Poems that navigate the complexities of human relationships, personal ethics, and religious tradition.
 
Wind moves through this collection, opening the poems to the dying beauty of the natural world, to the weathers inside the psyche and without, and to the connections between a family and between the speaker his mentor, the great poet Jack Gilbert. The collection navigates the intimacies of human relationships with others, the challenges of working as a lawyer trying to maintain integrity as others fall prey to corporate greed, and the complexity of holding a Jewish identity while being awake to tradition’s hold on the mind and its cost. Steven Rood offers a powerful account of how to be a human in dynamic relationships while also holding respect for the non-human beings that comprise most of the life on our planet.
 
Rood employs structures and forms that directly relate to the content of the poems themselves. Spontaneous breaks and starts reflect the writer’s turns of mind, offering readers insight into the meaning and measure of the work.
 

A surreal story in verse that follows a woman facing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic alongside ecological crisis and crumbling social norms.
 
Jennifer Hasegawa’s Naomie Anomie​: A Biography of Infinite Desire, is an experimental poetic take on biography, growing increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a call for attention to the looming ecological crisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling.
 
Feeling ever-increasing existential strain leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and culminating in her decision to no longer venture outside of her apartment, Naomie is not surprised to find her name is an anagram for anomie, a term for the breakdown of social norms. In these pages is a meticulous account of everything that went wrong in Naomie’s five decades of life. We find retellings of a life’s most significant moments—not because they are sources of pride, but because they stand as the only decipherable moments of humanity amid a world of static. This story in verse acts as a survival guide, romance novel, liberation handbook, pulp thriller, and jokebook for those who will live through ongoing plagues, environmental change, total AI integration, water wars, and cyberattacks and who will come out the other side ready to restart.
 

Poems derived from momentary reflections saved in the poet’s subjectless emails.
 
The poems of (no subject) are an investigation of the personal and the everyday. This collection draws inspiration from the idea of the quickly written subjectless email, as the poet would clear small periods of time to write and record observations and thoughts, then send it to himself in untitled emails. The book takes the shape of an impressionistic twenty-first-century diary, reflecting on themes of anxiety about the future and the situation of the present. As these moments compound, the line between the present, past, and future is blurred in the conflation of self and memory. Driven by a speaker who is hermetically sealed in their private world, these ostensibly subjectless poems derive their meaning through the tension between narrative and emotional resonances. Through moment-to-moment reflections, (no subject) digs deep in search of the big little feelings transmitted by fatherhood, the fusion of time and space, loneliness, resilience, and wonder.