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A. H. Jerriod Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine, cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life, how the native grape’s “thick skin    [that] teeth / pierce    breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue.” Throughout these pages, a deeply Southern sensibility balances an environmental awareness of deficit and bounty — appetite pains the stomach and delights the palette. In all seasons, the tongue’s subversive intelligence sculpts this masterwork of love, grace, conflict, and grief. This book tastes summer and the “ruins of / an afternoon” at once; it explores the language that testifies to loss while illuminating the abundance that loss obscures. Avant accentuates the sonic joys that Black Southern voices bring to bear on memorializing the present and commemorating the past. Don’t forget, he tells us. “Look how I hunger where // there is no hunger.” See how the weather changes swiftly and forever: “Look / how pops left    before we // thought he was done.” But notice, too, how an echo sounds remembrance: “Listen, / how the voice    of a dead man // can live.” He commands us to take the brief blooms with us, says, “Pack me    a bag / I can fit    in my heart.”
 

As John Gallaher prefaces this book, “It should have been an easy story to sort out, but it took fifty years.” My Life in Brutalist Architecture confronts the truth of the author’s adoption after a lifetime of concealment and deceptions with lucid candor, startling humor, and implacable grief. Approaching identity and family history as a deliberate architecture, Gallaher’s poems illuminate how a simple exterior can obscure the structural bricolage and emotional complexity of its inner rooms. This collection explores — and mourns — the kaleidoscopic iterations of potential selves as prismed through our understanding of the past, a shifting light parsed by facts, memories, and a family’s own mythology. The agonizing beauty of My Life in Brutalist Architecture is its full embrace of doubt, a jack that makes space for repair even as it wrenches one apart. After his daughter’s birth, the author considers the only picture of himself before the adoption, captioned “Marty, nine mos.” In legal documentation, in the photographic archive, this child no longer exists. “I appear next as John, three-and- a-half,” Gallaher writes, “and Marty disappears, a ghost name.” “And so, then, what does the self consist of?” he asks. The answer is, necessarily, no answer. “The theme is time. The theme is unspooling,” Gallaher summarizes, testifying to a story’s inability to recover the past or isolate its meaning. Equal parts reckoning and apologia, Gallaher’s latest work disrupts the notion that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, attesting to the irrevocable harm of silence, while offering mercy in its recognition of our guardians as deeply flawed conduits of care. Referencing Vitruvius’s foundational elements of architecture (firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, or solidity, usefulness, and beauty), Gallaher fuses an elegy and an ode to family when he writes “that in the third principle of architecture, / they bathe you and feed you. You won’t remember. // And they know this.” Gallaher’s lyricism encapsulates this, humanity’s consummate tragedy and profoundest grace — that love, even when forgotten, persists. 

An urgent exploration of caring and mothering on a planet in crisis
 
In a swell of sea-linked essays, Christina Rivera explores the kinship between marine animals, humans, and Earth’s blue womb. Rivera’s investigative questions begin with the toxic burden of her body and spiral out—to a grieving orca, a hunted manta ray, a pregnant sea turtle, a spawning salmon, an “endling” porpoise, and the “mother culture” of sperm whales—as she redefines what it means to mother and defend a collective future.

Braiding memoir with embodied climate science, Rivera challenges that it’s not anthropomorphism to feel deep connection to nonhuman species and proposes that gathering in collective grief is essential amid the sixth mass extinction. For ecofeminists, fans of Rachel Carson and Terry Tempest Williams—and for anyone who feels themself disintegrate in the presence of the sea—My Oceans offers a timely and wondrous descent into the deep waters of interconnection in which we swim.

Mycocosmic offers intricately woven incantations—prayers, hexes, and charms—all of which call for a transformation of language, grief, and the self.

“Good things come to you through fire,” a Tarot reader told Lesley Wheeler as she was composing what became her sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic. But how could that be true, while the planet was burning and life slamming her with one loss after another? Then she learned about pyrophilic fungi that lurk in soil until activated by fire. Enter mycelia and a teeming underground world that metabolizes death, changing what remains so that life can begin anew.

Mycocosmic offers intricately woven spell poems—prayers, hexes, charms, and invocations—that call for transformation. A parent’s death gives Wheeler the freedom to reveal difficult truths about family violence and her sexuality; a midlife mental health crisis transforms her sense of self. Incantatory language channeled through a wide variety of forms—including free verse, litany, sonnets, the bref double, the golden shovel, and the villanelle—empowers these shifts.

Beneath these poems runs a book-length essay in verse, “Underpoem [Fire Fungus],” sending tendrils across the footer of each page. This poetic mycelium nourishes metamorphosis and highlights its urgency. As Merlyn Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life, “Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” Poetry is rooted in real and imagined communities and conversations. Mycocosmic demonstrates how interdependence binds us together.

This new edition of William Doty's critically acclaimed study provides a comprehensive guidebook to the many schools of interpretation in this burgeoning field

William Doty's popular text has been hailed as the most comprehensive work of its kind. Extensively rewritten and completely restructured, the new edition provides further depth and perspective and is even more accessible to students of myth. It includes expanded coverage of postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, the Gernet Center, mythic iconography, neo-Jungian approaches, and cultural studies, and it summarizes what is new in the study of Greek myth, iconography, French classical scholarship, and ritual studies. It also features a comprehensive index of names and topics, a glossary, an up-to-date annotated bibliography, and a guide to myth on the Internet.

Presenting all major myth theorists from antiquity to the present, Mythography is an encyclopedic work that offers a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of myth. By reflecting the dramatic increase in interest in myth among both scholars and general readers since publication of the first edition, it remains a key study of modern approaches to myth and
an essential guide to the wealth of mythographic research available today.

A collection expressing musical experience and daily life through poetry.
 
The poems in Steven Rood’s newest collection take on a musical sensibility as they flow from the poet’s sixty years as a classical guitarist who remains preoccupied with the tonalities of daily life. Each poem in music from behind a stone wall comes together to build a multi-layered symphony that reveals the delights and travails of family life and moments of intimate connection with animals and plants. At the core of the book are poems considering the overwhelming task of trying to communicate the essence of musical experience via the written word. This is a book of grief and joy sung with lyric acuity, vivid images, and formal variation.