Publication Date: May 19, 2026

Paperback, 94 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-36-9

Judith Kerman returns with her twelfth collection of poetry, A Hard Frost, in which she confronts aging and disability with honesty, wit, and an undiminished creative force. Written from the lived experience of becoming moderately disabled later in life, the poems examine the physical limitations of an aging body while refusing narratives of decline. What emerges is resilience, humor, and a fierce attentiveness to the world.

With an imagistic and naturalistic voice, Kerman explores her developing relationship with the natural world—its beauty, its menace, and its capacity to ground a life under strain. A quiet, unconventional mysticism runs through the collection, in poems where perception, science, music, and history interact.

A Hard Frost affirms the emotional and imaginative vitality of old age, offering poems shaped by perspective, irony, and hard-won insight—and demonstrates that older women shouldn’t be underestimated or overlooked.

About the Author

Judith Kerman is a poet and multi-artist (singer, performer, and crafter). She has published eleven previous books and chapbooks of poetry along with three books of translations. She founded Earth’s Daughters magazine in 1971 and Mayapple Press in 1978, which she continues to run today. For more than 25 years, she has coordinated annual writers’ retreats and online workshops. Kerman earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Buffalo.

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 94 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-40-6

The poems in Habitat of Ghosts touch upon childhood, aging, and much in-between, haunted by memory, maturation, and loss. In the first three sections, poems converse with each other via images: of hands (caressers of the extant), of eyes (portals of perception), and of hair (correlatives of thought). In the fourth section those image clusters give way to various representations of the poet’s early and ongoing impulse to speak, write, engage with other writers, witness, heal, and honor. These final poems may even be ars poeticas, for they portray how poets are made and what poets do, which is, come to think of it, what ghosts also do in their own smoky style: breach the barriers of isolation and mortality to sing.

Praise for Charlene Fix & Habitat of Ghosts

In a cold and foreboding world, Charlene Fix offers us the warmth of these elegant poems— “perfect incantations” that reveal the unseen world in all its startling beauty, darkness, and tenderness. Habitat of Ghosts is a prismatic flame which transforms the ordinary into the iridescent. Handwritten letters shift into “the hearts of birds drumming softly,” and spectral loved ones appear at pianos and bedsides and in cafeterias and dog’s fur. A song, prayer, and confession, this collection is the gift of pure spiritual labor and wisdom refined in the fires of suffering and loss. Habitat of Ghosts is a masterpiece of alchemy, a treasure for everyone who encounters its light.

—Sayuri Matsuura Ayers, poet & essayist

Through Habitat of Ghosts, Charlene Fix travels with grace, love, sorrow, and smiles. Her generous poems welcome us to travel with her, her arm around our waist, her “nimble hands pushing on doors / of air, opening them…” She comforts and renews the spirit as she remembers that “beauty lingers yet in damaged things.” These poems invite us into the souls of rooms we may have lived in for years—rooms of intimacy, rooms of loss, of parenthood, of marriage, of friendship, of creation—but now, with Fix’s gift for invitation and revelation, we are guided to a more ripened understanding of these essential places. And, with these extraordinary poems and their well-wrought wisdom, we too may “endeavor to ripen well.”

—David Swerdlow, author of Empty the River

About the Author

Charlene Fix came of age in South Euclid, Ohio, one of many free-range kids in this mostly working class suburb on Cleveland’s east side. So it is no surprise that these poems wander around a bit too, loosely tethered to those modest homes and schools, and later to localities beyond, spirit soaring but poems anchored by an accretion of universal particulars from childhood to aging. Charlene started writing poems in grade three, and by high school would walk the mile from a Cedar Center bus stop home from temp jobs downtown, never missing a beat in the books held open in her hands. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from The Ohio State University where she met her husband Pat during the riots in 1970, took a ten year break from writing while raising kids, teaching, dabbling in domesticity, then suddenly found herself buying piles of paper and writing again. Charlene has published poems in various literary magazines, and has been honored by grants from The Ohio and the Greater Columbus Arts Councils, two awards from The Poetry Society of America, and several Pushcart Prize nominations. Emeritus Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design, Charlene co-coordinates Hospital Poets at the Ohio State University Medical Center, works for peace and social justice, and is the mother of three and grandmother of two. Her website is http://charlenefix.com

