If I can give myself anything, let it be a way into anger," a reasonable creed for navigating a life continually demanding passivity toward the violence and loss it inflicts. Allison writes the plights of mothers, daughters, lovers and spouses in a voice that endures scars and calluses but refuses to accept them as necessary. "Some unbecomes happen slowly." This book provides precise detail of ascendance above survival

BRIMHALL LOVE PRODIGAL

Allow: A Litany is a chapbook length poem. It’s written in English, interspersed with Spanish and structured as a prayer, asking for a variety of things to happen, including to:
“allow for the recompense of our mothers
for their celestial rewards to be granted earlier
for a damn advance on their salvation.”

Carvajal is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Kansas and an affiliate of KU’s Indigenous Studies Program and Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies.

A Kansas Notable Book for 2017

“Fast-Food Sonnets. At first this oxymoronic title stymied me, but Dennis Etzel, Jr’s mix of pop culture and high Italian Renaissance is spot on. Etzel’s verse is not strict sonnets, but each packs maximum emotion into spare lines. He tells about poverty-level coming of age through initiation at the local hamburger joint. A manager tells a new employee “to wear her hair up, be ready to serve.” This ending line is a chilling indictment of the class system, gender roles, and servitude. This book is an important satire for the 21st century. It also is a perfect blend of drama and passion.”
Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09

Poet and Teacher Dennis Etzel, Jr. explores education in this poetic memoir. Divided into three parts, the collection examines Etzel's time as a student, his transition to a member of the faculty at Washburn University, and homeschooling his children with his wife Carrie.

"To read MY SECRET WARS OF 1984 is to ride an old wooden rollercoaster through a spacious gallery of stained-glass windows, all their colorful shards having been stolen, shattered, then chewed into shape: what we have here are gorgeous and wise assemblages of sharp, scavenged graffiti. Ricocheting from Pac-Man to Topeka to institutional structures to AIDS awareness to Reagan, Dennis Etzel, Jr. masters the skills of fragmentation and disharmony without losing one bit of torque. Sharpen your political acumen on this poetry-memoir of the highest order and discover much pleasure in the process." Amy King

GREEN THE DELETIONS

In the Bodies is a collection of poetry for shapeshifting. The poems investigate possibilities of mutual transformation, as our relational encounters with others co-create meaning, poetry, environment, and even our bodies. What might we co-create when we press against the taught borders of body, of place, of time, of what is accepted as possible and holy? These poems press, inviting readers to get in the bodies of other creatures, people, and places - to taste what melts their tongues, feel their bones break, cry through their eyes, sense the world rotating through their dirt and updrafts, shift shape, and maybe sprout new growth together in shared gardens.

KHAN SPEECH IN AN AGE OF

KLEBER-DIG WORLDLY THINGS

Imagined and real worlds intersect as lyric poet Denise Low dances between mortals and the dead, humans and animals, her European and Indigenous heritages. Real pandemics and wildfires set the stage as she illumines connections between the rational and intuitive. This former Poet Laureate of Kansas mourns the lost buffalo herds and celebrates the irresistible and beautiful material world of art, from Renaissance paintings to recent works by Nick Cave, Julie Buffalohead, and Peter Max. History is a living entity in the works: English lords court on teacups; a spirit woman walks Cimarron Breaks. Two hands and vestigial limbs --including wings --are tools for understanding the dualities of existence. Low's rich work sings a healing song, knitting opposites together into a whole.

At The Corner of Fantasy and Main is about more than Disneyland, midlife, and churros. It's about how our heart is sometimes more reliable than our memory and how places that are touchstones in our lives stay with us in ways that don't always seem to make sense. And, well, it's about Disneyland, midlife, and churros.

NATHAN EGGTOOTH (PB)

Annie Klier Newcomer's debut collection speaks to the world's propensity to awe us in concert with all we love and lose. In writing about family, whether close at hand or long-gone, she explores the ties that bind, the grief that travels with us, and the love that remains. Looking to the larger human family, she writes a poem about integration, "Some stories never end," and to the cosmos, considering the cycles of comets. This lyrical collection invites us to consider the paths we live, like comets arching across time.

It's not often you see a whole life that's gone into a book, but here we have just that. Janice Northerns lives this life intensely, and lives intensely in language. At the core of this book are the raw elements of birth, love, and death; while surrounding them are sophisticated yet impassioned readings of the violence of history, class, and social codes. These are poems to be read both largely and closely, for the stories they tell, and for their turns of poetic craft. You don't just read this book, you enter it.

The idea for writing one poem a day for 100 days emerged slowly. In March, as we sheltered in place, I discovered that putting poems on Facebook allowed me to communicate with an immediacy that I usually only enjoyed at public readings. It tasted like bacon, like strong coffee. Naively, I thought 30 days would cover the worst of the pandemic. As I considered shutting down my daily posts, returning to sending poems out to small presses, I experienced a sense of loss, of isolation, that troubled me. I kept writing and posting, finding that I needed the electronic human contact more than a vetted publication with little feedback. Consequently, these poems have been self-published only on my Facebook platform, and on occasion, on the Kansas City Writer's Place website. In Swimming Shelter the poems are arranged chronologically as they appeared. Little has been done to revise, except for an occasional word choice selection or punctuation edit. I wrote each morning. Usually, stopping only when the poem was finished. A few appeared with an immediacy that surprised me. Other times, I worked off and on throughout the day, giving them up to the internet late at night, but seldom before I was satisfied. This went against the grain of my personal writing process, as I prefer to edit only after days or weeks have passed, letting the poems cool for the critical cold eye. Self-publication scared me, sort of like the time in junior high school, when I accidentally kicked off my penny loafer into the middle of the basketball court during a game. Ninth graders dribbled around my sad shoe like they might a mouse from the biology lab. The true embarrassment was that I'd forgotten to change my socks after gym class, and so there I was, swinging my dumb foot from the balcony in a sweat-stained sock. Essentially, my social life was ruined, and I became a poet. I'd like to thank Facebook readers who followed my posts, especially those who commented on what they read. Their words and emojis, likes and loves, let me feel like a village poet, sitting around a smoky fire, probably Irish, weaving words, inventing stories. I kept the organic character of original diction in place. The use of quarantine instead of stay-at-home or sheltering-in-place is an example of learning terminology, new words for a new time. The inaccuracies are honest. These poems are not all about Covid-19, per se, but all of them, for better or worse, were discovered while swimming in shelter, crawling for calm water.

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PORUBSKY STAND IN OLD LIG

Poems & sketches by Kevin Rabas. A book supersedes being a simple collection of words when a poet gets a hold of them. More Than Words by Kevin Rabas is an intimate collection of poetry and micro-fiction that takes a conscientious look inward and closely around us through stages of growing up, connecting with music, navigating romance, interacting with nature, and persisting through social and personal maladies.

In The Receipt, poetry blends with history and its lessons in a tribute to the human spirit. Reeves's poems are a receipt for life lived through the ages. Whether pre-cataclysmic Pompeii, Michelangelo on horseback to Bologna, or a plague doctor's first encounter with Angel Island, Reeves's fine eye, ear, and imagination find the imagery, metaphors, and language to create rhythms of history.