Books in the Mineral Point Poetry series

“As with the best writing, I found myself simultaneously devastated and soothed, satiated and hungry for more.”--Susanna Childress, author of Entering the House of Awe TANKA & ME is a visceral, pleading, and fierce collection of poems, underpinned with thudding vessels and satisfying wreckage. Kaethe Schwehn externalizes the overlooked power of women into a multidimensional character who hunts both the speaker and the reader. Our wild Tanka engages down deep with role-play, sex, prayer, and refusal until we can’t look away or stay quiet. These are love poems, but they love with claws and whiskey, bolt cutters and saws. You can love someone for a long time without knowing how, our speaker realizes, and Tanka prowls and preens and breaks us down until we know how to love ourselves, how to know ourselves, how to free ourselves. TANKA & ME is feminist poetry with muscle, bones, and heart. “Meet Tanka, the girlish/ghoulish spirit at the heart of Kaethe Schwehn’s marvelous TANKA & ME. She’s ‘all ears and a liver,’' knows extraordinary things, has a boyfriend named Briar and poignant adventures in grief, but her penchant for detail, at once hilarious and harrowing, is all Kaethe Schwehn.”--Leslie Adrienne Miller, author of Y

My Seaborgium sings songs of loss and growth, motherhood and viscera, elements and experience, with love and relatable grace. “I'll tell you the story,” the opening poem coos, “of how / I rolled around in a mail truck full of other / people's letters, I was that happy / to be your mother.” This speaker guides us into her expectant waiting, calling on insight from what she knows of her parents, what she thought she knew about her body, fables and gods. She asks all of these potential sources of wisdom to attend to her as forty weeks go by and she tries to detach because “it makes birth manageable,” even as she tests her nipples “to see if they lift / away from the breast” while “standing on a mountain / and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below.” My Seaborgium travels toward motherhood from before, during, and after the experiences of pregnancy and birth, as the speaker imagines the thickening of her infant’s fur and readies “for the bloody show.” The only wisdom she gleans from her passage is the live and atomic feeling that arrives for a child whom she tells to “be your element’s namesake / and alive, know it. My Seaborgium.” This is a book fat with heavy and wild love. Named a 2015 Best New Poet, Alicia Rebecca Myers is multiply published in prominent journals and magazines and has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts residency. “The poems of My Seaborgium utilize metaphor in an attempt to account for the beauty that emerges from our moments of greatest grief. . . . Even through the pain, Myers’s speaker struggles to pay attention, to unfold that pain in ways that feel particular and personal.”--Kiki Petrosino, author of Hymn for the Black Terrific

When the cutie-pie was opened, the birds began to sing, and what they sang was glittery and savage and fearless and dangerous—be careful with this book.—Catherine Wagner, author of Nervous DeviceThe fanged fairy of Emily Corwin’s forest-mud-stained collection asserts and sings with short rhymes and glitter-spells, and just as you’ve followed her into the deepest and darkest part of the woods, terrified, you’re asked to run away together / and promise to never / do this heart-skipping thing / with anyone else.Don’t be surprised when you find yourself answering yes, yes, yes.Confronting and darling, every word a perfect warm circlet of pink blood, My Tall Handsome raids every crystal jar on the lace-topped vanity for truth, poison, and song until you can’t remember why you ever thought pretty was better than powerful, sugar was better than bitter medicine, or dancing needed more music than your own voice.I sip the goblet down, tip it upside down / wear it as / a hat / I am a new shiny thing / and I steal you away from the hoopla hullabaloo rumpusYou won’t resist this kidnapping into the orchard, into the crabapple abracadabra—it is too crystalline a taking, and there are too many delicious chants to chant along the way.

“We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary voice in these poems” —Roy G. Guzmán, author of Restored Mural for OrlandoA truly incomparable collection, The Rise of Genderqueer constructs a voice with unmitigated and authentic yearning. Its poems soak ink into page from margin to margin, pressing into the reader’s assumptions about gender unmercifully. These poems demand, carry authentic wisdom, deliver keen argument, and disarm with sly wit. Wren Hanks challenges the status quo as neatly as a flower slid into the barrel of a rifle. These are utterly convincing prose forms studded with rhetoric he’s deftly remastered and sampled from our culture and conversations right now.“I’ll never be denatured, // I am nature,” Hanks’s poems insist, as the reader bears witness to a bigger world, light flooding into every corner, revealing what has always been true, vigorous, and expansive.