“Poetry Wants Us to Be Our Free and Best Selves”: A Reflection on Against Breaking

Apple & Palm by Patricia Henley

The town and its surrounding land form the connective tissue between stories, linking women across generations, families, friendships, and chance encounters. Certain landmarks reappear throughout stories, creating the sense that geography itself is responsible for bringing these lives together.

I Have One Student
by Mary Ellen Redmond.
Finishing Line Press (June 26, 2026)

But to grasp Shamlu’s preoccupation with freedom, you also have to sense the passionate love that drives his work, a passion above all else for humanity and humankind as fundamentally creative beings.

In NYC, Lucas soars academically while Lila has a contentious relationship with Professor Vrubel, her piano teacher, who throws shade on her practice after practice. Imperious, but truthful, he warns her: “…press coverage means little on its own if you can’t consistently deliver great performances…I have assumed you’re here because you want to develop yourself artistically. If it’s instant fame you’re after, I invite you to do everything your agent tells you to do.” Sage advice that Lila can’t quite accept until she hears him play Bach (Bach, again!) – and then, she feels the tsunami of what she thinks is Bach but does not know is Vrubel’s experience and wisdom. It’s also the watery echo of interpretable obstinacy, but to say more would give away the plot. It’s enough to know what Vrubel tells Lila. “Don’t hide in the music. Show your true self.”

Hutsulka Nicole Yurcaba

…we have How to Live with a Dog—a book about dogs, yes, and how to live with them, but, thanks to Saville’s deep clarity, compassion, and engaging storytelling—it’s also very much a book about how to human.

Surrender
Jennifer Acker
Delphinium Books (April 2026)
275 pages

Acker’s knowledge and understanding of farm life, so well-researched, and her gentle authority, vibrate throughout the novel as farm owner Lucy struggles to keep her father’s family farm running.

Relearning the Body
Carlene Gadapee
Finishing Line Press (May 2026)

The collection is a lyrical journey that moves between carefree humor and moments of survival, rediscovery, and small victories. What makes Gadapee's work so accessible is her ability to weave imagery, allusion, and a myriad of literary devices seamlessly into this journey, creating a mirror in which readers of any age can see their own stories reflected and rediscovered.

Murray’s fears: war, violence, dictatorship, loss; erasure by a military culture plumbed with a keen eye and occasional wry revulsion.

Murray’s loves: their daughter, their husband (most of the time); animals; the natural world.

the book of sentences
rob mclennan
University of Calgary Press, 2025
186 pages

“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.”

Sea Now 
By Eva Meijer, translated from Dutch by Anne Thompson Melo
Two Lines Press / Peirene Press, 2025
180 pages

It’s abundantly clear that we, the inhabitants of Planet Earth, have created an untenable ecological situation, one that we’d better work on yesterday. Consider, for example, the global prospect of rising waters that may wash over and submerge continents, countries, cities, towns, villages.

Your Guide to Climate Action: How to Move Beyond Your Footprint and Make a BIG Impact
Ryan Hagen
Climate Action Press ( January 2, 2026)

Ryan Hagen’s book is a practical, resource-rich guide to taking steps to becoming a climate change activist. It is an informative read and one that can serve as an ongoing reference and source of ideas when the work of climate change begins to feel too big. The book lays out an action plan for everyone at any point in their climate activism journey.

What Love Is
David Daniel
Nirala Publications (March 2025)
90 pages

David Daniel, the poet, touches on a great deal of love’s aspects like his ruptured appendix with his thoughts near death. “Wailing into the wild heart’s places.”  Death, he gathers, is possibly a celebration of the love we have held and still hold, he writes.

Mountain. Memory. Marsh
Carol Parris Krauss
Fernwood Press (November 2025)

Her lyrical language with sights, sounds and color is a pleasure to read. Her memories and descriptions are alive on every page. She comes from a long line of story tellers and has lots to recall, “what you fail to see from your kitchen window.”

Querida
Nathan Xavier Osorio
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
101 pp.
Winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

This collection is both a delight and a challenge; a delight, because Osorio’s imagery and his mastery of both free verse and formal structures flows so easily, and a challenge, because for me, a middle-aged white woman in New Hampshire, the experiences of working-class and poor Americans of Mexican descent are foreign to me.

London Sojourn: Rewriting Life After Retirement
Rebecca Knuth
She Writes Press
January 2026

Knuth goes on several literary and cultural tours to hone her storytelling skills.

If I Had Said Beauty
Tami Haaland
Lost Horse Press, October 2025
65 Pages

Understanding who our ancestors are beyond their genetic makeup, and identifying our home or homes, is not an easy task…

World on a String
Gail Mazur
Arrowsmith Press, October 2025
60 Pages

Mazur’s World on a String is born of strings of love, loss, doubt, confidence, questions, and sometimes peace. A wondering of who we are and how we got where we are. A judgment-free zone to explore her world, your world, and then she questions every piece of those entities in a lush, lyrical language.

Crimean Fig: Contemporary Crimean Tatar Poetry and Fiction
edited by Anastasia Levkova, Askold Melnyczuk, Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed,
Arrowsmith Press, 2025

Now he lives alone in his small house. His wife is dead. His son has adopted a stricter form of worship, no longer approves of his father’s ways. At first, the father thought, it might be not be so bad: “It’s better that he prefers religion to walking around and drinking with the Russian guys.” But the “young, foreign mullahs” are recruiting, driving a wedge between the generations. We know how this ended elsewhere.