In lines taut as a drum or the stakes of a tent of meeting, we meet in Brooks’s Forbearance a restraint that belies an urgent strength, poems training us for some contest or some kingdom here and sure to come—as sinewy and hale a debut as I’ve seen

There isn’t anything affected in either Garrett Soucy’s singing voice or his literary style. Both are spare as a cabin in the Maine woods, a cast iron stove in the corner for heat, but also for hardness. Sometimes when walking, one comes upon the remnants of such a place, a chimney that has out-lasted its house. That’s these poems: compelling, comfortable, and classic as brick.

"Scattered about, some seeds surely fall on the road, some are choked by weeds, and others fall on good soil and sprout. The work of Calis’ weighty new collection is to see all of them—the bloomed and fruiting ones along with the choked and trampled—as a testament to the long, slow, and holy struggle toward cultural healing, nourishment, the light."

The poems in City Nave twist and slither off the page, never still, ablaze one breath and ashen the next, here admonishing, there searching, always, like a Phoenix, fiery, always re-birthing.

Readers will be staggered at how much scholarship and good humor, how much formal dexterity and easy cadence, they find in these poems. A Testament of Witnesses is startling, aloft, and all of it singing an otherworldly glory.

For all its intimations of quietude, there's a wildness in Pastor's poems- think Berryman's dreaming songs or Whitman's barbarian yawp-a rusticity that is as defiant as it is pastoral. This book is a plumage, not of butterfly or bird, but of moth wing, which is to say: a blessing.

Ben Palpant’s poems in The Stranger breakdance through both biblical and literary history, remixing tunes from Tennyson and Gwendolyn Brooks with samples from the pop band Starship and the Divine Office. But those juxtapositions are not this strong collection’s best surprise. Rather, it’s the big quiet after each poem ends in which we mouth both How true and Hallelujah. This book is at once a daring and a tender undertaking.

After so much posturing on the parts of pundits, preening celebrities, poets on the picked through street market of the avant-garde; after so much hollow flash, so much essentially genre-bent lineated prose of small epiphanies; after so much, well, else, Jeremiah Webster’s After So Many Fires comes out of the Pacific Northwest like rain: greening everything, cleaning the language, sharpening the eye, casting a slant-lit wonder about this whole good God-haunted earth, and, most importantly, allowing again a kind of deep breathing.