them off into the world. Yet the beauty of the language and images she uses to convey her experiences offer a tenderness and care that keep us buoyed up along the way. Describing the progression of her mother’s Alzheimer’s: “Her memories, black pigeons flying off at dusk. Who knows where/ they spend the night? Dawn finds them back at the cote, softly/cooing.” Her father playing his violin after his cancer diagnosis: “I remember the A string/wouldn’t tune. He played/anyway. His body leaned/and swayed in its wheelchair/cage.” And in the poem “Nocturne” about a son: “What is parenting but a prayer for one’s young.” In the end, Torres has made a mark, illuminating with her pen the intertwined paths of love, grief and memory. What Happens Is Neither is available Here.

Each section of Sara Ryan’s poetry collection begins with a different “Wolf Question,” a poem in two parts—the first about a wolf, the second about a girl. Yet, both the wolf and the girl are at different turns lost, hungry, cold, living and surviving, and each part calls to the other in a way that blurs the line separating them. Throughout the book we experience this shapeshifting along with repeated images of blood, teeth, bones and fur that highlight “the animal in all / our skins.” It’s as if we’re immersed in the folklore of a far north country—full of danger, grief, loneliness and pain, but also full of courage and beauty. As Ryan writes in the poem “Grasp”: “a miracle, / maybe, how the earth shudders beneath / us, how we dance along the fractures.” I Thought There Would Be More Wolves is available Here.

There is something magical about the way Samantha DeFlitch has stitched the poems in Confluence together. The repetition of certain words—especially “old,” “dog,” and “woman”—throughout the book give the feeling of a series of ghazals pulled apart and then gently woven into the manuscript. As a result, poems call to each other in a way reminiscent of the couplets of a ghazal. The Arabic verse form was originally used in poems about loss and romantic love, both of which are subjects central to the book. “Life is brushing me clean, gently, as if/ blowing dust off an old desk,” writes DeFlitch in the poem “I Told Colleen.” And we are drawn into her journey through the music of her language, compelling images such as the bridge spires in Pittsburgh that “twang in the cold,” and the ongoing anticipation of a miracle that could happen if, or happen over there, or happen someplace else  . . . Confluence is available Here.

I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with Artists in Residence by Melissa Wyse and Kate Lewis, visiting artists’ residences and learning what these spaces meant to them. Who says you can’t travel in a pandemic?! Wyse’s descriptions of how the artists interacted with their spaces are wonderful complements to Lewis’s beautiful illustrations. And there was the bonus of discovering several artists, such as Clementine Hunter and Louise Bourgeois, with whom I was not familiar. The book is available Here

Reading Nothing Like the Doll You Learned On by Jan Wallace feels like entering a mystical world full of “curious spirits”—the dead who never leave us or who come back to visit, witches as characters on old TV shows or rumored to live in the neighborhood, the falcon healing the falconer, the resting seal pup “reminding of us what we cannot name but know.” It’s rich with keen observation, surprising twists, and vivid images that are sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking.  A wonderful collection, available Here.

If you’re looking for writing ideas check out Joanna Penn Cooper’s Wild Apples: A Flash Memoir Collection with Writing Prompts. Whether Cooper is writing about being a little girl burdened by the gift from an elderly neighbor of an old doll or her grandmother’s memory of being woken to look at the beauty of dogwoods in snow or the angst of a woman in her late forties who suddenly finds herself being “aggressively ‘ma’amed,’” the vivid images and focused bits of dialogue she uses ensure each story will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. The dozen pieces of flash memoir also serve as inspiration for the writing prompts that follow them—and these are rich with ideas for both subject matter and approaches to try. Available here.