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 90 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-39-0

“Sometimes to forget / is to remember / & to remember / is to forget.” Tim Hunt’s latest poetry collection is an exercise of memory – and at time an exorcism – as he considers what of the past (his and our national collective) bears remembrance and what should be left behind. Nowhere is this examination more necessary than in the cycle of “Manzanar” poems memorializing the World War II Japanese-American internment camp of that name, which at this moment seems less history and more dire warning. He bids us “do not read these pieces, / but listen, if you will, in the way / your thumb and forefinger might / rub the sleeve of an old coat” – as if to say, yes, our history may seem threadbare, but still may be a source of comfort if we will take it up and take it on.

Praise for Tim Hunt & Then Back Again to Now

I like the clarity of Tim Hunt’s voice, the overlaying of memory and the present, the seeing and re-seeing, the outward and inward gaze finding the key details that bring a scene and a character to life. These are poems that call for a doubletake, especially after one has read a few of them and seen how they work together and build on one another.

—Greg Pape, former Montana Poet Laureate, author of A Field of First Things & others

Tim Hunt writes aptly about growing up in small-town 1950s-60s California. His poems highlight his compassion for this rural community: friends, family members, as well as Japanese Americans in the nearby Manzanar internment camp where 110,000 were once held. He imagines their losses and fears, walking through its ruins. He also details with precision the atrocities in the Viet Nam war. Though loss is a theme, lightness is a quiet force in many of the poems. Hunt sees light as a voice in the desert that says “nothing at all— / and everything;” a boy’s family's evening of storytelling as he drowses “in the lamp-shaded light / of the voices” on a winter night; moonlight which suggests “its light is not his father’s light;” and “...this war is wrong. That I am right / and that conscience is real—some inner/light....” Light’s physical presence here leads to awakenings, lifting memories from the darkest edges of the past. Even the poems’ structures appear to be light with the poet’s use of white space, one-line stanzas, creating pauses that give a sense of deep thought.

—Jan Minich, author of Coming into Grace Harbor

Then Back Again to Now is, as the title promises, Tim Hunt’s exploration of time and memory, like the “real” road that was there before they built the interstate, that new road that “pushes north past the little towns / as if they aren’t there.” That’s where the people live, though, in those little towns that Hunt brings alive for us, with their regulars at the café who all share their same history and the same songs, “Strangers in the Night” and “Little Girl Blue” that they sing together at the karaoke bar. Some of us remember, as Hunt does, “when we were so sure / that all that mattered was injustice / as we wondered what to burn to make us free.” In these newly troubled times, we should be grateful to be reminded of when freedom and justice mattered to us, and also of the earlier time when, to our shame, we sent those who didn’t look like us, who were born across the ocean, to camps like Manzanar where they were at the mercy of the desert and the guards. Even if memory is really the desire for memory, as Hunt also says, we need to hear those stories again, and think about what stories will be told of us.

—Susanna Lang, author of Like This & the forthcoming collection This Spangled Dark

About the Author

Tim Hunt was born in Calistoga and raised primarily in Sebastopol, two small towns north of San Francisco that were, in the 1950s and 1960s, still agricultural, working-class communities. As a boy, he identified strongly with the Lake County region of his father's family, an area where quicksilver mining had once been profitable. Here one of his aunts taught him “I Can Tell You Are a Logger ’Cause You Stir Your Coffee with Your Thumb,” while a rockabilly cousin offered “Be-Bop-a-Lula.”

Educated at Cornell University, he taught American literature at several schools, including Washington State University and Deep Springs College, before concluding his career at Illinois State University, where he was University Professor of English. He and his wife Susan, a retired respiratory therapist, have two children: John, a visual artist, and Jessica, a composer.

