You know those cute little books right by the cash register at the book store? The ones that have fifty ways to remind yourself you are beautiful or humorous tracts on puppy antics? Well David Atkinson’s new book of short stories, Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change From My Pockets, despite the catchy-kitschy title and cover which might suggest otherwise, is not such a book. What kind of book it is, however, is hard to pin down, as each story wiggles away from logic, reason and what we commonly think of as “plot” or “story”. Or typical anything, really.

What if the people you come from were from warring tribes, colonizer and slave, the indentured and the human trafficker? What if your own origin myth is one of violence and clash? This is the territory of Cherokee Road Kill, brave poems by the courageous, spiritually enlightened and linguistically acrobatic poet, Celia Bland.

“Who says you need five rivers/ to reach the underworld?” asks Leslie Contreras Schwartz in one of the title poems of her new collection Nightbloom and Cenote. In these rich, and layered, evocative poems, like “My Mother As a Child Surrounded by Night-Blooming Jasmine,” Contreras Schwartz shows us there are many routes indeed, as well as many underworlds.

I am one of those dreadful people who dog ear the books. Not the library ones – don’t freak out here. But my own. The best ones look a little scary. Like they might have been to Bosnia in certain years or have traveled up the Amazon on a raft. I find a phrase or passage I find enchanting and there I go, making little triangles on the page tops. And if I really, really love the writing, a pen will find its way into the equation. Then the book will become a super mess, pages fattened by folds and demarcated by my literary liner notes. These are the books I will go back to, time and again, to find a certain phrase, or to try and locate a certain feeling the writer inspired. They are topographical maps of their impression upon me, all bent up and beat by my affections.

In the heart of Lynn McGee’s collection of poetry, Sober Cooking, is a heart. A broken heart, both figuratively and literally. A full heart, same deal.

Illness and love and longing comingle and conspire in this book to give us that cross-hatched country where love and human frailty meet. In some poems, lovers practice the slow waltz of relationship building and losing. In others, the tenderness of blue hospital light and the bedsides of the sick and beloved find a special and arched attention. It is clear throughout that McGee knows the country of love. She knows the country of loss. This book is a map of each and the places they overlap.