I am one of those dreadful people who dog ear the books. Not the library ones – don’t freak out here. But my own. The best ones look a little scary. Like they might have been to Bosnia in certain years or have traveled up the Amazon on a raft. I find a phrase or passage I find enchanting and there I go, making little triangles on the page tops. And if I really, really love the writing, a pen will find its way into the equation. Then the book will become a super mess, pages fattened by folds and demarcated by my literary liner notes. These are the books I will go back to, time and again, to find a certain phrase, or to try and locate a certain feeling the writer inspired. They are topographical maps of their impression upon me, all bent up and beat by my affections.

In the heart of Lynn McGee’s collection of poetry, Sober Cooking, is a heart. A broken heart, both figuratively and literally. A full heart, same deal.

Illness and love and longing comingle and conspire in this book to give us that cross-hatched country where love and human frailty meet. In some poems, lovers practice the slow waltz of relationship building and losing. In others, the tenderness of blue hospital light and the bedsides of the sick and beloved find a special and arched attention. It is clear throughout that McGee knows the country of love. She knows the country of loss. This book is a map of each and the places they overlap.

Ravi Shankar is a great poet, a scholar, and, over the years, became an editor to reckon with, at the literary magazine he founded, Drunken Boat. His poems are luminous and voluminous; they shimmer with ideas and color and a great love and curiosity for life, art and music. He is widely respected for his advocacy for the poets and people of Singapore; he is a prophet of the polyglot, perhaps diversity’s best muse.

On June 24, 1947, small businessman and hobbyist pilot Kenneth Arnold was on a business flight in his CallAir A-2 Mountain plane, when he saw something. An unnameable thing. What becomes the topic and title of Brooklyn poet Matthew Bialer’s epic poem, Formation.

In terse and clipped three and four word lines, bundled mostly in couplets and tercets and occasion longer stanzas, Bialer delivers up a narrative poem that traces events from the middle of the last century surrounding the origins of the phrase “flying saucer”.  The New York-based literary agent, well-known street photographer, watercolorist and author of eleven previous books from such prestigious presses as Coffee House, effectively uses repetition and imagistic description, artfully (and interestingly) combined with a quasi-journalistic research of the topic. He has located both official and anecdotal materials recording these events from all sorts of sources and in the book he recounts various versions of these mysterious sightings.

Ah, the poetry chapbook.  These mini-books, often between fifteen and thirty five pages, can be a delicate reminder of what we love, a toe-dip in the pool of a specific writer’s relationship with language. Often they are themed; they tend to have a preciousness. They fit well in even the smallest of purses. They offer up poetic hors d’oeuvres. Tasty imagistic nuggets.

Now, forget everything I wrote above. This summer I met a chapbook that, despite its scant twenty-four pages and the most delicate of covers– a 19th century botanical illustration of plant and bird– is meaty and substantial, a sensual and narrative feast that satisfies, rather than teases, the reader. In Wandering in My Mind, Michigan poet Laura Smyth parses nature in all its grandeur, and the place she has witnessed it intersecting with humanity, whether her loved ones or strangers.