In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.

Nebraska Book Award, Special Poetry recognition More in Time is a celebration and tribute to Ted Kooser, two-time U.S. Poet Laureate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Presidential Professor of the University of Nebraska. Through personal reflections, essays, and creative works both inspired by and dedicated to Kooser, this collection shines a light on the many ways the midwestern poet has affected others as a teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend, as well as a fellow writer and observer-of-the-world. The creative responses included in this volume are reflective of the impact Kooser has had in his connections to other writers, while also revealing glimpses of his distinct way of seeing.

Poetry. "A startlingly surreal and mytho-erotic creation, The Egg Mistress conjures unknown boundaries of eros and worlds within an egg whose origins demand the geographies of a new language: 'If I could speak mineral./ If I could only eat bonemeal. If the cabbage/ learned not to grow roots. If you were the barn/ and I was the peeled corn.' Jessica Poli is a true original and this chapbook is an odyssey of delight." Mark Irwin"

The twelfth issue of Caketrain, featuring new work from Kirstin Allio, Riley Bingham, Laurie Blauner, Bridget Brewer, Ryan Call, J'Lyn Chapman, Jessica Comola, Yonca Karakas Demirel, Alexandra Dillard, Zachary Doss, Sarah Rose Etter, Brian Evenson, Kelsie Hahn, Joel Hans, Ya-Wen Ho, Dan Ivec, Jacqueline Kari, Davy Knittle, Alyce Knorr, Darby Larson, Gary Lutz, Elizabeth Mikesch, JoAnna Novak, Kim Parko, Vanessa Place, Jessica Poli, Nick Francis Potter, Daniel Wessler Riordan, Sally Rodgers, Freddy Ruppert, Kathryn Scanlan, May-Lan Tan, Adam Veal, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, Rae Winkelstein, Timothy Wojcik. Edited by Amanda Raczkowski, Joseph Reed, Tanner Hadfield and Katy Mongeau.

THE MOTIONS OF BURYING is a thesis comprised of 52 pages of poems and a five page introduction that explores personal connections to physical space and landscape. The poems included in this manuscript are representative of the places I've called home: the woods of Pennsylvania, where I grew up; barns and pastures in Central New York, where I spent several years working on small family farms; and the wide sky over Holmes Lake in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I now reside.