so starved for touch
i trace my own arms to feel skin on skin
cracked lips tingle sinking battleship
in the absence
- ghost town

salt box traces longing and desire over the course of three long, grey Baltimore winters.

It’s how persons grow while sleeping
Like scabs have no feeling
But cover the skin-to-be
(It will feel later)

It’s how this person must always
Be incapable try to make dinner
Time this normality
(Can she do it?)
- Child World

In Holds Up When Shattered, Andrew writes into the breaking that comes with adulthood, the hard rush of insecurity and disorientation that fills in the corners when we leave child behind. These are poems of love, strength, and self finding; a search and tentative finding of self. Andrew’s eye for beauty and hope in all the small moments guides the us through the turmoil of motherhood, marriage, and the building of home.

everything we claim as a discovery
is someone’s dear, once beloved
- I Didn’t Come Here to Make F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Two hundred and fifty years later,
These jokers are still helping themselves.
Tentatively, I walk in their shoes.
Boldly, they speak with my words.
- Hospitality x COLONIZATION Collab

In Hinting at Decolonization, Andrews brings modern indigeneity full focus, holding the reader in the lived experience of colonial cause and effect. From West Auckland to San Francisco, Andrews tracks erasure, co-option, and theft as they appear in western popular culture, the performance of contrition, and the products on our shelves. At times cheeky and playful, Andrews' message is simple: it’s time to pull up this anchor. Land and Language Back.

they can go anywhere / they say / they can go anywhere but you / you go no further than railroad tracks, bridges, casings, and ordinary objects placed in extraordinary places. in the end, we’re lucky enough to have this floating deposit of pebbles returning every year. ours is a tied island. a step forth: a horizon: a step back back. a step forth: a step back
ponor

In these poems, Gotic confronts the fallacy of a war with an end. This is Bosnia and Germany. The year is 838, is 1878, 1945, 1992/94/95, and last week. This is the story of a people, a family, a girl. Gathered from memory, shared accounts, and the very documents that govern its future, We Need a Breathing Tongue Between brings the Bosnian War back into focus, and sets its legacy before us in true human scale. Read along as Gotic weaves poetry, narrative, and history together in this all too timely reflection on the fight for a country and the horror of war.

lately, I've been trying very hard not to start my poems the same way I always do-

this is what it feels like
this is what it looks like-
this is how
- envy in the form of four years of screaming

Bones's MAYBE JUST THIS is a reflection, a refraction—a dissection of selfhood and memory and generational unhealth. For the TransMad and unholy, these poems tread the path of unlearning and relearning we know so well. What of nature and nurture, what of family and frailty, both lost and found. At times defeated and at others defiant, MAYBE JUST THIS mines the past with eyes on the future, the present, a way to rebuild without denying the grief.

l am relentless brick and mortar.I am kicking and screaming, fawningWith desperation, to be loved backBy a mother, by my own hands

Patron Saint of Broken Things

One imagines the poems of Toothache written by carefully concealed wick light deep in the trenches behind enemy lines. These are testaments to a love found between the scarred and still fighting, a record of those determined to find joy. In toothache, Ozzy Welch’s own experience taps into an experience of mental illness and abuse that is too often shared by those who come up trans.

“Damage / on a Tuesday; / consequence / on a Saturday.” (Damage)

Thus begins the story that leads us to Molar, Allison Thung’s micro collection of poems that center her fractured relationship with her tooth. These poems are at once visceral and reflective. Like floss in the gap between canine and incisor,  Molar slips past the crown and exposes the bone.

Immediately, I want to make it count for something. I use meditation and tarot as an anchor, with immediate reflection. And now, how do you feel? And now, what is arising?

Sobriety becomes an incantation, a summoning spell. I gather bird feathers and selenite. I keep my pocketknife close.

