Happy New Year, Happy Reading!

Looking for ways to stretch your mind and imagination in the new year? These two wildly creative collections will get you there!

The Catalog of Small Contentments by Carolyn Martin

The Poetry Box, 2021

Carolyn Martin has done it again. 

In her sixth poetry collection, her words prance, dream and and sing. Through conversations with the sky, musings about Monet, and appreciation for an antic ant that offers critiques of Martin's writing, we enter a world that's both imaginative and also entirely relatable. The collection includes heartrending poems such as "Music to Disappear By," in which her dying father asks her "to record/his melody before it disappears," as well as the bouncy, life-affirming "Dear Type-A Friend," where Martin asserts she's "newly funemployed" and plans "to gadabout" a universe full of infinite possibility. 

To purchase a copy, you can click here.

Callie Comes of Age by Dale Champlin

Cirque Press, 2021

Think you don't like poetry? Think again. This pageturning coming-of-age and character-driven thriller redefines the meaning of what poetry can be. With a gutsy heroine and a rugged landscape that's so vivid you can smell the sage and feel the "dry heaves of hills," Callie Comes of Age took my breath away. Dale Champlin, who has always struck me as being a magician as much as a writer, fills her book with a dark secret, a sense of danger and delirious pleasure.

You can purchase this novel/poetry collection here.