Books in the New Women's Voices Series series

"We keep our animals locked / in pages." Through Illuminated Creatures, the award-winning chapbook and modern interpretation of a medieval bestiary, Angela Sucich explores personal and human experiences using the frame of animal lore, taking inspiration from but also interrogating the dubious stories and illustrations that brought the creatures to life in old manuscripts. Poems play with the structures and constraints of poetic forms, especially syllabic verse, as well as more thematic boundaries and the questions they raise. What is in our nature and what can change? Who do our bodies belong to? What is on the other side of loss? What stories are our lives telling us, and how do we write new ones? Especially when "[a] myth is a danger, too, kept warm and intact by the telling." Winner of the 2022 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize and the 2022 Cutbank Chapbook Contest.

The poems included in Tunnel address those narrowings, distant lights, and burials that complicate the paths to self-discovery through childbirth, exposure, and love. Ultimately, the poems seek beyond the underneath and the hidden to unearth glimmers, and like the final crow, joy.

Lois Baer Barr's Tracks: Poems on the "L" announces an exciting new voice. Her poems are attentive to the electrical details of urban life, which she observes on her journeys across Chicago's "L." From these details, Barr constructs a portrait of Chicago as it is today: a city marred by violence and by grotesque wealth; a city whose beauty is urgent and extraordinary for those who care to look at it closely. This is a poetry written in the public square and for it-a poetry that proposes, through the precision of its attention, to help us see each other more clearly.-Toby Altman, Author of Discipline ParkThe movement of the train meets the movement of life in the poems of Lois Baer Barr's Poems on the "L", and we readers are Barr's fortunate passengers, carried through a range of Chicagoan experiences in fresh, thoughtful, and indeed poetic ways. These poems carry a sense of joy of the communal journey-and what it means to never stop being surprised by our time with others, as so beautifully summed up in words from the final poem of the collection "Fail Better II": I want to ride the "L" again- / share air space, delays, rattles / and hums. Sway with other riders. / A poetry petri dish, the "L" / is so full of people's stories, / you cannot fail to find one.-Andrea Witzke Slot, Author of The Ministry of Flowers (Valley Press) and To find a new beauty (Gold Wake Press)What a wonderful read!! Inventive, touching, funny, Tracks: Poems on the "L" is Lois Baer Barr's love letter to Chicago and to her life in late middle age. She takes us on a journey through physical and emotional landscapes with an empathy and expansiveness that leaves her readers changed, as she is changed by her encounters with the people she meets.-Ellen Birkett Morris, Author of LOST GIRLS

Amanda Gomez's Wasting Disease is the antithesis of the vajazzled pussies of which she writes. The collection's poems strip away social constructs, to expose naked pain. Little girls disintegrate like diseased starfish. The Jets rape Anita because she's a brown girl. A dreamer performs her mother's autopsy, clearing out the torso to make a maternal space for herself. Lips become scissors. And love is venomous. Gomez takes us to the brink of confusion, rage, fear, abandonment, despair-the horrors of a people in steep decline-and holds us on the precipice with a final line of disconcerting commentary, a new kind of nakedness ... a lesson in scars. Read the collection. See us our worst. Hope for something better. -Kit-Bacon Gressitt, publisher of Writers ResistWhat is language in the hands of a poet? Should it yield smoothness, a polished and easy finish? That would be too easy. In the poetry of Amanda Gomez, language is above all restored to its true function, so we might trust it again and give it the proper respect- for its capacity to expand rather than merely limit experience, for its ability to render visible rather than subdue or eclipse. If an autopsy is meant to see into the flayed body, poetry is meant to lovingly return it to itself. "Please, don't take me for tragic," she asks; for this is a poet brave enough to "wear the galaxy like a dress." -Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser and The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis"Amanda Gomez spares no one and no thing in her brilliant and sharp debut, Wasting Disease. 'I guess what I am saying is, every girl / learns to disintegrate' she tells us, not in resignation but in rage. This is a book of so many things-yes, rage, but there is so much more. Gomez writes 'Everywhere I stare my shadow is running.' And haven't we all known that place? That place of self-loathing and displacement? In Wasting Disease, Gomez sticks her hands deep in the mud to pull out all the things we have buried, not to shame us, but to ask "who made us feel this way?" The fingers point in complicated directions-to gender, to race, to colonization, to language, to ourselves-but make no mistake: Wasting Disease is not a book asking you to come clean. Rather, it begs you to dance in all the facets of your humanity, light and dark." -Nishat Ahmed, Author of Field Guide for End Days and Brown Boy

In Go Ask Alice, Liz Axelrod invites us to view the world through the looking glass prism of her thoroughly postmodern imagination. Ironically, though, instead of distortions, we enjoy sharp observations that capture our contemporary landscape with an irreverent and dark, celebratory wit. This collection offers a panoply of our common obsessions-food, sex, politics, technology-showing how they impinge upon and transform our many identities. As passionate as "full moon fever," yet delicate as "hand-colored sound-bytes," these poems create a wonderland of extravagant delights well worth exploring. ~ Elaine Equi *** "The sky's the limit," writes Liz Axelrod, "if you've got good aim." She does. With Lewis Carroll's Alice as a guide through a terrain of lived experience, Axelrod shoots the shit out of the clown circus that is life itself-and never misses. A single page has healing powers (and not only when watching Netflix). Meanwhile, Axelrod's Saturn births the hexagon cloud that brings our matter home, home to these very healing pages. ~ Sharon Mesmer

