Cardiac Thrill
Meg Kearney
Green Linden Press, 2025
22 pp.

The term “cardiac thrill” is a medical one, referring to a palpable vibration felt most often over the precordium (chest wall over the heart and overlapping the stomach), and it is often related to turbulent blood flow. It usually indicates an underlying disturbance, signaling possible heart disease. What Meg’s poems do, however, is something even more heart-felt: she tackles mortality head-on, with nods to Grandma and her father, the Pope, poets William Matthews and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Neruda and Yeats, among other notable figures. What do they –and we—have in common? We all have heart issues. Maybe not medical ones, per se, but we have loves and losses, worries and dreams.

“The world that I had forgotten was indeed a frightening place,” Schwartz writes. She invites readers to consider, who are we if not our memories, our experiences, and the people we surround ourselves with? What makes an identity? “A lot of people live without knowing much about the truth of their lives,” Marzino’s mother says.

But between these silences and within these objects, there is a simmering, shimmering, gathering power, the knowledge that loss, or resentment, or love, could detonate at any moment and blow the human budget.

Feller
Denton Loving
Mercer University Press, August 2025
336 pp.

Located and informed by natural settings, many of the poems in Feller search beyond geographical boundaries—you’ll find songs of memory and longing, joy, gratitude, a search for peace, and much more. By the end of reading the collection, you’ll feel as if you have made a new, dear friend, someone to laugh with, someone to offer wisdom through hard times.

I shuddered as Fugett read down an itemized list of how much wounded veterans could receive per lost body part, how OxyContin (manufactured by Purdue, now discontinued) was marketed in deceptive ways that downplayed its potential for addiction, how Karie navigated a cheapskate military bureaucracy to make sure her husband got full compensation for his lost limb.

The Error of the Stars
Bill McCloud

Expect the unexpected.

Closer
by Miriam Gershow
Regal House Publishing (2025)

It’s an Odyssean journey, filled with modern-day shipwrecks, and by the end, the sodden characters are cast upon shores they never expected to find. Some die, others succumb to temptation, and still others flee.

The Dime Museum by Joyce Hinnefeld
Unbridled Books (August 2025)

Spanning decades and crossing continents, from the vaudeville stages of early 20th-century America to the isolation and grief of the COVID pandemic, Hinnefeld’s stories explore the lasting effects of privilege, desire, caregiving, and personal history.

Pastorals
Rachel Hadas
Measure Press

“This is what it is to live in time, to remember what we can no longer feel, to feel what we can no longer remember. And then it bubbles up.”  

Bodywork
Eva Tuschman Leonard
Bored Wolves co-edition with Firehouse Press (San Francisco), 2025

With the turning, turning of her agile mind she contemplates the myriad ways she could manage to live in the thrall of a chronic, inexplicable illness.

Willow Hammer
Patrick Donnelly
Four Way Books, 2025
86 pp.

Donnelly’s deft handling of the personal and universal tragedy of [sexual violence] is profound. He turns to mythology as a vehicle to carry the reader on the path of terrible discovery and to discuss the horror; the speaker’s not being present and not witnessing first-hand the destruction that the violence causes makes it somehow both more terrible and mythic at the same time.

What to Keep
Carlene M. Gadapee
Finishing Line Press

Through a thoughtful and substantive mix of warm visual imagery and heartbreaking scenarios, the question of what stays with us and what we leave behind reminds us of the power of individual moments, past and present, in an overstimulated world. 

Some Things I Said
David Ferry
Grolier Press

Some Things I Said is wonderfully instructive, a poetic masterclass for any aspiring or seasoned poet.

This Darkness Will Never End
Edith Bruck, translated by Jeanne Bonner
Paul Dry Books, 2025
187 pp.

New generations of readers can pay their respects to victims of the Holocaust by reading and remembering Bruck’s moving collection.

Coming Ashore
Thomas O’Grady
Arrowsmith Press

“What I love about reviewing books is how much I learn—not simply from what the authors have written, but from researching the techniques, influences and ideas that inform their writing. All of this makes me a better writer.”

Grief’s Apostrophe
Steven Ratiner
Beltway Editions, 2025
91 pp.

Ratiner leads us through the wilderness of grief, using references to sacred text and imagery, mythology, and common experiences as vehicles to plumb the depths of a feeling Self.

Magic Can’t Save Us  
by Josh Denslow
University of New Orleans Press (May 6, 2025)
176 pages

If you do not want to see, don’t read [these] book[s]. If you do not want to see, for God’s sake read [these] book[s].

The Soul We Share
Ricky Ray
Fly on the Wall Press, 2024
159 pp.

The soul in the title of the collection is not just shared between the human and his dog, but more, it is found among humans, nature, and the readers: we are all sharing the world, and we might need to be reminded of this fact.

How to Love a Black Hole  
by Rebecca Fishnow
Conium Press (March 4, 2025)
88 pages

What stands out in How to Love a Black Hole is the masterful way in which Fishow blends beauty and melancholy. The writing is introspective, filled with moments of quiet tension and powerful imagery that often leaves an undercurrent of unease.