We’re keeping poetry alive beyond National Poetry Month with a May showcase of indie press poets, Wednesday, May 26, at 4pm on our YouTube page. Four poets join to read from and ask/answer questions about their recent books.

Nik De Dominic – Goodbye Wolf (The Operating System, 2020)
Goodbye Wolf is a collection of poems alternating between the author’s subversion of the horoscope and its tropes and his epistles to chronic illness, dear wolf or lupus. The poems explore the everydayness of disease and the absurdity of asking for answers from the stars — and of course waiting for their replies. Someone once said the longer you wait for the bus, the sooner it’ll arrive.

Avni Vyas – Little God (Burrow Press, Oct. 2021)
In the wake of a miscarriage, a speaker looks outside of herself for a sign. In looking through her past, the figure of Little God arrives to shape-shift grief into self-knowledge. Unlike benevolent deities who receive prayers and bestow blessings, Little God offers faulty insight and callous love. Through these poems, Little God explores family, diaspora, grief, loss, and landscape. Set in southwest Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, ibises, and manatees echo possible lives that never arrive in the form one expects. These poems negotiate finding one’s place in the world, and the courage to leave that place. With illustrations by Mimi Cirbusova.

Heather Green – No Other Rome (Akron University Press, March 2021) 
In No Other Rome, the title’s “o”s are islands (wholes) or holes, lacunae, apertures through which we view the past or future. The poems in this collection engage contemporary art and Modern literature, alongside texts from Classical Greece and Rome, in an embodied, intertextual worry. The poems ask what lasts–“please last”–and what might be the last (or, with an “o,” “lost,”) “time,” “auk,” or “breath” as we move away from twentieth-century concerns into an unpredictable future. When there is no Planet B, no other Troy to burn, these elegies, love poems, and meditations seek a song that could “in singing, change the seen.”

Jesse DeLong – The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook (Baobab Press, April 2021)
Jesse DeLong’s full-length debut, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, is a collection of poems set among the mines and farmlands of Idaho. The severe landscapes move the speaker to investigate his romantic and familial relationships through lyric considerations of the natural world and scientific concepts. Like the seeds on the face of a sunflower, each poem is both whole and a piece of a whole. Mimicking this structure, or the “struggle of scale,” these poems combine love and science, and the product is both declaration and interruption, elusive and graspable, love and the deconstruction of love. In The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, the friction between the stone and the mountain demonstrates the wonder generated in this struggle to become, to grow, and to change.