Publication Date: April 1, 2026

Paperback, 36 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-17-8

Sun go down and moon rise up

Time the eater be always near

If the past is another country, who lives there? The poems of St. Fursey’s Abbey hopscotch back and forth in time to invoke an imagined place where myth and magic jostle against human hopes and uncertainties. Inhabitants of a multilayered past—a cunning woman, an inanimate box of relics, the woodwose, a doubting priest—reveal themselves through their voices in poems that play with language and form, while our present moment, like a ghostly visitor, haunts the margins.

About the Author

Ann Lauinger’s previous books of poetry include Dime Saint, Nickel Devil (Broadstone Books, 2022), Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2013), and Persuasions of Fall (University of Utah Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in publications such as the Cumberland River Review, the Georgia Review, Parnassus, Plant-Human Quarterly, the Southern Poetry Review, and SWWIM. Featured in anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature, and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, she is a winner of Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize and the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry from University of Utah. Professor emerita of literature at Sarah Lawrence College and a member of the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee, she lives in Ossining, New York.

Publication Date: March 15, 2026

Paperback, 42 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-37-6

Praise for Lance Le Grys & Stray Hunter’s Bullet

Lance Le Grys’s Stray Hunter’s Bullet challenges not just the meaning of the narrative but, in Beckett’s tradition, the act of storytelling itself where what is of most interest to the speaker is “what never happened.” Fragmented, ironic, and irreverent at times, LeGrys’s poems mix equal doses of tragedy and comedy because at the heart of this work are the random forces beyond the individual’s control and the story that’s doomed from the beginning: “I have tried to tell / the story of Gabriel / but there is no story / just a death.” Gabriel, aptly named for the messenger angel, is blessed with musical talents that come from the realm of mystery (“whoever heard him loved it / but none ever knew what it was / they thought it was him”), but his gift is misunderstood and incongruous with how he is being perceived by others, including the speaker (“Gabriel looked like the yard man / which he was”). The story of Gabriel is marked by failures, hesitations, and repetitions, and as the poet re-imagines the anti-heroic existence of the artist, he also poses deep philosophical questions about the nature of art, life, and above all, love itself (“yes three of us did / loved him / for no reason / for if there is a reason / there is no love / but love for the reason”). Indeed, those who love Gabriel must also deal with the cruelty of fate in which they are all entangled, though it all happens amid the mystery of art and the abundance and wildness of life.

—Lucyna Prostko, author of Infinite Beginnings

About the Author

Lance Le Grys was born in 1970 in Cambridge, New York. He received his B.A. in Classics from Middlebury College in 1992 and has made his living first as a Latin teacher and then as a librarian. He currently lives in Castleton, Vermont. He is the author of the poetry collections Mortal Variations (In Case of Emergency Press, forthcoming) and Views from an Outbuilding (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019), and the chapbook Pilate Suite (Bottlecap Press, 2024). A selection of his songwriting indiscretions can be heard at legrys.bandcamp.com.

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 124 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-42-0

In his poetry collection Pareidolia, Michael Brosnan asks us to see life in the abstract. Floating clouds, a fishing heron, or ducks on a pond all become metaphor describing the abstract concepts that form his life, all our lives. In the title poem we are told to listen to “the bright trill / of the winter wren,” that it is “an exhortation of how to greet / the day with full on awareness / that this is it, the all of it, bathed / in grace and beyond our grasp.”

Brosnan exhorts us to ask the unanswerable and yet constantly seek the answers in music, nature and most importantly, in self-reflection. The perpetual questions of where have we been? How does that affect where we go or end? The adult version of “are we there yet?” Do we ever get there? And if so, how do we know?

Brosnan forms poems based on phrases that come to him in a seemingly random manner. In reality these works are carefully composed and exquisitely crafted. These poems move us to look around and more importantly, listen around us. What is the “soul contained in sound”?

