In The Light Between, award-winning poet Terry Blackhawk probes beyond and through the painful dissolution of a long marriage to examine the complexities of love with bravery and delicacy. Mythical themes, elements of the natural world, and masculine/feminine polarities resonate throughout Blackhawk's poems as she explores loss, the nature of relationships, and the integrity of the individual soul. Ultimately, The Light Between celebrates our connectedness to one another, to the planet, and to the natural world.

Section one opens as Blackhawk visits a lonely mythical kingdom and...

The full-length debut from francine j. harris, allegiance is about Detroit, sort of. Although many of the poems are inspired by and dwell in the spaces of the city, this collection does not revel in any of the clich? cultural tropes normally associated with Detroit. Instead, these poems artfully explore life in a city where order coexists with chaos and much is lost in social and physical breakdown. Narrative poems on the hazards, betrayals, and annoyances of city life mix with impressionistic poems that evoke the natural world, as harris grapples with issues of beauty and horror, loyalty...

To Embroider the Ground with Prayer is a portrait of poet Teresa J. Scollon's several worlds, as she accompanies her father through his illness and death and records the richness of family and community life in her Michigan town. These poems enjoy reverence and irreverence in equal measure as grief appears side by side with playfulness and humor. Scollon employs a wide range of poetic styles and voices: elegies, narratives, and persona poems are organized in recursive circles that evoke family, village, local characters, and the author's adult life beyond her hometown.

The collection...

The early 1900s was a dangerous time for African American men, whether famous or nameless. Punishment from any perceived transgression against the Jim Crow power structure came swiftly in legislative, emotional, or physical form, and it could well take one's life. Despite this reality, however, a number of African Americans still lifted their heads, straightened their spines, and spoke and acted against the mainstream. In Booker T. & Them: A Blues, poet and playwright Bill Harris examines what he calls "the age of Booker T." (1900-1915), when America began flexing its imperialistic...

In "Practicing to Walk Like a Heron" multiple-award-winning Michigan poet Jack Ridl shares lines of well-earned wisdom in the face of a constantly changing world. The familiar comforts of life-a warm fire in winter, a lush garden in summer-become the settings for transcendent and universal truths in these poems, as moments of grief, sadness, and melancholy trigger a deeper appreciation for small but important joys. The simple clarity of Ridl's lines and diction make the poems accessible to all readers, but especially rewarding for those who appreciate carefully honed, masterful verse.

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The second full-length collection from award-winning poet Chris Dombrowski, Earth Again transports readers to an imaginative world where identity is explored and expanded. With a mixture of long poems and shorter pieces, Dombrowski probes birth, death, sex, memory, and our blessed but treacherous engagement with the natural world. While he writes from a number of points of view and employs both male and female speakers, much of the collection's singular insight centers around masculine identity and being a husband and a father. Readers come away transformed, -like the land / gasping...

Michigan's Upper Peninsula is distinct from the rest of the state in geography, climate, and culture, including a unique and thriving creative writing community. In" The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works, "editor Ron Riekki presents poetry, fiction, and non-fiction from memorable, varied voices that are writing from and about Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In all, this unique anthology features new works from forty-two writers, including rising star Ellen Airgood, Edgar Award-winner Steve Hamilton, Rona Jaffe Award-winner Catie Rosemurgy, Jonathan Johnson of "Best American...

We all have to live together, whether we do it with enthusiasm or grace, reluctance or despair. In this skillfully drawn collection, National Book award-winning Michigan writer Gloria Whelan presents short stories and a novella that look at people living together who have reached a crisis point. Whether her characters are old or young, male or female, in settings that are urban or rural, they wrestle with anger, loneliness, and frustration, but ultimately demonstrate bravery, trust, determination, and, often, the ability to learn something new.

Whelan considers a variety of narratives...

Depending on dialect, the Anishinaabemowin word "weweni" expresses thanks, exactitude, ease, and sincerity. In addition, the word for "relatives" is "nindenwemaaganag": those whose "enewewe," or voices, sound familiar. In Weweni, poet Margaret Noodin brings all of these meanings to bear in a unique bilingual collection. Noodin's warm and perceptive poems were written first in the Modern Anishinaabemowin double-vowel orthography and appear translated on facing pages in English.

From planetary tracking to political contrasts, stories of ghosts, and messages of trees, the poems...

Poet Ken Mikolowski ran a letterpress printing house for over thirty years, setting poems by hand, one letter at a time-an experience that influenced his love of short verse. In "That That, "Mikolowski presents his trademark quirky, humorous, and insightful poems, none longer than three brief lines and some made up of only two or three carefully chosen words. Together, these poems create a narrative of life and love broken down to the most minimal of forms.

Mikolowski's deceptively simple collection takes readers on a whirlwind tour through weighty topics and humorous vignettes. He...