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Chronicling reproduction and parenting within a lesbian relationship, this poetry collection reveals both the anxieties and awe inspired by rearing children. 

In her frank, vulnerable third book of poetry, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers considers queer kinship through scientific, cultural, and personal lenses. Bad Cell presents perspectives on family and inheritance that are at once granular and comprehensive. From a pregnant woman being mistaken as a man by a store clerk to some “FAQs Re: Queers & Reproduction” that dispel stereotypes, the collection celebrates the fluidity of gender.

Early in the volume, Rogers addresses the emotional and physical complications of fertility treatment and pregnancy loss, a medical journey that, though harrowing, is gorgeously rendered in taut lyric language. Later, in forms like the abecedarian, definition poem, questionnaire, haibun, and a sonnet crown, the poet looks at how cells themselves—the stuff of life—divide and recombine. As in previous collections, Rogers leans into science-inspired verse, showcasing her talent for turning small-scale mechanics into meaningful metaphors. 

The book also supports an openness to neurodivergence in children: “I want to assemble / something that can speak / for everyone,” says the speaker of “Apraxia.” And Rogers does, with the skill of a seasoned poet and essay writer, whose eye for the particularness of the world is encompassing and gives new insight into the experience of parenting: “But I’m not mom, I tell / writers who think I’ve gone soft, given up deeper subjects. As if these wild, / xenogeneic offspring aren’t a full-on wrestle with the deep.”

Brothers is Nico Slate’s poignant memoir about Peter Slate, aka XL, a Black rapper and screenwriter whose life was tragically cut short. Nico and Peter shared the same White American mother but had different fathers. Nico’s was White; Peter’s was Black. Growing up in California in the 1980s and 1990s, Nico often forgot about their racial differences until one night in March 1994 when Peter was attacked by a White man in a nightclub in Los Angeles.

Nico began writing Brothers with the hope that investigating the attack would bring him closer to Peter. He could not understand that night, however, without grappling with the many ways race had long separated him from his brother.

This is a memoir of loss—the loss of a life and the loss at the heart of our racial divide—but it is also a memoir of love. The love between Nico and Peter permeates every page of Brothers. This achingly beautiful memoir presents one family’s resilience on the fault lines of race in contemporary America.

A lyrical meditation on time, survival, and merciful moments of joy 

Sara Henning’s Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.

Burn magnifies the way time leaves us both the victim and the victor of our realities. The blaze of her late-mother’s Tiffany lamps sends the speaker back to childhood, where she unearths mica from the schoolyard dirt. The devastation of an ecological crisis, the annihilating act of rape, and the unsolved disappearance of a caretaker all level the speaker’s world and upend her place in it, forcing her to reconstitute reality from what remains. In poems which summon the spirit of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this collection walks through the physics of temporality as refracted through love, loss, and grief, so we better understand its effect on our lives. Through this insight, Henning introduces a new way of being in the world.  

A work of advocacy and uplift, Burn shines with the vibrant possibilities of narrative lyric poetry as it forges a path from grief to hope.