As the 1960s dawned in small-town Michigan, Anne-Marie Oomen was a naive farm girl whose mother was determined to keep her out of trouble-by keeping her in 4-H. In "Love, Sex, and 4-H, " Oomen sets the wholesomeness of her domestic lessons in 4-H club from 1959 to 1969 against the political and sexual revolution of the time. Between sewing her first dish towel and finishing the yellow dress she wears to senior prom, Oomen brings readers along as she falls in and out of love, wins her first prize, learns to kiss, survives her first heartbreak, and makes almost all of her clothes.

"Love,...

The well-crafted lines in Michael Lauchlan's "Trumbull Ave." are peopled by welders, bricklayers, gas meter readers, nurses, teachers, cement masons, and street kids. Taken together, they evoke a place-Detroit-in its bustling working-class past and changeable present moment. Lauchlan works in the narrative tradition of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson but takes more recent influence from Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, and Ellen Voigt in presenting first- and third-person meditations on work, mortality, romance, childish exuberance, and the realities of time.

Lauchlan presents...

In Garden for the Blind, trouble lurks just outside the door for Kelly Fordon's diverse yet interdependent characters. As a young girl growing up in an affluent suburb bordering Detroit, Alice Townley witnesses a tragic accident at her parents' lavish party. In the years that follow, Alice is left mostly in the care of the household staff, free to forge friendships with other pampered and damaged teens. When she and her friend Mike decide to pin a crime on another student at their exclusive high school, the consequences will reverberate for years to come.

Set between 1974...

The InsideOut Literary Arts Project (iO) began in 1995 in five Detroit high schools, with weekly classroom visits by a writer-in-residence, the publication of a literary journal for each school, and the mission of encouraging students to use poetry to "think broadly, create bravely, and share their voices with the wider world." Twenty years later, the program serves some five thousand K-12 students per year, has received national exposure and accolades (including a recent visit to the White House), and has seen numerous student writers recognized for their creativity and performance. In"...

"Inscrutable, inaccessible, indefinable. Even at the end. That's what her mother had always been to her." In Seasonal Roads, L. E. Kimball introduces Norna, Aissa, and Jane-mother, daughter, and granddaughter-who are as fierce and complex as the northern terrain they inhabit. Following a nonlinear timeline,
Kimball's stories unravel the beautiful mess of layers that is their lives and allow the narratives to roam freely in time, thus granting the reader keen insights into the past, present, and future.

Spiraling through time and perspective, the stories converge at Norna's...

While a mother can be defined as a creator, a nurturer, a protector-at the center of each mother is an individual who is attempting to manage her own fears, desires, and responsibilities in different and sometimes unexpected ways. In Know the Mother, author Desiree Cooper explores the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations. In a collage of meditative stories, women-both black and white-find themselves wedged between their own yearnings and their roles as daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and wives.

In this heart-wrenching collection, Cooper reveals that...

In I Want to Be Once, M. L. Liebler approaches current events with a journalistic eye and a poet's response. Part autobiographical, part commentary, the lines of Liebler's poems come hard-hitting, but not without moments of great tenderness and humanity.

Ordered into three sections, I Want To Be Once provides readers with a look into the author's personal life, as well as our collective history as a nation vis-a-vis the American media. The first section, called -American Life, - captures the experience of coming of age in working-class 1960s America and helps to paint...

Lying in the River's Dark Bed: The Confluence of the Deadman and the Mad Angler by Michael Delp is a collection of fifty-six poems that brings together two characters Delp has been perfecting for years: Deadman and the Mad Angler. The Deadman, a spirit that constantly shifts, is one part troublemaker, one part truth-teller, and one part demon who demands respect. The Mad Angler, on the other hand, could be called the Mad Shaman or Mad Activist, as he speaks of the water and nature and then of the greed of man. While these two personas are distinct in the collection (highlighted...

Bob Seger's House and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by some of Michigan's most well-known fiction writers. This collection of twenty-two short stories serves as a celebration not only of the tenth anniversary of the Made in Michigan Writers Series in 2016 but also of the rich history of writing and storytelling in the region. As series editors Michael Delp and M. L. Leibler state in their preface, "The stories contained in this anthology are a way to stay connected to each other. Think of them as messages sent from all over the map, stitching readers and...

Sharp Blue Search of Flame is an exploration in poetry of a complex network of nuanced journeys into a variety of worlds. The searingly rich poems reflect Zilka Joseph's own history of living in Eastern and Western cultures, as well as the influences of her Jewish Indian roots. Joseph's free verse and forms shift scenes from the real to the imagined landscapes of the mind, and search for fulfillment and solace amidst the terrifying beauty and chaos of the human condition.

Joseph's poems, while dark and brooding in subject matter-bride burnings and infanticide in her native...