The river does not ask how you fell in only takes you, cold and certain, pulling at your lungs like a quiet demand. Branches lean in, witnesses with trembling hands, while the current wraps your ribs in a tightening hush a language of weight, of breath stolen before it forms. You learn the sound of silence pressed beneath the surface, how panic blooms like thunder with nowhere to go. You kick, you claw, but the water is patient, and it knows how to hold. There, in the dim green blur, you meet the heaviness not just of water, but of everything you tried not to carry. And still something in you refuses to dissolve. A fracture of light, a memory of air, a stubborn, flickering yes you rise. You break through not into peace, but into ache lungs burning, body shaking, the world louder than you remember. Because survival is not gentle. It is the gasp, the trembling, the fight to stay when leaving would be easier. And yet you stay. You learn the rhythm again: in, out not just breath, but choice. You become river-shaped strong where it matters, soft where it heals, carving kindness from stone. And though the current still moves, though the depths still call, you stand in the shallows with something unbroken a quiet knowing that even forced under, even undone, even lost in the weight we rise above it all.
give me the large dose small doses of kindness are beautiful, yet sometimes are not enough;
surviving off of crumbs a soul can still starve—
i prefer large doses of kindness that last and linger on more than a single day,
i want do be drowned in flowers, trinkets, affection, compliments, and love;
i want to know i matter to someone else other than me—
i want to linger on the mind as a dream or a haunting crow, whose inky black feathers and eerie song bring no peace in accordance to how a soul treated me. -linda m. crate
So we often have friends releasing new books. And we love to recommend them. Here’s our book recommendations. We try to get it done every Saturday but we are busy so we may have missed a few.
Weeds and Stars By Lisa Rosenberg From the celestial to the ground beneath our feet, from supernovas and nebulas to dandelions and the beautiful mundanity of the everyday, Weed and Stars houses us in the living herbarium of its vibrant poetry.— Ariel Francisco Henriquez Cos, Judge, 2025 Hilary Tham Capital Collection PRE-ORDERS ONLY AT THIS TIME. RELEASE DATE IS APRIL 21.
About to Disappear by Robbi Nester About to Disappear is a poetry collection that explores the limits of ekphrasis; that is, descriptions and reflections on works of art in order to expand their meaning. The book is separated into four sections: Ex Nihilo, Adaptation, Law of Attraction, and Ad Nihilum. The first and final sections-translated as “from nothing, returning to nothing”-act as bookends. Ex Nihilo includes poems about imagination, optics, creation, and and development; while poems in the final section, Ad Nihilum, are about trauma, unmaking, climate change, and catastrophe. Poems in the middle sections are about artistic, psychological, and physical transformations, and natural history and community. Artworks included are from contemporary artists-as well as such artists as Vermeer, Grant Wood, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper.
It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath by Kevin Risner Anchored by the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kevin A. Risner’s debut full-length poetry collection It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath is both introspective and outward-facing, rippling from the poet’s inner life into family and friendships, work and unemployment, suburban life, and wildlife. The collection draws on daydreams and nightmares, small animals’ housecalls, and memories of childhood. Concerns about health and emotional well-being intermingle with the worries about what climate change will bring in a world hellbent on maintaining the capitalist status quo. Though not without that unbeatable Rust Belt hope, this is a collection that sits with the heavy weight of what the powers that be have done to the natural world and what it might take for ordinary people to survive in the years and decades to come. “It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath reflects on our collective quarantine year with a burgeoning hope in the face of dread’s drumbeat. It’s no surprise that Kevin A. Risner’s poems snap with a pulse from The National because both yearn for what could be (or for what could’ve been) amid bedraggled reality. ‘I’m the only human who weeps for this lone songbird,’ Risner writes, but his poetry connects us. We all feel, and weep, with Risner through his poems. With our hearts on our sleeves, we struggle as one with ‘[t]he knowledge that I can try my best and I might still fail.’ The year 2020 separated us, but It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath brings us together.” – Mitchell Nobis, author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees
The Weather Inside by Stevie Edwards In The Weather Inside, Stevie Edwards measures the emotional atmosphere of a mind navigating bipolar disorder, complex PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and alcoholism while forging intimacy and creative resilience in a rapidly declining world. Both as someone who has struggled with mental health and as a feminist approaching middle age, Edwards interrogates parenthood and marriage: What forms of nurturing survive when traditional roles and certainties do not? Can bringing children into a collapsing world still be an act of hope? When your partner does not want children, where should you divert your surfeit of love? The poet grieves, “I am chanting the name of a daughter / my husband doesn’t want / enough, the child I’ve spent years / not being sure I deserved.” This fiercely honest and intimate collection offers a vision of adulthood shaped by the capacity to inhabit an embattled inner world. With clarity and dark wit, Edwards probes the uneasy border between solitude and connection, asserting the relationship between caring for oneself and caring for the wider world.
Where is the Green? by Carolyn Donnell The author/artist has paired her original artwork with her poetry in a way that makes you wonder which inspired the other. She writes both structured and unstructured verse, some poems as short (and deep) as haiku and others that meander from thought to thought, taking you along with them. There’s even a shaped poem…no spoilers, I’ll let you discover the image in the words for yourself.
i define myself watching from a distance, you can lose your whole life waiting to become;
and so i decided to believe in myself and my dreams—
for it didn't matter if others could see what i saw, only that i could get there;
because there's nothing this simulation can do to hold me back from becoming who i truly am—
i am magic, i am a melody, a poem, a song, i am the crow, the fox, the creek, the tree; i am immortal and i will never be forgotten no matter how many discard me—
i define myself although many others have tried, they don't know my heart or the mythology of these bones. -linda m. crate
