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.

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.

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.

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.