The Lune

Escue bridges the tender and the terrible, exploring and examining the sadnesses and slow glories that bind us together. Like Louise Glück’s work, these delicate yet deliberate poems transform image into meaning, recording the moment of realization and leaving the reader more fully alive. — Emma BoldenBruised Gospel takes notes from Sylvia Plath, weaving baskets out of broken thatch, making a toy out of a misshapen chair, reclaiming identity through deconstruction. Escue writes the image at the edge: of birth and death, plain and forest, water and shore. Like stardust in the alpine dew, Bruised Gospel proclaims the reworking of potential into energy, picking up dead lines and branches to weave a wreath, a collage, a photograph, a poem. — Robert Eric ShoemakerThrough permutations of the elements into language, the generation of sentience submerged into matter, and the alchemy of decay, the incantatory lyrics of Bruised Gospel find "rebirth through refuge," taking up "again this body / occupied by many mouths," becoming "glass shattered," or dissolving, however transiently, ‘into this tilted hour.’ — Jonathan SimkinsIf, in this unfolding new year, I can find the faith to pray again, it will be a bruised prayer, and if I find the voice to share the good news, it will be a bruised gospel. Sarah Escue’s poems are a flame on the tongue, a hymn to unity. — J'Lyn Chapman

A rich array of sensory intuitions brought to life in the play of language… representations so acute and precise ‘like silk thread through an atom’ that, by their reading, reawaken our faculties like the first blinking sensations of the morning. — Tyler BurbaIs onwardness a thing? Well it’s made into a lovely wise seeing & speaking thing here in Morning Rites, a deeply kind way to hear walking in one’s legs & contribute to the woof while being & consciousness stand off between questions. — Anselm BerriganThese rites assay secret activity, the motion in stasis, in matter, mapping out the bodied experiences behind the poem, behind the day. The aubadic narrator asks urgent questions with careful urgency, how to both capture and generate the thought, how to uncover a self-love that does not overflow into a denial of other. — Ella Longpre

Not singing of the world, but singing to it, Mutschlecner offers us an invitation foolhardy to decline: ‘Stay with the world awhile. Linger.’ He writes with light, as light; all one need do is let the eye adjust, take a patient breath, and see. — Dan Beachy-QuickIn brief meditative chapters, luminous as reveries, David Mutschlecner continues his investigation of poetics through Being’s illuminating lenses—philosophy, theology—always moving toward clarity: the self emptied of dogma. There is room for the whole cosmos. — Mary CisperHere is a new grammar, the syntax whose copula finally, fully conjoins as the ‘simple is of any of us, when it is cupped and loved, becomes the inclusive Is of all of us.’ — Elizabeth Robinson