House of Women is where the inner lives of the women you love dwell. Kristin Kovacic's poems let you peer inside to honest female experiences in its many forms--lover, mother, daughter, artist, teacher, wife. New Women's Voices Series, No. 119

owlmouth is a collection of poems about transformation. Michele Marie Desmarais (Métis, Dakota, European) offers perspectives on the environment, being-in-relationship, the need for change and the process of healing. These poems are an expression of an Indigenous worldview replete with relationships between human and other-than-human persons. owlmouth is about the possibilities of transformation within a life-in the face of colonialism and the sometime liminal identities on the urban rez. Reflecting on experiences of historical trauma due to the Indian Residential/Boarding Schools, as well as climate change and the responsibilities we have for our relatives who include both human and other-than-human persons, owlmouth is also about intergenerational resiliency, healing and the necessities of transforming the dominant culture. Depending on the Nation or culture, an owl may bring medicine, wisdom, or death. These poems explore all three within the overall theme of transformation, and, in doing so, reflect upon belonging, home, Indigenous/Native American perspectives, and the intersection of multiple moments, beings and cultures.

In Two Tongues, Lana Issam Ghannam writes about her experiences growing up as a first-generation Palestinian-American in post-9/11 America. She creates small scenes from big perspectives in each poem as she navigates her two cultures from adolescence to adulthood. She moves in and out of family duty, religion, culture, gender expectations, patriotism, and competing languages in the search for her truest identity. These poems represent her growth, stand for her pride, and strive for the absolute strength known by so many immigrated families-"I grow beneath the ground / in this America of coloring seas. / …I am of this earth, this flame / …I own the roots of this land."

The poems in Frost Flowers by Winifred Hughes plunge, open-eyed and open-hearted, into the natural world-its seasonal rhythms and impenetrable mysteries, its vanishings, its incorrigible quality of being alive. They seek to chronicle the encounter between the non-human and the all-too-human, the passion and longing of our species as we relate to our natural environment, both apart from it and a part of it. Like the swallows and tanagers and foxes, like the box elder and frostweed, we are transitory creatures living in vivid moments. These poems are propelled by curiosity, precise observation, and a sense of wonder; they are a searching, a probing into the secrets at the heart of natural processes, which are the fundamental processes of life and death. The natural world appears under all its contradictory aspects-sharp stones in a streambed, hatchlings clinging to their precarious nest, wildflowers that are both beautiful and poisonous, the exuberance and overflowing life of a flock of blackbirds. In the midst of such fullness and blossoming, there is always the possibility of frost, whether nipping early buds or being transformed into late-blooming flowers made of ice. Like our fellow species, from hardwood trees growing slowly over centuries to small passerines with speeded-up metabolisms, we are subject to the passage of time; before we can quite grasp it, our moment is gone. Throughout, we are inextricably bound up in our natural context, in the wild places and wildlife that are increasingly threatened by human activity.

New York City native Dina Paulson-McEwen's debut poetry collection, Parts of love, (Finishing Line Press, 2018) was a 2017 finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Parts of love explores interstices in loving, delving into themes of relationships, living, the body, and desire, and includes prose and lyric poems. "Paulson-McEwen plays with paradox, excavating moments of hope amongst the seeming ruins, "that signal you sent - / a dagger of fire / amongst all the black - / will bring me home /". These poems are not merely to be read, but to be dissolved into with a whole and vulnerable spirit," writes author Robin Richardson. Parts of love speaks to (an) experience of love from/within a woman's body. Author Marthe Reed writes, "Simultaneously site of desire, sexual fulfillment, ritual, and reproduction, the girl body [in Parts of love] is figured also as site of disobedience, investigation, erasure, trauma of the medicalized self. Paulson-McEwen's response? Go into dream, into ritual, into love-making and self-love, resistance writ as love-cum-beloved...Tantric, celebratory, bewitching, Parts of love takes l-o-v-e as a new divine/beloved, site and center of worship, ecstatically evoking love's manifold quotidian forms against any and all erasures."

Strange Roof is a bold collection that shines a light on women as immigrants, emigrants, mothers, daughters, wives and artists. The poems are fresh; searingly honest, sharp, poignant and accessible.

Deborah Kahan Kolb was born and raised in an insular Hasidic community in Brooklyn, NY, and many of the poems featured in her debut chapbook Windows and a Looking Glass are reflective of her strict religious upbringing. Ultimately, she left the constraints of the community and has written poetry informed not only by her uniquely challenging past, but also by family and community, marriage and children, and shared histories and experiences. Windows and a Looking Glass is the poet's first offering - a gathering of anecdotes, snippets, and glimpses of characters and stories that populate the childhood and adulthood of this first-time author. The poems take the reader on a modern and edgy, autobiographical and biographical, observant and experiential excursion through childhood and community, relationships and marriage, and back to childhood and parenting on the other end.Poems included in this collection are winners of the Queens College James E. Tobin Poetry Award, "Zhou Ling," a finalist for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award, and "Eldest Daughter," a piece that highlights the oppression of women in Hasidic communities (in Veils, Halos & Shackles).