Praise for Michael Brosnan & Pareidolia

Michael Brosnan’s terrific fourth book, Pareidolia, lives within the curious and wonderful moments where lives brush against each other. Here, encounters with ducks, herons, lovers, tuna sandwiches, and strangers are a “parade in random patterns.” Yet Brosnan deftly — and with such heart — turns these associations into the very essence of how we experience life: nonlinear, and with an immediacy to the threads which connect us to each other, which ground us in who we were and who we will become. “Some days you’ve just got to believe / there is no grand plan,” Brosnan writes, taking genuine comfort in the seemingly chance ways our lives take shape. Through it all, Brosnan is a poet in awe of his surroundings, eager to document with clarity everything from the tongue of the vole to the expanse of language, seeking meaning within each thread that makes a life.

—Samantha DeFlitch, author of Cornerstone & 2025 Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park

An exquisitely crafted lyrical lens held up to a life not merely lived but deeply examined, Pareidolia, as the title might suggest, is an artist’s attempt to find, in the shapes and lines of poetry, meaning and patterns in the great mystery of our shared human existence. Navigating through city and country, through the natural world and the human, through the music of language and the language of music, Brosnan, with stunning verse, meditates upon joy and loss as only an older poet can and yet with all the vibrancy and energy of a still discovering artist. Pareidolia is an achievement of voice and style available only to the mature and fully realized poet.

—Matt W. Miller, award-winning author of Tender the River & Club Icarus

About the Author

Michael Brosnan is a poet and writer based in Exeter, New Hampshire. He is the author of three earlier collections of poetry: The Sovereignty of the Accidental (2018), Adrift (2023), and Emu Blis, Bums Lie, Blue-ism (2024), the latter of which was a finalist for the Wandering Aengus Book Award. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and has won awards from various arts organizations. He is also the author of Against the Current, a book on urban education, and writes often on issues related to teaching and learning.

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 98 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-41-3

As amber traps the bodies of ancient life, poet Babo Kamel preserves her memories in glimpses of family, parents, and old loves. “Can you hear the crow’s eternal laugh bending time?” She tells of her grandmother’s flight from pogroms and persecution, continues with stories of her parents, homage to her father’s painting, and how she is haunted by her mother’s death decades later. Lastly, Kamel allows us a look into her own life and memories including her first experience of death and loss. Shaded by the color blue – “Not the taken for granted blue of Florida skies,” “or the ink of love letters faint on aerogramme paper” – this work takes you deep into loss. Yet you emerge hopeful that memory, like amber, can gift you with the past.

Praise for Babo Kamel & Through the Amber

This incandescent lyric blessing of a book is Babo Kamel’s ode to family, the living and the dead, her love song of survival in diaspora—a song vital in these challenging times. In Through the Amber, Babo Kamel shows us a child born of a shtetl erased years before—a refugee of an inherited story who grew to carry the memory of aunts who die and friends who disappear, to mourn the dead who don’t know they’re dead. A displaced child who learned not to say she was a Jew, who hid from herself even when she looked in the mirror. A child who grew to write poems her artist father once told her held hundreds of paintings. And these poems do. They do. Babo Kamel’s masterful poems paint a life as indelible in memory as your own. I am grateful for these poems and for this poet.

—rose auslander, author of Wild Water Child

Babo Kamel’s dead may be securely fastened inside an amber gemstone, but they often visit, “riding currents, then circling back.” Piercing the amber, the poet releases the complex lives of her dead who sweep back and forth like “melody rising from the crimson ground.” These particular lives, enmeshed in a particular time and history, become “intimate as breath.” I was swept away by the painterly beauty, living depths, and sheer reach of this enthralling collection.

—Patricia Corbus, author of Ashes, Jade, Mirrors & others

As you move Through the Amber you will find you have entered another consciousness, and you will draw long breaths at the events unfolding, the ordinary and the surprising. You’ll be aware of the weight of the living and the beauty of the familiar. What we see and understand in the daily gathers mystery and solidity, and you will pause to re-see and re-think familiar experience. These are poems rich with family and presence, given us by the keen eye and wise heart of the poet, her past alive in her present, and they will become yours: a line, a gesture, a yellow scarf, the angle as you ascend a particular hill, or climb a local mountain. Babo Kamel’s work draws on a rich apprehension of the ordinary and is intersected by the rare; as the poems unfold, they render the dead and the living, we feel the weight of life and the vast volume of emptiness that goes on forever. These are poems made from the ordinary, and like our lives, they are rich with surprise and wisdom, poems dressed in the familiar ordinary of the daily, and rich with the unforgettable.

