The Mineral Point Poetry Series

"As with the best writing, I found myself simultaneously devastated and soothed, satiated and hungry for more." --Susanna Childress, author of Entering the House of Awe TANKA & ME is a visceral, pleading, and fierce collection of poems, underpinned with thudding vessels and satisfying wreckage. Kaethe Schwehn externalizes the overlooked power of women into a multidimensional character who hunts both the speaker and the reader. Our wild Tanka engages down deep with role-play, sex, prayer, and refusal until we can't look away or stay quiet. These are love poems, but they love with claws and whiskey, bolt cutters and saws. You can love someone for a long time without knowing how, our speaker realizes, and Tanka prowls and preens and breaks us down until we know how to love ourselves, how to know ourselves, how to free ourselves. TANKA & ME is feminist poetry with muscle, bones, and heart. "Meet Tanka, the girlish/ghoulish spirit at the heart of Kaethe Schwehn's marvelous Tanka and Me. She's 'all ears and a liver,' knows extraordinary things, has a boyfriend named Briar and poignant adventures in grief, but her penchant for detail, at once hilarious and harrowing, is all Kaethe Schwehn." --Leslie Adrienne Miller, author of Y

"Elegant and raunchy, tender and brutal, musically, visually, and erotically ravishing, Greg Allendorf's work is everything I want poetry to be, and I will read this volume again and again." —Aliki Barnstone, author of Bright Body It's April now, complains Allendorf's speaker, and still no desperate gift of unreturned yearning. The poems of Fair Day in An Ancient Town subvert the glorious, Romantic pastoral into a voice easy to imagine as Walt Whitman's darkly clever younger brother. The object of affection is fake-tanned and an idiot but still crashes a dozen lush masturbatory fantasies—or the speaker and his lover meet as shepherds only to eat M&Ms and abandon each other on bingo night. O, the way his mouth confounded me / and folded on my mouth there in the fold, slyly sings one of Allendorf's shepherd's songs, O, the glory of his hairy arms, / the way they lit my eyes a little then. Layering complex form, rhyme, and craft over lush horniness and hard wit, Allendorf effortlessly upends romantic poetry and exposes it to the twenty-first century. This is a collection to make the reader laugh out loud and think deep—and then find a way to be alone under the covers. "With uncommon linguistic acuity [. . .] and a delightfully original voice, Greg Allendorf offers up poems that speak—and continue speaking—genuine longing, and the insistent ache of love. These are necessary poems for our young century." —Scott Cairns, author of Idiot Psalms

My Seaborgium sings songs of loss and growth, motherhood and viscera, elements and experience, with love and relatable grace. "I'll tell you the story," the opening poem coos, "of how / I rolled around in a mail truck full of other / people's letters, I was that happy / to be your mother." This speaker guides us into her expectant waiting, calling on insight from what she knows of her parents, what she thought she knew about her body, fables and gods. She asks all of these potential sources of wisdom to attend to her as forty weeks go by and she tries to detach because "it makes birth manageable," even as she tests her nipples "to see if they lift / away from the breast" while "standing on a mountain / and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below." My Seaborgium travels toward motherhood from before, during, and after the experiences of pregnancy and birth, as the speaker imagines the thickening of her infant's fur and readies "for the bloody show." The only wisdom she gleans from her passage is the live and atomic feeling that arrives for a child whom she tells to "be your element's namesake / and alive, know it. My Seaborgium." This is a book fat with heavy and wild love. Named a 2015 Best New Poet, Alicia Rebecca Myers is multiply published in prominent journals and magazines and has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts residency. "The poems of My Seaborgium utilize metaphor in an attempt to account for the beauty that emerges from our moments of greatest grief. . . . Even through the pain, Myers's speaker struggles to pay attention, to unfold that pain in ways that feel particular and personal." --Kiki Petrosino

