As enriching as it is to consider “Blackbody curve” in terms of its scientific allusions or placement in Samiya Bashir’s collection, it’s important to note that the poem stands on its own as an enjoyable and rewarding literary experience.

The poems in 'Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl' paint their own murals in words glowing with passion and conviction. There is also a good dose of sass, a quality visually captured in book’s cover photo.

I'm looking at race and trying to understand and explore and untangle my personal identity, but also the place and time that we find ourselves in, in this world around race. —MK Chavez

'Storage Unit for the Spirit House' began as a group of poems I had been working on around the idea of containers and containment. Questions I considered: Who is held and who is not held? What do we save and what do we discard?

“Private Collection” by Shelley Wong perfectly captures the experience of museum-going. Standing in a museum gallery, our speaker sifts back through other galleries, thoughts, and experiences as a woman and as a partner, a private (re)collection of sorts.

This poem draws attention to two convenient plot points. One is glibly introducing the death of a woman as a narrative catalyst; the other is the crisis of an anaphylactic reaction, invoked without any regard for the lived experience.

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.