Sarah Sarai's Geographies of Soul and Taffeta takes place in a universe where the real and the unreal meet each other in a careful, ecstatic dance, where words melt into their partners and opposites, and Yin and Yang swirl together like the best kind of soft serve ice cream. The ideas and images here are exact, surprising, and often humorous: in fact, Sarai's poems strike new ground in being intelligent and far reaching while maintaining an air of humility and matter of factness.

--Christine Hamm

The poems in Sarah Sarai's Geographies of Soul and Taffeta are little...

In one of the most important of the Aztec festivals, a month of fasting was ended by observers of the fast cutting up the figurine of a god made of amaranth seeds and honey and sharing it in small pieces. In Amaranth, Robert Carr feeds his readers portions of a god fashioned out of terror, longing, infidelity, wasting sickness, humor, and a searing lyrical tenderness. Crafted with the fingers of a careful and nimble musicianship, these poems vibrate with a current that simultaneously sets the teeth on edge and soothes the agitation the words produce. Even the most casual reader will be...

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer from rural Washington State. His writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Gawker, Salon, The Rumpus, and The Feminist Wire, where he is an Associate Editor. He's currently a post-doctoral fellow in systems biology at New York University.

Osmundson describes Capsid: A Love Song as an essay "On HIV, desire, science, queerness, love." The book is a long-form essay that incorporates eight prose poems, each one inspired by a different...

Love is always complicated. In the poems of Drug and Disease Free, Michael Broder ponders the further complexities of love in the context of HIV and AIDS. These include the pleasures of cruising and anonymous sex, the challenges of marriage and erotic power exchange, and the realities of blood, cum and other "proud, shameful mysteries." Broder's narrator is intimate and plainspoken even when formalist; wary but romantic; self-mocking and elegiac; and utterly open--even with "no lube"--to loving and being loved, and all the complications those entail.

--Arielle Greenberg

Luminous, whimsical, and heartbreakingly tender by turns, the poems in Lisa Andrews's Dear Liz are a portrait of a beloved friend, movie-going companion, and fellow human, a portrait unfailingly loyal to the telling detail, unfailingly appreciative of the quotidian. To read these poems is to enter a world that is full of feeling, at once loving and quirky. There is grief here, but these poems, more, help us continue in the world, which Andrews, sometimes plainly, sometimes in stunning images, shows us to be full of beauty. Dear Liz is a moving reminiscence, and to be offered the friendship...