If I had a very young poet in my life right now, I would gift them a copy of Michael T. Young’s The Infinite Doctrine of Water post haste. The poems in this, Young’s third book, take the reader on a guided tour of beauty, mystery and thoughtful meditations on a wide range of topics, from new pens to turpentine to Jersey City, a town that I have not seen visited in verse often. The width and breadth and depth of the book is staggering.

Some books of short stories feel like they take you on an assortment of short vacations, others feel more sublime, like they are taking you away from life itself, into other worlds or realities. Our Dreams Might Align is one such book of delicious fictions that toggle or get close to magical and speculative realms but never leave the country of the heart. Dana Diehl has a spot- on deadeye shot at the bulls eye on yours. And she never misses.

You know those cute little books right by the cash register at the book store? The ones that have fifty ways to remind yourself you are beautiful or humorous tracts on puppy antics? Well David Atkinson’s new book of short stories, Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change From My Pockets, despite the catchy-kitschy title and cover which might suggest otherwise, is not such a book. What kind of book it is, however, is hard to pin down, as each story wiggles away from logic, reason and what we commonly think of as “plot” or “story”. Or typical anything, really.

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.