It's National Poetry Month; Therefore, Buy Books. Part IV.

We're already at Week 4 of National Poetry Month. I hope that your mailbox has been loading up with new poetry books. I also hope that for every book you buy two of your own will be sold.


Susan Elbe 
The Map of What Happened (The Backwaters Press)
won the 2014 Julie Suk Prize

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Susan Elbe's "Map" is an elegant work of starkly-hued reminiscence, a love letter to the city that raised her and an unflinching exploration of the littered personal landscape we all must travel. These deftly-crafted stanzas will conjure home for you—wherever that home is, whatever shape it has taken.
                                                                       —Patricia Smith


Read sample poem at Zocalo Public Square
Read sample poems at diode






Rachel Dacus
Gods of Water and Air (Aldrich Press)

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In Gods of Water and Air, the humor and irreverence of a 1960’s rebel mix with feminist, expressionist, and lyrical motifs as the author openly explores her feelings, relationships, and spiritual musings. Inheriting her late painter father’s artistic eye, Dacus paints with words. Her writing can be indirect and slant, but is always transparent, clear, and immediate, eschewing the often impenetrable poetic structures one frequently finds elsewhere.
                                                                     —Ann Wehrman


Read sample poems
Read sample poems from Prairie Schooner





Sally Rosen Kindred
Book of Asters (Mayapple)

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Sally Rosen Kindred has a gift for creating poems I wish I’d written. Here is a garden of witness, of forgetting, of memory and music and love s bright blare. Aster as metaphor, aster as ghost bouquets of common weeds and wildflowers haunt us in these poems, and teach us to lean toward their mysterious light, to blossom with their stories, and to grow bruised, but fed by their songs. 
                                                                        —Meg Kearney

Read "Confession" in Waccamaw

"My Son Asks" featured at Linebreak with audio

Jeffrey Harrison
Into Daylight (Tupelo Press)

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This book gets better each time I read it. Harrison is very skillful in a way that's almost passed out of existence: only a handful of writers can do what he does in handling the line and understanding how syntax and line work together employing the plain style with great virtuosity.
                                                                       — Tom Sleigh


Read selected poems from Into Daylight
"To a Snake" featured at The Writer’s Almanac