About the Books
Uncomfortable Ecologies is an exploration of relationships and their tenuous nature. Levinson explores the domestic and wild, the macro and the micro, the familiar and the other, the objective and the confessional. These poems seek to uncover vulnerabilities within ecologies as a bridge to a new level of understanding and intimacy.
NIGHT HAG speaks of femininity through the eternal voice of Lilith, the first woman. NIGHT HAG is an exploration of yin strength and autonomy of body, heart, and mind. NIGHT HAG invites readers to consider distinctions between selfishness and self-care.
What is the love poem’s function? Does it eternally preserve the beloved as they actually are, or does it warp and suffocate them, locking them inside stanzas and lines from which they will never escape? In Ventric(L)e, Jerrod E. Bohn dissects the heart’s labyrinthine structure. The organ is an intricate house, full of delight, surprise, and possibility; however, its chambers are also walled, barred. The heart is equally a cage. What began as a series of love poems took a turn with the relationship’s erosion. Are the poems themselves at fault? Did the page become the prison from which the beloved struggled to break free, and when they couldn’t, did it hasten the physical act of leaving? And what remains behind when the beloved is gone? Are they still entrapped even when another comes along? Through meditations dense with sorrow and hope, the sacred and the profane, Bohn explores the love poem’s power to both create and destroy.
Cormorant is a work of contrition. The poems are political and personal. A response to the federal government’s plan to kill thousands of cormorants in the name of salmon recovery and a tribute to the person who died from heartbreak because of it.
In a post pandemic world, how do we rebuild what is broken? Pool Parties dives into dinosaurs, pop culture, hospital beds, barnacles, geology, and the soil of the midwest to dig through and sift our aching to heal psyche. Found poems about crystals, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and building trails are just some of the topics of these playful yet sometimes dark poems. Once shielding ourselves from the world in tiny boxes, we now long to break the glass, feel the sun, and one another, but it is scary. Try to connect we must, if we fail, we must fail better. What rooms are our safe spaces? What woods? From Ranch for Sale, As is: “In the god trees you disappeared into Port wine and too many off ramp brown eye role playing games. My heart in a 1960s ranch style basement. Thought you’d come in, shake out the red and white checkered tablecloth, pull aside the daisy patterned curtains.” MacBain-Stephens invites us to dive into the deep end of the pool where it is always too cold at first. We don’t trust our own pleas for help and need a third operator to repeat our words back to us: “the operator whispers / plays the soundtrack to the The Third Man / listens in, but this isn’t Orson Welles in black and white beauty…” (from The Telephone Operator Knows When to Plug in.) Pool Parties is a delicious awkward visit to that place you left too quickly, just when it was getting interesting.
22-year-old Jacob Constantine has everything he needs—an Ivy League education, a wealthy family, and the lucrative offer to take over his father’s real estate empire. The only problem is he doesn’t know what he wants, other than his ex-girlfriend Deirdre back. When she attempts to rekindle their relationship one week before his departure to Germany—where he accepted a one-year job to put off the inevitable career with his father—the presence of the past begins to overshadow his temporary escape from the future.
With the help of a beer-guzzling, flatulent punk rocker named Stinki, and Julia, the beautiful and spirited intern at the American Studies department where he works, Jake tries to navigate the present tense in Germany. But as he speeds toward his unwanted future, no amount of sex, drugs, or punk rock can keep the dark secrets from the past from being stirred up in the wake of Deirdre’s reappearance.
Equally funny and foul, heartwarming and heartbreaking, "Release Me" is a coming-of-age story about a young man who understands that home is where the heart is, but is stuck pondering the question, “Where is my heart?”
With the help of a beer-guzzling, flatulent punk rocker named Stinki, and Julia, the beautiful and spirited intern at the American Studies department where he works, Jake tries to navigate the present tense in Germany. But as he speeds toward his unwanted future, no amount of sex, drugs, or punk rock can keep the dark secrets from the past from being stirred up in the wake of Deirdre’s reappearance.
Equally funny and foul, heartwarming and heartbreaking, "Release Me" is a coming-of-age story about a young man who understands that home is where the heart is, but is stuck pondering the question, “Where is my heart?”