Part diary, part cartography of the road they’re still walking, Christy Tending’s Sobriety Through the Major Arcana brings generosity and grace to the early days of their effort to forge a new path. There is hope in these words and there is also tension. As Kaveh Akbar tells us in Martyr, “Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day,” and Tending does fill them. The results of those long hours of thought and reflection, with the tarot to guide them, are gathered here

All we wanted

was to be enveloped, so yes,
I will be the car window, I will
be the pillow over your head,
I will be the paper coffee cup.
Social media is sacred in this
era of non-communication.
I protect you through my phone
and that's all I can do.
- For H

Sharp, barbed, and lovely, the poems in Olympic Speedwalker document love and life in your twenties, a time when everything is possible and few things look better than a nice night at home. Wolden takes us inside the friendships that sustain us, the loves that excite us, and the lasting sting of a loss. 

i, the  girl turned mockingbird. opening my beak and
spilling untruths— pretending i did not need my own
voice. tearing my soft, tender insides apart instead.
-   mouth & throat

In Body, Dissected Ivi Hua roughs out our edges, the points at which the body feels most raw and real. In transition, in the hands of another, in a bright patch of sunlight that highlights a scar. Vivid and drenched in the language of longing, this collection will be familiar to anyone whose sense of settled in their own skin came on fitful and slow. Hua cries out to those who 'kept our pain locked away and secluded, coating the agony in luster,  held knives to our lips' and offers less answer than voice to the choir. I'm here and you've been here, it's time we got out.

i become an exit wound with no place of entry. i become a bullet with no gun. i become a shell with no casing. i become unmade.

I offer my hands,
fingers tentatively wandering your skin
slick with honeyed gold
and I would love to [love you]
slit you amorously in situ
between then, now, and every now-and-then
 - Hedone

Dreamlike and evocative, Amorously in situ leans into the sweet ache of longing for a love consumptive even in loss. Immersed in the natural, Swanson's poems situation the body and it's wants as at one with the great griefs of the earth. Desperate and reflective, memories gnawed raw by moonlight, these are the words so often unsaid.

select an option from the drop-down menu.
how difficult can sculpting a self be?

Framed within the language of the technology that connects us, <bo(d)y rendering> is a confession, a cry out, a history of search terms typed under cover of darkness in twelve hidden tabs. Each poem a missive, A. Deshmane has dialed up the future and offers a record, of path and intention, as they bridge the gap.on goes here

It's 2004, 2024, and we're all "at the circus, for some reason." In Mall Water, Jaco delves into the interplay of gender, capitalism, the built environment, and the buy one get one horrors of existing in public. It's the stress, it's nascent adulthood, it's just that one hallway and you can avoid it. It's the jeans, but it isn't. You're 17, 20, 24 and washed in the worst kind of lighting. You're alive and real and want people to want to touch you and it is the worst kind of awful. The most graphic of tees will not save you. Eventually you'll find the right department store exit. Eventually you'll feel this in your bones.

Dirt Roads and night drives course through this collection. Each poem a headlight flash on hexagon, every page turn  a decision to hold speed,  roll backward, or stop. Mothers and fathers and .the bare earth that birthed us, what goes and what carries, what grows into You?

when you are a ghost story of the purest sort, when you, peerless,
discover you have no survival instinct, the question is not why, but
how could, why should you

Nothing, lover, will die with you.
-T4T4T4T4T4T4ever

“The body is never the end,” Sainwood tells us in her poem “Hour of Need,” and every line of this book explores what it means to see beyond the body. ‘What is eaten was given’ cradles the past and prays into the future as context for a queer, trans life being lived to its fullest right now. Sainwood’s naked discussions of sex, mental illness, fear, hope, and longing beg the reader into their own self reflection. Cis, trans, queer, straight, we are all praying to something with our bodies every day. How do you worship? What lies deep inside you? What must you let out?

Thy holy cities are a wilderness... From honesty about the vagaries of the body's desires to the cults of medieval saints to the streetcars and the Don river, Lafleur's poems probe what it means to be a queer person of faith formed by Toronto - the eternal city's - splendour and cruelty. In erotic, religious, and historical poems, Lafleur draws us back to the closeness of past and present, the compulsion of vocation, and the vast grace of the liturgical year.

The poems in DISASTERFIRE/DISASTERSTAR find tommy blake in conversation with the myriad parts that make up his self. These alters trip over, build onto, correct, and enlighten what tommy has, can, and will know. This is a window into a mind where all lives live concurrent, informing the now. When the mind breaks itself open, there’s reason. In the aftermath there’s fear and there’s wonder, both inside and out.