—Deena Linett, author of When I Was Water

Through the Amber is a collection of poems that paints a portrait of generational relationships, emotional attachments, and enduring memories that disturb and comfort. From many perspectives, and in vivid detail, these poems explore the co-existence of the dead and the living who inhabit our lives. How dreams and real places shape our perceptions and fine-tune our sensory appreciation. Like an amulet made of deeply earthen amber, a most historic gem material, Through the Amber pays faithful homage to life’s true measure - its collection and recollection, attentiveness to everyday and grand significance.

—K. Alma Peterson, author of two collections of poetry & a forthcoming chapbook

About the Author

As a dual citizen, Babo Kamel resides in Montreal, Quebec and Gorham, Maine. Kamel’s work appears in the Greensboro Review, Lily, Poet Lore, The Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry 2020 among others. She is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, and a Best of Net nominee. Her chapbook After is published with Finishing Line Press. Her full-length poetry collection What The Days Wanted is published with Broadstone Books. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers.

Publication Date: March 15, 2026

Paperback, 112 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-38-3

“What do you collect?” Like the hoarding uncle described in one of her poems, Lucia Cherciu has collected a lifetime of experience from her native Romania to her adopted America and transmuted it into poetry. Or perhaps more aptly, “translanguaging” as she expresses the process of thought at the intersection of tongues, where “My love language / is dusting.” Dedicated to and inspired by the life and art of painter Betty Ross (whose portrait of the author graces the cover), her poems celebrate the art of, and in, living. “God, let me keep what I love,” she implores, and here she both keeps and shares all that matters most in her life.

Praise for Lucia Cherciu & Geraniums in the Studio

Lucia Cherciu’s Geraniums in the Studio is rich in flowers, fruit, and trees—in nature, in art, and in the memory of the emigrant who longs for home. “Immigrant” reads in its entirety, “All those cups of coffee / I should have drunk /with my mother, // all those orchards / I should have walked through/with my father. // Send some money home.” Raised in Romania during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Cherciu writes, “My computer figured out / I want to buy a black dress / after I already bought a black dress // and now tempts me with black dresses.” She writes, “My neighbor has a TV as wide as the whole back of the house. // When the leaves fall, I could place a chair in my yard/and watch golf all day.” She plants trees in that yard, a big garden. This book is a bountiful harvest.

—Suzanne Cleary, author of The Odds

I am moved by Geraniums in the Studio partly because I knew Betty Ross, the extraordinary woman and painter to whom the book is dedicated. These are eloquent poems of friendship and memory, honoring art so deeply that “Even the grocery list is a love poem, a prayer.” Lucia Cherciu explores the life of making and discovering, connections and losses. “A poem is a letter sent over a grave,” she writes. As an immigrant from Romania, she knows the double life of language and dream. As a true poet, she leaves us “feasting on sagacity and stories.”

—David Mason, former poet laureate of Colorado, author of Cold Fire & other books

Geraniums in the Studio is a collection that invites us into a world rich in imagery and tales of family, nature, and friendship. Lucia Cherciu’s poems share the intimacy of daily experiences through varied landscapes of memory: from her garden to meditations on her homeland, Romania. In this volume, the gifted artist Elizabeth Ross (1936-2021) sits alongside the reader as a wise and benevolent presence, invoked by poems that bring Ross’s art, creative spirit, even the light in her Colorado home, to life. In one of many memorable lines, Cherciu declares: “Create your own table.” For us, her gathering of deeply-lived and deeply-considered moments provides a language of abundance and tenderness where we can linger for many hours.

