"In Sugar Zone Mary Mackey takes you on a fascinating journey to the interior, somewhere between Saint Theresa’s Inner Castle and the thicket of Eros, a place of desperate actuality even if it is ‘on the other side of the world.’ Mackey joins other visionary poets of dépaysement—Henri Michaux in Asia, John Ash in Anatolia, Sharon Doubiago in Peru, Lorca in Manhattan. But Mackey really seems to recover a lost part of herself in the edgy lyricism of the tropics, haunted by fado, forró, and death. Sugar Zone authoritatively creates a language and a culture, and the lines are tense with the vulnerability of lovers, strangers, and travelers with no ticket home.” — Dennis Nurkse

Mary Mackey’s published works include six collections of poetry and twelve novels. Her poems have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Dennis Nurkse, Ron Hansen, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Garrison Keillor has featured her poetry four times on The Writer’s Almanac.

These poems possess a quiet urgency—an elegant, stark beauty. The sentences are prisms conjugating light. - Elaine Equi

Gouirand repunctuates the world in stops and starts as she reaches toward new ways to parse the complexities of love. Open Winter shows us how language breaks and fails, how poems repair and revive. - Mark Wunderlich

Rae Gouirand's poems glow with motion and stillness, the richness of consciousness, as they delicately enlarge the boundaries of comprehension and desire. Open Winter offers a shimmering geometry of cognition in visionary poems that witness the erotic ligatures between self and world. It is a generative—and deeply generous—book. - Alice Fulton

Rae Gouirand’s first collection, OPEN WINTER, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize for Poetry. An alumna of the MFA program in Creative Writing, she lives in Davis, California and serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Cache Creek Conservancy.

This satirical spin on the ancient, much-beloved nursery rhymes of our youth gives familiar characters such as Little Jack Horner and Little Bo Peep a chance to “make it” in our 21st century. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to time travel in leaps and bounds, so you’ll enjoy the hilarious and unexpected glitches our Mother Goose friends encounter along the way. Intended for more adult audiences, this collection of free-verse poems delights and surprises with literary references, witty double meaning, and clever irony.

Lois Sonnenberg has enjoyed careers as a Registered Nurse and teacher of English Composition and Literature. She challenged her students to read and write in many genres and share their poetry and fiction by creating classroom publications.

In "Letting Go and New Beginnings: A Mother's Poetic Journey" (eBook, 2011), the poems tell a universal and compelling story about the changing nature of relationships. Filled with insights and especially supportive of parents whose teens are leaving for college.

Margaret earned a Ph.D. in Microbiology, but after healing from MS in 1995 she became a poet, singer, healer, photographer and story-teller. Her book, "As Easy as Breathing: Reclaiming Power for Healing and Transformation—Poems. Letters and Inner Listening," won a 2010 Eric Hoffer Award in Self-help/Spiritual.

Elizabeth Kincaid-Ehlers' second poetry collection offers a rich variety of moods ranging from despair to hope, resignation to determination, fury to love. And always there is that wry (sometimes rueful) wit at play. Ending in a series of love poems addressed to children and grandchildren, the book paints the portrait of a splendidly unpredictable, courageous and humane woman.

Elizaeth Kincaid-Ehlers began making poems when she was three, engaging her mother as amanuensis. She has been making them ever since. Elizabeth was featured in the first year of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival and has received many awards, including the North Country Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize nomination from Nimrod magazine.

Ryan Flaherty pays particular attention to linguistic slippages and etymologies as he examines the persistent difficulties of language and love in his latest collection, What’s This, Bombardier? Alternating between self-deprecating humor and striking images, wry wordplay and a sense of awe at the beauties and absurdities of the world, these poems construct a postmodern play on the foundation of sadness, wonder, and longing. The combination is smart, fun, and ultimately heartbreaking -- an exciting, extraordinary debut.

Ryan Flaherty is the recipient of the 2010 PEN /New England Discovery Award for Poetry. He has published two chapbooks. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Columbia, POOL, Conduit, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in New Hampshire.

These vivid and moving poems take the reader on a journey of mind, body and spirit through geographical and cultural distances: from the author's childhood in Detroit with her Polish immigrant grandparents to mid-life in the West among Native Americans. As the title of her poem "Paying Attention" directs, she observes people and landscapes not only with her eyes, but with her heart. Her poetry of life and rituals among the Lakota are particularly vibrant.

Gloria Dyc, professor of arts and letters at the University of New Mexico-Gallup and a UMN Regents Professor in English, has taught Native American literature for 25 years. This is her first collection of poetry; her fiction has been published in numerous journals and anthologies.

This is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination and memory; and, most importantly, failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the "failed elegy," all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.

Paisley Rekdal is assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays and two books of poetry. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and her poems and essays have appeared in many publications.

Matthew Rohrer turns wide eyes and lyric wit toward the requirements of fatherhood, citizenship and romantic love. Approaching pleasure and terror with the same searching and determined curiosity, "Rise Up" traverses political, natural and domestic landscapes with gentle agility. Beautifully crafted surfaces give way to sincere depth.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of "A Green Light," which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, and "Satellite." His first book, "A Hummock in the Malookas," was selected for the National Poetry Series in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at New York University.

The author writes of ongoing conflict and ongoing need for refuge. Through introspection, she finds a deep, constant, unfailing presence in the Goddess' forms. Poetic images and tantra yoga teachings of India and Tibet help her picture her mind's fecundity, struggle and abiding truths.