Julie Danho

 "In Julie Danho's THOSE WHO KEEP ARRIVING, the personal is political and the political is terrifying. Danho faces this terror and transcends it to make stunning poems about creating a home and family. She often employs the ekphrasis mode, seeing well-known visual pieces anew, using them as vehicles for exploration. She also writes her own character studies in American Landscape and other forms. In 'Abstraction,' a sonogram is imagined as art on a wall called 'Moon, Clouds, / Volcano Taken From Above.' The glittering surfaces of her elegant poems are as fascinating as their substance."—Denise Duhamel

Craig Beaven

"I've been an admirer of Craig Beaven's poetry for years; for its deep focus as well as its immaculate craft. In NATURAL HISTORY the poet's domestic life—impending parenthood and marriage—is often in the foreground, but in the background of these poems is a deep, unsettling sense of history and time itself that haunts. NATURAL HISTORY is a deeply American, wonderfully accessible collection of poems, in voice, but it carries as well a freight of uncommon depths and shadows."—Tony Hoagland

Gigi Marks

 "If you focus on [Marks'] poems line by line and phrase by phrase, very often they turn out to be anything but calm. They turn out to be quite brilliant and quite insightful and sometimes quite reassuring but sometimes quite disturbing. I am tempted to compare them not only to other poets, but also to the work of painters and musicians. Claude Monet comes to mind, in fact, as does Nick Drake, let's say, in that you can think of them as beautiful background, but you can also think of them as terribly brilliant foreground. Marks, I think, looks more closely at familiar spaces and things than most of us can, and the more closely you look at her language the more you get out of it. And the more I read [her work], the warmer I feel about it, the more I see a range of emotion from gratitude to anger in those poems whose surfaces are so calm. And the more I read it the more I like it."—Stephanie Burt

Aaron Brown

Winner of the 2018 Nelson Poetry Award from the Kansas Authors Club. "Aaron Brown's ACACIA ROAD moves between the past and the present, and the known and the unknown, wandering the rooms of memory and the knowledge of the body. But ACACIA ROAD also evokes real places, full of real lives and hard lessons, deeply felt and evocatively rendered. The narratives in this book resist easy certainty, and the images suggest how distance is both a measure of miles, and an important emotional register, as a cloud-like voice rises up to say, 'pay attention / or you will / miss your destination.' And these poems do pay close attention. To language—'I knew how to sing a little.' To time—'then and only then could we share a kind of silence, the pause between one cup of tea and the next.' And, ultimately, to the questions that remain for all of us as we travel together: 'Now, as the meat on my bones passes through death's teeth, will you remember me?' One way I measure the impact of a book is in my desire to start over again when I am finished, and it was a deep pleasure to turn and return to the mysterious and familiar roads of these richly imagined poems."—Jenny Browne, judge for the 2018 Nelson Poetry Award

Alison Jarvis

Winner of the 2015 Gerald Cable Book Award. "In Alison Jarvis' extraordinary WHERE IS NORTH, a life unfolds between breath-taking love poems. There's a powerful arc, but it's a vortex, more visceral than linear. Dramatic moments enclose each other like Russian dolls, 'the future falling back into itself,' so that the air between I and Thou becomes charged with the trials of childhood, the rigors of history, the mirror-life of dreams…WHERE IS NORTH is a profoundly necessary book for our strange era."—D. Nurkse

Robert Hunter Jones

"In WINTER GARDEN, everything slides toward the leaf rot and the twisted roots—the apparitions of a father, two countries, the landscapes of childhood, and the hinterlands of obsession and imagination. Aesthetics and hand tools, myth and winter light, and so much of the world's raw materials become hopelessly entangled and ultimately numinous. This book is a paean to place, a witness to the mysteries of the examined life, and a true gift for those of us who think the poet's profession is to invent a new language for a singular vision."—Michael McGriff

Randolph Thomas

"This accomplished first collection of poems by Randolph Thomas announces itself in rich poetic narrative and character invention, well-wed in the art of the persona, which has too often been rendered as unmasked autobiography in much of the poetry of the second decade of the twenty-first century. We can happily detect a sweet new sound in the work of Randolph Thomas, a young master in full career."—Michael Heffernan