Tony Crunk writes the kind of poems that compel folks who claim to “hate” poetry to admit that well, actually, they like his poems. Crunk’s is a poetry of unlabored images and unadorned language. His new book, Cumberland, is complicated in the best way for contemporary poetry to be complicated.

Willie James King is a masterful poet-physician, environmentalist, and surgeon-priest. He attends to the ills that befall the bonehouse of the body in which we live and recognizes that it is at once the mortal frame, our spiritual being, the work we do, and the earth we inhabit. The House in the Heart is a potent poetic prescription that helps right wrong.

The cover art aptly describes this first poetry collection by Irene Latham as an organic, growing, nature-of-life-itself work—the roots, the thorns, the blossoms, the birds.

The entrails of a slaughtered sow, the child born with a goat’s face, the cousin laid on a railroad track: such images make up the core of Janice Harrington’s Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone. These images weave in and out of her poems but never appear the same as the poet plays with theme and variations.

At a point approximately midway through Fleur Carnivore, Rich Lyons’ Washington Prize-winning third volume of poetry, an augury emerges, voiced in such a way that both bleakness and hope are held within a single couplet: “The future never is, it dies to arrive. I’m not what you said I’d be, / the future whispers. The future is . . . .” The achievement of tone at a moment like this, simultaneously filled with authority and puzzlement, is pure Lyons.

This is Matthew Graham’s third volume of poetry and the sixth book in the River City Poetry Series, edited by Andrew Hudgins. The title refers to one of the book’s two epigraphs, this one from the Book of Isaiah: “ . . . ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.”

Several poems in Janet McAdams’ Feral “retell or refer to stories about feral children” as the author clarifies in the “Notes to Poems” addendum. Upon finishing the book, McAdams’ second, the reader may recall as the most interesting poems those that are referred to rather than retold.

Much like the canvas of Joan Mitchell, which “leans so all her drips go down,” Mary Kaiser writes with her paper leaning forward, words too heavy for the task slipping to the floor. Bound within a serene yet austere hand-sewn cover, Kaiser’s seventeen poems weave together a seemingly dissimilar community of master artists. From the brilliant and fleshy images of Velázquez to the curiously sterile yet surreal box art of Joseph Cornell, Kaiser imagines them into a combined reality to illuminate the magic of eternity.

In a 2002 interview with Southern Scribe, Kelly Cherry commented that as a young child “even before I had words to say it with, I had something to say…. This need to say what was mine to say preceded anything else in my life.” This urgency “to say” has produced a seventh collection of poetry that demonstrates a range of emotional, technical, and lyrical concerns.

Poems from the Big Table samples the work of five poets, all members of a Birmingham poetry workshop. The concept of binding several chapbooks together in one volume makes economic sense and potentially widens the audience for each poet.

Performer and songwriter Tom Kimmel’s debut book of poems is uneven but nonetheless pleasing. Like a homecooked meal made with much care and some ability, it satisfies.

Brambu Drezi: Words that define liberation, that are beyond boundaries, that testify to the genius of Jake Berry. Brambu Drezi: a Wittgensteinian rendering of: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. But of course there is then no question left and just this is the answer.” Brambu Drezi is an answer.

The poems in Alan May’s Notes Toward an Apocryphal Text appear as tight little blocks on the page, like columns of newspaper print, or as if larger poems had been trash compacted. I admit I had trouble getting past the seemingly arbitrary form. Then early in the collection I came upon this...

Yeats asks, in a question that is really a lyric lament, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” In the case of the uniquely-gifted poet Rette Maddox, it is impossible to separate the two. His dance was the dance of death in the embrace of the Scotch, malnutrition, and tobacco that ultimately killed him (he was 44) in the form of esophageal cancer, but it was out of this embrace—organically and inevitably—that his poetry bloomed.

Edge by Edge is a collection of four chapbooks with poems by Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, and Vivian Teter.  In How To Recognize a Lady , Emma Bolden’s chapbook ,  the reader will find sharp and unabashedly direct poems pushed and pulled by the lilt of language, and then bitten back to the driving point by words skillfully crafted that show what women are subjected to in society’s written and unwritten rules.