front cover of Back to the Woods
Back to the Woods
Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Cynthia Cruz reevaluates the paradox of the death drive in her eighth collection of poetry, Back to the Woods. Could it be that in ceaselessly snuffing ourselves out we are, in fact, trying to survive? In “Shine,” Cruz’s speaker attests that “if [she] had a home, it would be // a still in a film / where the sound / got jammed.” This book inhabits the silence of the empty orchestra pit, facing “dread, and its many / instruments of sorrow.” The quiet asks, “Did you love this world / and did this world / not love you?” We return to the site of our suffering, we perform the symphony of all our old injuries, to master what has broken us. To make possible the future, we retreat into the past. “I don’t know / the ending. // I don’t know anything,” our speaker insists, but she follows the wind’s off-kilter song of “winter / in the pines” and “the dissonance / of siskins.” Cruz heeds the urgency of our wandering, the mandate that we must get back to the woods, not simply for the forest to devour us — she recognizes in the oblivion “flooding out / from its spiral branches” an impossible promise. At the tree line, we might vanish to begin again. 
 

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Bastards of the Reagan Era
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Four Way Books, 2015
Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, confronting realities that frame an America often made invisible. Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear “the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world.” We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.
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Bear, Diamonds and Crane
Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan
Four Way Books, 2011
Bear, Diamonds and Crane depicts the sansei, the grandchildren of Japanese immigrants to America in villanelles, haiku, and lyric poems collaged from family letters. Kageyama-Ramakrishnan recounts her relatives’ internment in Manzanar, the California concentration camp where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Honoring Sadako Sasaki, who, “after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, / […] folded / a thousand cranes/ for world peace,” Bear, Diamonds and Crane looks to the yonsei (fourth generation) to transform “the wound” that “resists erasure and cultural amnesia”: “For you, I will keep the ripe weight,/ […]/ The limes and climbing wisteria vines.”
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Begging for It
Alex Dimitrov
Four Way Books, 2013
In his debut collection of poems, Begging for It, Alex Dimitrov leads us through the streets, bridges, and bedrooms of New York City, sometimes as far away as Buenos Aires and Iceland, and as close as our own darkest corners. A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this “American Youth,” as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing—whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, “Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you.”
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Between Lakes
Jeffrey Harrison
Four Way Books, 2020
How does consciousness inhabit liminal spaces? In Jeffrey Harrison’s Between Lakes, the death of the speaker’s father places him in the ever-shifting zone between the living and the dead while also sending him back into his journey to manhood. Old arguments are reimagined: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a participant in one’s life as well as a witness and recorder of the lives of others? The exploration of these questions leads to new discoveries, including the way time reshapes the vision of one’s life and alters relationships, remaking a shared history. Harrison refrains from explanation, instead offering detail after trustworthy detail—less to prove a case than to imagine a life true to the original. Whether observing nature with steadfast precision or sensing the presence of his absent father while doing chores, Harrison sings the songs of experience in late middle life.
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Bianca
Eugenia Leigh
Four Way Books, 2023

“I thought I forgave you,” Eugenia Leigh tells the specter of her father in Bianca. “Then I took root and became / someone’s mother.” Leigh’s gripping second collection introduces us to a woman managing marriage, motherhood, and mental illness as her childhood abuse resurfaces in the light of “this honeyed life.” Leigh strives to reconcile the disconnect between her past and her present as she confronts the inherited violence mired in the body’s history. As she “choose[s] to be tender to [her] child—a choice / [her] mangled brain makes each day,” memories arise, asking the mother in her to tend, also, to the girl she once was. Thus, we meet her manic alter ego, whose history becomes the gospel of Bianca: “We all called her Bianca. My fever, my havoc, my tilt.” These poems recover and reconsider Leigh’s girlhood and young adulthood with the added context of PTSD and Bipolar Disorder. They document the labyrinth of a woman breaking free from the cycle of abuse, moving from anger to grief, from self-doubt to self-acceptance. Bianca is ultimately the testimony of one woman’s daily recommitment to this life. To living. “I expected to die much younger than I am now,” Leigh writes, in awe of the strangeness of now, of “every quiet and colossal joy.”

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The Bible of Dirty Jokes
Eileen Pollack
Four Way Books, 2018
When Ketzel Weinrach’s beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her family’s shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on the outskirts of Vegas), her long and apparently not-so-loving marriage to her recently departed husband Morty Tittelman (a self-styled professor of dirty jokes and erotic folklore), and her own failed career as a stand-up comic.
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Birches
Carl Adamshick
Four Way Books, 2019
Brutal and tender, Adamshick’s spare poems recount a son’s unsentimental and powerful love for his mother, while contemplating, in the wake of her death, what it is to be truly alive.
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Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows
Eugenia Leigh
Four Way Books, 2014
“Everyone warns us off the rocks. / But what will keep us from the river?” Leigh asks in her debut collection, which pieces together a kind of mythology in which the surreal and celestial coexist with the realities of childhood abuse as an adult speaker grapples with its lasting emotional trauma. Rooted in a place of deep faith and bottomless compassion, Leigh’s speaker struggles to remember, and to remind us all, “that to worship is to survive is to be / wholly human.”
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Blue Guide
Lee Briccetti
Four Way Books, 2018
In Blue Guide, Lee Briccetti is as much archeologist as tour guide as she excavates the layers of her life and reassembles the shards into poems that are stunning in their lyric wisdom. She moves easily, albeit restlessly, between past and present and here and there, from the streets of ancient Rome to post-9/11 lower Manhattan, ultimately concluding that “The dead / always tell us live.” Through this journey, she constructs a new architecture of the soul that realizes “In this happiness we build each other—”
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The Book of Ruin
Rigoberto González
Four Way Books, 2019
These poems consider the history of the Americas and their uncertain future, particularly regarding the danger of climate change, and suggest a line from colonialism toward a shattering “Apocalipsixtlán.”
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Buddha’s Dogs
Susan Browne
Four Way Books, 2004
These poems are at once tender, vulnerable, biting, heartbreaking, and hilarious. One moment you are laughing, the next moment drying your eyes. Edward Hirsch, judge of the Four Way Books 2002 Intro Prize says of Buddha’s Dogs, "There’s a ruthless authenticity—a deep cherishing—in Buddha’s Dogs, a splendidly mature first book of poems that is filled with moments of Proustian recall, with the comedy and the anguish, the beauty and the burning of lived experience."
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