This collection of poems arose in the aftermath of the author’s profound loss of his grandson Rory, who was killed at the age of 21 by a drunk driver in Wilmington, North Carolina. Confronted daily with the temptation to retreat from life, he instead turned to language as a way of moving through overwhelming grief—not as therapy, not as art, not in search of closure, and not to impose meaning on what remains senseless, but simply to give voice to the unendurable and to speak of it.
“To anyone who has lost a love—which is all of us—a parent, child, friend, lover—these remarkable words are for you." —John Pielmeier, author of Agnes of God and Hook’s Tale “Deeply personal, deeply universal, Steve Lewis’ finely-crafted poems will clench your heart with salty grief, and then expand it, as love makes sacred ‘the sweet bread of sorrow.’ We are fortunate this imaginative and sensitive writer finds refuge in language.” —Irene O’Garden, poet, author, Off-Broadway playwright “Imagine Steve Lewis as a North Star just above the horizon. These pages hold sorrow, love, and the fierce ache of memory—not to explain the unspeakable, but to walk with it. Each poem feels like a sacred stone placed gently along the path of return.” —Larry Winters, The Making and Unmaking of a Marine Steven Lewis is a former Mentor at SUNY-Empire State College and The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College Writing, as well as a longtime freelance writer and editor. He is currently Senior Editor at WritersRead.org. His recent books include a novel, The Lights Around the Shore, and a poetry collection titled Fire in Paradise, co-authored with his daughter Elizabeth Bayou Grace. Paperback Page count: 63 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-33-8-
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In Oh Oblivion, Robert Krut presents poems written from the island between lives. They look out on a world disappearing, filled with the surreality of a city where a cardboard box containing a human heart awaits discovery (“Nocturnal Cartography”) to a country where gasping birds cough up coins in a now-drained lake (“The Loons”). While current life is keenly observed, the poems turn to what lies ahead, investigating the narratives that are yet to take place, where simple earnest gestures linger (“An Offering Is Infinite”) and “the ghosts of the future” turn to the comfort a resetting solar system (“Oh Amnesia”). Standing in the space between worlds, the poems take a hard-earned stock of where we are but make a toast as we step forward on uncertain and unseen ground. Robert Krut is also the author of Watch Me Trick Ghosts, The Now Dark Sun, Setting Us All on Fire (which received the Codhill Poetry Award), This is the Ocean, and The Spider Sermons. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies, and lives in Los Angeles. Paperback Page count: 57 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-31-4
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In The Beautiful Language of Our Disaster, poet Dale Going, an early survivor of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, reflects with lyric grace and formal innovation on the reverberating trauma and long-term effects of illness, while connecting her rare cancer experience to the broader experience of the catastrophic world we're all living in now. The poet’s decades-long experience as a professional patient, which radically altered her life, interrupted her career, and is a constant of daily existence, is addressed in poems resonating with the felt sensations of an afflicted body, while celebrating with exuberant life force the pleasures available—‘the body’s too small to live in’—in an embracing stance toward love, art, and the natural world. Going gathers up fragments, takes the tears and tears (weeping/rips), the world's grief and error, and makes intimate wholes from the broken, as part of a poetic experiment in healing for ourselves, our others, our wounded world, in the only now. Dale Going's poetry includes The Beautiful Language of Our Disaster (2025, Codhill Press, 2024 Guest Editor Series selection,) For the Anniversaries of All Loving Kinds of Meetings (2025, Albion Books) Aerial Perception, (2003, Em Press) Leaves from a Gradual (2001, Potes&Poets Press), The View They Arrange (1994, Kelsey St. Press), She Pushes With Her Hands (1992, Em Press), Or Less (1991, Em Press) and As/of the Whole (1990, SFSU Chapbook Award, selected by Brenda Hillman). Her work has received support from the Fund for Poetry, California Arts Council, and Residency Fellowships at Yaddo, Watermill Center, Wedding Cake House, and Djerassi. Paperback Page count: 88 ISBN: 978-1-949933-30-7
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In Watch Me Trick Ghosts, Robert Krut reveals a city weaving between a surreal consciousness and concrete imagination, where speakers are fully aware that “the scars of the world are turning neon” (“Accidental Light”). Among them, spirits hide and appear in tree lines, behind bookcases, even “etching a name into a street sign pole with a knife” (“You Are the Street, You Are the Sleep”). These poems skillfully veer between lyrical moments of intimacy and urgent messages seemingly sent from the negative space surrounding a dream. It may be the case that “fear is a blade held in a lung” (“The Anxious Lever of Lowering Sky”), but in the quietest hours of night, strangers can connect through striking images that cast a spell. Robert Krut’s poetry collection Watch Me Trick Ghosts offers an immersion into the sublime, enveloping the reader in a shroud of welcome terror. Fusing narratives of ordinary life with flashes of otherworldly awe, Krut’s speaker serves as guide and protector while we venture down darkened streets, through empty buildings, and even into a forest grown out of grief. The lines of these poems haunt with remarkable clarity. “A Coffin is a Battery” states that, “Fine hairs of stray electricity twitch in wind,” and “When you come looking, I am the wires.” Whether through surreal imagery, or storylines lifted from our strangest dreams, Watch Me Trick Ghosts has a chill to rival the most ravishing Gothic novel, and the simmer of film noir. --Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy Paperback Page count: 66 Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in. ISBN: 978-1-949933-13-0
