In Debris Jonathan Wells is concerned by the tension between the internal world of the lyric and an external world of violence and intrusion. Following this conflict through poems of rumination, imagination and increasing threat, the book resolves in a eulogy that is simple and touching. In one of the opening poems, “Notes from the Invasion”, the speaker asserts, “The worst has happened. There is nothing/to imagine,”. The collection as a whole asks us to consider the questions: without imagination, what is left of the poem and the mind in a time of catastrophe? How are we to find peace? Experience love? Wells invites us to join him in the lyric’s journey, to shelter in reading, and to travel in the imagination in order to protect the self from danger and risk without denial.

How does art mirror and shape our lives? Can it transcend the boundaries of time, wealth, and circumstance? Debra Spark—whose previous work the Washington Post described as "richly imaginative" and "real world magic"—explores these themes in her new novel Discipline. With a trio of important paintings missing, the book weaves together three narratives that span almost a century. From an inhumane boarding school in Maine in the late 1970s to a contemporary Boston art appraiser struggling with raising a teen to the long-lost love letters between a painter and his wife, Discipline is a propulsive literary mystery about family strife and devotion, ambition and authorship, and the abiding and mysterious power of art.

Inspired by the life and family of Walt Kuhn (the painter responsible for the 1913 Armory Show that introduced Americans to modernism) and the scandal-ridden Elan boarding school that was forced to shut down in 2011, this richly drawn, suspenseful novel shows Spark at her most masterful.
 

Cintia Santana’s virtuoso debut collection, The Disordered Alphabet, reckons with the emotional anarchy of our lives, baring the difficulty of wrestling experience into language. She surveys a cosmic crossroads, “the sluices of heaven wording as we [stand] in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning.” These poems pay homage to inherited forms while fashioning their own shapes — Santana writes in alliterative verse, in footnotes, in epistles to consonants and vowels, in ekphrasis, in thrall. Ranging from A to Z in style, subject, and mood, Santana’s poetic encyclopedia chronicles life’s ubiquitous elegies alongside the world’s innumerable wonders — true to jumbled experience, they arrive in no particular order, or in the particular order of all the time and all at once. If “let there be” enabled light, it released every other sublime liquid, for then also “there was lie. // Lapse. And lake. Luck and leap. Little by little. Letter by letter. And it was late. / And there was bloom.”