"In these surreal lyrics, romantic love is a repository for emotions sweet, bitter, and blazing. Brandel's language— rich with visual and tactile imagery—delivers us into a world where domestic objects transform into amorous talismans." —Kiki Petrosino, author of Hymn for the Black Terrific and Witch Wife Brandel's formally structured lyrics, as carefully arranged as a chest packed with tissue paper and clove oranges, lure and invite the reader with beauty and craft, then hiss and coil and buzz with needled wit and blade flashes of human insight. These are poems Emily Dickinson would have delighted in and sent daringly to friends. This is a collection where six lines and twelve words in a poem about a teakettle sear and brand so hot, the reader finds relief in the white space on the page. Domestic objects are both weapons of war and charms of love, often simultaneously, and the cycle of poems circling around each presented object — kettle, snapshot, penknife, coins, silence, book, and skeleton key — work both as a dance and the creeping threat of a predator pack. A Wife Is a Hope Chest demonstrates brilliant facility with form and capacious understanding of the capabilities of plain-language verse. This is a poet's poetry collection, even as it is a volume that invites any reader to become infected with its unforgettable imagery, pointed humor, and dark charm.

At a literal crossroads in the South, there are two speakers in these poems — the descendant, who has traveled here to try to find her ancestors in the archives, records, and receipts of their violent and near-unrecorded history, and the ancestors, who are alternately bemused, angry, and tender with their descendant. Petrosino's poems argue with each other across time and seek to hear each other over the guardians and soldiers of the past who want to keep black genealogy from the descendants who would sing its truth. Interchapters illustrated by artist Lauren Haldeman reimagine the barriers of genealogical research as an enigmatic Confederate soldier with the disquieting habits and obstructive magicks of Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat. Timely, groundbreaking, and powerful, Kiki Petrosino's Black Genealogy has the weight of an instant classic.

"An anthem against apathy" —Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat Read Tracy Mishkin's poems as an antidote to the "meat wheel full of teeth" that is the contemporary news cycle. Not because this dangerously clever collection soothes, or because it provides comfort, but because these lyrics are urgent without shallow or callous bids for the reader's attention, and instead render the heartbreak of America as gorgeously as an old master's Vanitas—it's the beauty of the poems that provides hope, even as the menace of the grinning skull cannot. This Is Still Life fully invests in the double meaning of the title as it uses the dirty minutia of domestic life to symbolically stand in for our ruin while pointing to how the sunlight gilds the dirt so sweetly, we can't help but get up again in the morning. "Talk radio, speak / to my heart of all that I have lost," Mishkin's speaker prays, and we find ourselves praying, too, while the poems work polish into our hope.

"We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary voice in these poems" —Roy G. Guzmán, author of Restored Mural for Orlando A truly incomparable collection, The Rise of Genderqueer constructs a voice with unmitigated and authentic yearning. Its poems soak ink into page from margin to margin, pressing into the reader's assumptions about gender unmercifully. These poems demand, carry authentic wisdom, deliver keen argument, and disarm with sly wit. Wren Hanks challenges the status quo as neatly as a flower slid into the barrel of a rifle. These are utterly convincing prose forms studded with rhetoric he's deftly remastered and sampled from our culture and conversations right now. "I'll never be denatured, // I am nature," Hanks's poems insist, as the reader bears witness to a bigger world, light flooding into every corner, revealing what has always been true, vigorous, and expansive.

I am trying to tell my unborn daughter a story. It is an old story that hangs on the spinneret tip of a spider's abdomen, the spider's heart a bruise, each chamber a stitch that nicks the copper blood as it rushes through, each valve sighing out like the hush that hung lodged in everyone's lungs, a silence stacked between plates on the drying rack, a thrum that vibrated the blades of his kitchen knives. With long-limbed free verse and highly textured prose, Calf Canyon builds an origin myth with uncertain consequences and bald violence. McCartt-Jackson imagines a landscape where memories are permeable, physical places: the watersides of rural Kentucky and the Ozarks give way to the dry gulches and deep ravines of California as the speaker attains adulthood and her relationships become more fraught with danger. So, this: / you didn't mean to / tear out the part of you you didn't like / by tearing out a part of me / for the sixth, seventh, eighth, twelfth time you decided: / love was my heart, / the size of your fist. Domestic meditations vine with the thorns of the natural world in a collection that is bare-handed, wind-polished, and visceral, and McCartt-Jackson's command of imagery leaves the reader with sculptural playback of brutal love and resonant feelings. This is a collection to read beginning to end, and from the end to the first poem, interleaving the pages with marginalia, tears, and the reader's own memories. Rarely does a poet bend such gifted, formal craft to the requirements of fierce feeling.