Seeing Things by Marjorie Maddox. Wildhouse Poetry (an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing), 2025.
Refaat Alareer stands in a field in Gaza, holding a container of freshly picked strawberries. What evokes the earth’s sweetness more fully than a ripe berry? The expression on his face—scholarly, bespectacled—is gentle and tender.
Tell me, what steel entered your heart,
what fear made you rabid,
what hate drove out pity?
All poetry begins in song, as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds the reader, starting with the title of her latest collection, 117 mostly brief free verse poems that like songs, are both accessible and mysterious.
In Every Hard Sweetness, Sheila Carter-Jones weaves a personal and cultural history of racism into poetry.
I never learned la bella lingua except
to write you one letter in schoolgirl Italian
from college, a letter you loved so much
it fell into sharp creases
I hope you don’t mind my sharing links to my own recent publications.
In her new poetry collection, Alexis Rhone Fancher Boldly Explores the Landscape of Sensuality
St. John looks deeply and compassionately where others might glance away or move on, and draws the reader along with him.
What would happen in this vast dagger
If America stopped eating human flesh
For three days?
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public.” –Allen Ginsberg
Emotions wrestle with physicality in the twisted sheets of Erotic.
In fifty numbered verses—many with the diamond-like compression of Emily Dickinson—Stevens Kane explores how the daily reality of the body suddenly can become extraordinary, paranormal—and how the science of events—such as gravity—can give way to the spiritual…
It was the summer the Israelis withdrew, leaving
behind
a landmined no-man’s-land of phosphorus orange groves,
blighted with white like the kingdom of the Snow Queen.