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All songs have skin, / all skin has holes. On High, Neil Surkan's debut collection of poetry, searches for spirits in myriad places. Wondering how, why, and when to act with a conscience, speakers try out steep hikes, strong drugs, and earnest meditations as they attempt to make meaning in a divided and distracting world.

Shiver. Swift whip of wind. / Fangs of the low front / stinging fierce as forest fires. / Frost thickening the stoop. In his debut collection, Short Histories of Light, Aidan Chafe recounts his Catholic upbringing in a household dealing with the common but too often taboo subject of mental illness. In unflinching fashion, Chafe reveals the unintended disasters that follow those who struggle with depression and the frustration of loved ones left to pick up the pieces.

A whistling through teeth. / He shuts his eyes but still sees / the red glow of exit signs. Harold Hoefle's The Night Chorus rises out of forests and country roads, bars and buses, cities and small towns. These locales are the haunts of outsiders ranging from travellers and farmers to a soldier, a drug addict, a refugee, and the murdered.

The hunt over; the kill complete / limping towards perfection, padding / about the room, thorns in her thumbs / Hermes crawling on all fours - / That was the last I saw of Hilda. What is it to remember a life, to relive it, to mythologize it? Things that were said or not said haunt us for a lifetime. In Translating Air Kath MacLean imagines conversations between the modernist poet H.D. and Sigmund Freud during the poet's sessions with him in 1933 to 1934 and the dialogues that continued long afterwards in H.D.'s own mind.

Hate to tell you, but you're going to die. / Quite soon. Me, too. / Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm. / Death does no harm / To wisdom. Sarah Tolmie's second collection of poems is a traditional ars moriendi, a how-to book on the practices of dying. Confronting the fear of death head-on, and describing the rituals that mitigate it, the poems in The Art of Dying take a satirical look at the ways we explain, enshrine, and, above all, evade death in contemporary culture.

Isabella Caro, born in Florence at the de-occupation of Italy in WW2 is a woman shaped by the resilience of her country and a thirst for knowledge. In this fictional Novel-in-Verse we take a journey through one woman's life, told from the perspective of three characters: Isabella, her daughter Alina and her granddaughter Georgia. Three voices weave through a lifetime in and out of harmony as they tell us a story of innocence, feminism, intellect, motherhood, immigration, understanding and loss.

These poems dwell in the hearth of domesticity, but they look beyond the confines of the home with clear eyes. Boldly unafraid, they confront the realities of climate change, the desecration of habitat, some quiet truths about aging and death. The first section consists primarily of the experience of childhood, not all of it particularly pleasant - much of it a reflection of an era that, thankfully, is now behind us with its often oppressive atmosphere.

The poems in this book trace the emotional and spiritual journey of a woman whose beloved son dies after an arduous battle with cancer. Nudelman explores the nexus between art, healing, and truth. As the woman gradually climbs out of grief's darkness she reclaims her own life's purpose. Confronting her losses, she heals. This collection is about strength, survival, love, and the healing that comes from self-empowerment through speaking one's own truth and releasing the past.

The capacity of the rediscovered world to signal and illuminate, restore and repair, fuels the poems in Every Shameless Ray. In Every Shameless Ray, it's more often possible to find one's way when headed somewhere else. Intellectually curious, emotionally acute and playful in form, these poems rely upon the unreliable - the accidents and reversals that expose prescriptive narratives of war and patterns of desire. In poems about a child's misunderstood words and the shock of a Matisse painting, habits of perception are interrupted and disrupted.

Bringing together the themes of death, of gender and sexuality, the poet creates a speaker whose language and experience, linked from poem to poem, reflects the true complexity of a woman's perspective. Death is a prevalent theme; anxiety, fear and paranoia simmer throughout the poems. Regret, too, is a recurrent theme, as previous experience defines us even by its absence.