Language Like Water is a moving, deeply personal glimpse into the layered, often tumultuous relationship between a mother and daughter. It can’t only be roses with something that goes so deep—many of our familial roots go into muddy messes. Or in Nancy Gerber’s case “before argument tore us apart.”

In Seeing—In a Small Town, Pasquale Trozzolo starts each poem with an epigraph/mini-memoir. Unlike most poets, Trozzolo offers the reader a glimpse of the perspective or scene behind his poetic inferences, and, in most cases, casts light on the hidden meanings through his eloquent phrasing.

How do you write about childhood sexual abuse? You follow Eve Ott’s lead. In Proof of the Sun, Ott chronicles her “journey through childhood sexual abuse” with astounding grace.

Early in the going of Chris La Tray’s exquisite memoir, Becoming Little Shell, a heart-rending scene occurs shortly after his grandfather’s funeral. Sitting with his father at a VFW bar, his old man says of his old man, “I’m not sad. Not even a little bit. That sonofabitch never did a thing for me.”

Native Chicagoan, award-winning poet, publisher of the literary arts journal After Hours, and blues saxophonist Albert DeGenova takes a deep look at youth in Human Nature. Youth of self, youth of country, youth of redemption. The mistakes we make without knowing we’ve done so until we look at them later through a wiser lens.

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, who was the 2022/2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate.

“We come from nothing we can remember, / and travel toward a place we know nothing about, / the margins of our lives closed to us.” —“The Path of Melting Ice”

Like his last name, Adam Clay’s fifth book of poetry, entitled Circle Back, is deeply rooted in soil horizons and opulent Earth tones. Poems formed from the decomposition of rock and dirt, then brought to life on the poet’s wheel.

This collection of poems, the first from novelist, journalist, short story writer, and essayist Colm Tóibín, was written over many years. That is why, perhaps, the poems are so far-ranging in place and time, and in thought and emotion. Tóibín’s singular vision—and his mordant wit—bind them together.

Robert Love has worked for over fifty years in the woods and put his experiences to the page. So when you’re craving the outdoors but that cold wind is keeping you indoors, Love’s selected poems, essays, and tales will take you to the woods.

Hala Alyan is the winner of the Arab American Book Award in Poetry and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Allen Morris Jones, known for his novels and thought-provoking essays on the ethics of hunting, gracefully steps into the realm of poetry with his latest literary offering Mumblecusser—a delightfully quirky collection. In Jones’s words, “These poems . . . are about late-life fatherhood, about aging and mortality.”