Jeanie Thompson & Larry Mitchell
The Myth of Water: Go Into Your Life
“This collection is a stunning duet by two of the most dedicated artists of our time. The amount of care taken by Mitchell both in providing original music and in producing the album is unrivaled. The poems, what started all of this, are some of Thompson’s finest writing. Individually, Jeanie Thompson and Larry Mitchell are wildly gifted. Paired together, they create the most cohesively sharp and beautifully balanced work of their careers.”
Full review published at Up the Staircase Quarterly
Carrie Chappell
Loving Tallulah Bankhead
“Chappell conjures Tallulah with precision. The drawl, as husky as it is devastating, is audible in the lines. Though the real Tallulah likely never uttered any of this, we’re none the wiser. This is a testament to both Chappell’s craft and devotion: she can alternate between her own voice and Tallulah’s cleanly and with care. That’s not to say there’s anything careful about this collection. The poems kick at and stomp on the history that’s kicked and stomped on our kind, exposing the cruelties and unearned judgments following southern women from birth to burial. Chappell and Tallulah are done with conforming, opting instead to burn skirts and bury old ideas. They own themselves and free the rest of us. We watch the unraveling of it all; the big show: our autonomy being granted by the woman America tried to undo a lifetime ago.”
Full review published at Screen Door Review
Kwoya Fagin Maples
MEND
“With Mend, Kwoya Fagin Maples is equal parts teacher and poet: releasing a part of history that needed to be told, she’s brought dignity and light to the women of Mt. Meigs; further, she’s urging readers to learn and listen, to not repeat the ugliness hidden in our white-washed past. This is a must-read book for anyone, timeless and worth any praise Maples may yet garner for it.”
Full review published at Alabama Writers’ Forum
Savannah Sipple:
WWJD and Other Poems
“WWJD and Other Poems is an unflinching collection that dares its readers to find themselves in these personal but wildly relatable poems. The work is challenging but charming, and as gritty as it is gorgeous. Savannah Sipple rises up in this book, no longer allowing others to point at her flaws—instead pointing at herself in the mirror with love, staring down anyone trying to alter her reflection.”
Full review published at Screen Door Review
giovanni singleton:
American Letters
“[…] this work takes multiple reads to fully digest, and that’s the point: in various ways and through multiple lenses, singleton successfully unteaches habitual acceptance and opens up new angles of understanding. Her use of concrete poetry, effectively and without limit, displays how perspective can grow when fed substance and left to thrive without limitation. In these studies of shape and presentation, singleton destroys the concepts which control understanding and urges the reader to reevaluate how things appear, to focus less on what is named and more on why it is.”
Full review published at Broadkill Review
Emily Blair
We Are Birds
“Intimacy is the ultimate focus. Know this going into the book: there’s a lot of sex. It isn’t an easy thing to write about for most, and queer intimacy is even more difficult. But it’s more than that. In these poems you’ll find an exploration of the intricacies of heartbreak, how it looks different in each setting. You’ll find faults, self-admitted and burning. You’ll find blame, thrown without regret. Nothing here is one-dimensional: where Blair offers self-examination, she also examines her partners and the rough edges she and they try to make work. In each go, emotions get cluttered and confused or flatly denied; while the messes made seem exhausting, let’s face it: the bore of clean corners is hardly worth exploring.”
Full review published at Up the Staircase Quarterly
Ashley M. Jones
Magic City Gospel
“In Magic City Gospel, Ashley M. Jones delivers poems that conjure up everything from grits to God. Music is always in the background and her writing near enough holds your hand through the hardest parts of Alabama’s past.
She opens this collection with the honest and innocent fear of being a child learning her history, what it once meant to be black in the South and what it is now. As readers, she doesn’t talk at us about Civil Rights or what it feels like to have dark skin in a state that hasn’t fully gotten away from its worst times; she instead takes us home and shows us what it is to grow up as a young black woman in Alabama.”
Full review published at Hobo Camp Review
Tina Mozelle Braziel
Known By Salt
Full review published at Up the Staircase Quarterly
The parallelism of home in these poems is maybe the biggest love story. From a trailer park to a glass cabin built by hand, the foundation has always been dirt. Braziel understands it’s where we all come from and celebrates the beauty she wouldn’t escape from even if she could. This book, however or wherever you grew up, will make you want to go outside. It’ll make you want clean air and dirty feet. Tina Mozelle Braziel will help you understand why so many of us call Alabama home.
Read Known By Salt for the southern calm, the wildness of rural freedom, the love story of partnership and riverbeds. Read it to understand privilege and the overwhelming gift of grit. To know salt is for more than taste. Take from these poems the shelter they were built from and the red clay they’re coated in. Read Braziel’s poems outside and in the morning. And I hope you can hear birds where you are.
Kate Garrett
Deadly, Delicate
Rachel Nix 