Joe Benevento's Expecting Songbirds, Selected Poems, 1983-2015, provides readers with the opportunity to sample the very best of the writer's work from his four previous books in poetry: Holding On, Willing To Believe, My Puerto Rican Past and Tough Guys Don't Write, along with some of his most recent journal-published poems collected under the heading "Ode to Pears." Oftentimes narrative, and predominantly free verse, Benevento's poems mirror his Italian-American, working class roots in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood in Queens, but they also look back on his past three decades...

My Perfect Wife, Her Perfect Son reimagines the Holy Family's story through the very human voice of Joseph. Mary's pregnancy only begins his troubles. He has to navigate the unreasonable dictates of a disheveled, wise-cracking Angel Shlomo, Mary's surprising insistence that she remain a "Blessed Ever Virgin," pushy in-laws, Roman contractors, Jesus's crazy cousin John, and the allure of the harlot Safiya, just a few of the challenges for an imperfect man assigned to become a role model for the son of God.