As a visual artist and poet, Kelly Cressio-Moeller knows what she is leveraging when she evokes the color blue in the title of her debut poetry collection, 'Shade of Blue Trees' -- a word that describes not just color but also emotion and language.

The poem speaks from the present, when climate disaster is incipient but not yet realized, when we still “did not know to fear” the sun. It poses images of lushness and life against those of aridity and death, allowing readers to draw their own inevitable conclusions about what we hope for our planet.

In these sometimes-painful poems, beauty is the balm that allows readers to understand what the speaker has experienced and to approach those experiences close-up but without getting overwhelmed.

I chose “Dusk” by Tracy K. Smith for its frank expression of the double-edged sword that is motherhood (parenthood, really): We adore our children more than life itself, and if we do a good job of raising them, they one day will abandon us.

In Monica Youn's “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado),” the longing of a speaker who seeks to connect and make sense of so many threads, lessons, myths, and messages is stirring.

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s poems are set in the circumscribed worlds of home and Academia, but this is merely the way the author accesses larger issues of exile, identity, and artistic inspiration.

Learning how to read art by way of “deep-looking” can lead to a more creative way of seeing that could be applied to a number of other areas of human endeavor, and maybe, even to a way of life.

You could call this poem an elegy to a lost mother, but I read it more universally as an elegy to the lost kingdom of childhood.