What if the people you come from were from warring tribes, colonizer and slave, the indentured and the human trafficker? What if your own origin myth is one of violence and clash? This is the territory of Cherokee Road Kill, brave poems by the courageous, spiritually enlightened and linguistically acrobatic poet, Celia Bland.

“Who says you need five rivers/ to reach the underworld?” asks Leslie Contreras Schwartz in one of the title poems of her new collection Nightbloom and Cenote. In these rich, and layered, evocative poems, like “My Mother As a Child Surrounded by Night-Blooming Jasmine,” Contreras Schwartz shows us there are many routes indeed, as well as many underworlds.

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.