—Joanna Roche, art historian and author of Then. Now. If & Tyrannical Angels & Other Love Poems

About the Author

Lucia Cherciu writes both in English and in Romanian and is the author of six books of poetry, including Immigrant Prodigal Daughter (Kelsay Books, 2023), Train Ride to Bucharest (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017), a winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, Edible Flowers (Main Street Rag, 2015), Lalele din Paradis / Tulips in Paradise (Editura Eikon, 2017), Altoiul Râsului / Grafted Laughter (Editura Brumar, 2010), and Lepădarea de Limbă / The Abandonment of Language (Editura Vinea, 2009). She served as the 2021-2022 Dutchess County Poet Laureate, and her work was nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She teaches English at SUNY/Dutchess Community College.

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Paperback, 86 pages

ISBN: 978-1-966677-34-5

In his new collection Unpainted Houses, Mervyn Taylor recalls “Getting Lost” as a child on his way home from the movies, and of his relief upon finding familiar landmarks and knowing himself safe. The nostalgia in these poems serves a like purpose, his memories of his native Trinidad and his long-adopted Brooklyn both anchoring him in the uncertain present where he wears black “for the dead, for the strong / shoulders of the bearers.” The title poem recalls a tax dodge of leaving houses unpainted, “how we managed island / by island, until the day we could / afford to paint the house purple, / orange, any damn color we want” – a sly tribute to making do, skirting the edges, the celebration of getting by. An encounter with a Guinean neighbor leaves him “wondering if heartbreak is / different in another language.” In these poems, Tayor has mastered the universal language of heartbreak, of humanity, and of hope.

Praise for Mervyn Taylor & Unpainted Houses

“The Music Must Be Coming from Somewhere,” the first poem in this new collection, opens onto a landscape of sound, where memories hiss in the air, and history dances at the front of a Carnival parade. Houses hold secrets and share gossip and dream of being painted. Curtains turn into capes spun from ancient threads, fabric of the islands brought to this city by the poet Mervyn Taylor, himself a masquerader. Follow the 9/11 Man, covered in soot, as he comes to the place where Sonny Rollins practices, and the songs here partner with the ones over there.

—Rashidah Ismaili, author of Autobiography of the Lower East Side

“When I saw the blue house at the corner of the lane, I / laughed out loud. I knew where I Was …,” writes Mervyn Taylor in this collection that fuses the cultures of Trinidad with that of Brooklyn. Sensuous, aching, and illuminating, poem after poem juxtaposes the ruin of humanity and the planet with the sweetness of “a hummingbird’s pee.” Unpainted Houses is a homage to houses painted and unpainted that serve as refuge to the people who live there: “I like the quiet, in-between notes / that linger…/…coming / from a voice so like mine.” These poems are steeped in love, caught in the circle of leaving and returning. “And when / the basin on your lap was nearly full, / I saw your hair, like mine, was gray.”

—Catherine Strisik, author of Goat, Goddess, Moon

Each of these visionary poems embodies the “song that’s been sung since Day One, its lilt, like light from a worn-out star.” Mervyn Taylor’s poetry chronicles the hope and pain people endure, as they live between cultures and through political upheavals. Taylor does not solely define himself or his friends by their clashes of geographies, but draws from them the wisdom “of the universe, which sounds like someone playing with a door, opening and closing it.” Luckily for us, Unpainted Houses provides the doorways for strangers and foreigners, not only through the glimmer of “a worn-out star,” but with a calypso beat leading to survival.

—Melinda Thomsen, author of Dropping Sunrises in a Jar

About the Author

In a broad, ongoing Savannah meets Prospect Park narrative, Mervyn Taylor’s poems join experiences of his native Trinidad with those of having lived for many years in Brooklyn. He has taught in the NYC public school system and at The New School, where his Banana Boat Poetry Cruise was a course on the Caribbean in verse. Currently, he serves as editor with Slapering Hol Press, Hudson Valley, New York. Unpainted Houses is his tenth full-length collection of poetry. About Taylor’s work the poet Derek Walcott once said, “There are many words for what is perhaps the most difficult aspect of good verse: honesty. Mervyn Taylor is an honest poet, and that is high and sufficient praise indeed.”

The cover art, “Unfinished House,” was completed during the COVID lockdown period spent in the house where he grew up, in Belmont, a short walk to the Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain.