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Love Her Blind & Other Poems
Love Her Blind & Other Poems is a restless, emotionally exposed collection that moves through romantic betrayal, childhood violence, family memory, aging, faith, mental illness, and the strange negotiations required to survive all of them. David Somerfleck’s poems often begin with an ordinary object or encounter, then push it into a more charged psychological space. A rocking chair becomes part of a child’s understanding of violence, a bicycle becomes both escape and resistance, and a grandfather becomes something nearly cosmic. The collection’s range is clear in titles such as “My Grandfather’s God,” “Bicycle Rider,” “What I Didn’t Know About Love,” “Tall Time,” and “Mum.”
Somerfleck writes in a dense, image-driven style, piling physical detail onto memory until the past feels immediate and unstable. His strongest poems let metaphor deepen the experience rather than simply decorate it. In “Bicycle Rider,” reading and riding give the speaker a way to move beyond family cruelty, even when that cruelty follows him into sleep and imagination. In “My Grandfather’s God,” ancestry, nature, grief, and belief merge into a vision of blood moving through soil, roots, trees, and stars. These poems don’t treat memory as a tidy record. Memory becomes a living environment, full of weather, animals, wounds, voices, and figures that appear larger than life.
The book’s emotional center is its ongoing attempt to understand love without simplifying it. Love appears as tenderness, obsession, protection, grief, dependency, and renewed possibility. “What I Didn’t Know About Love” begins with harsh, dangerous images, but gradually makes room for a love that can be delicate, clear, and newly understood. That movement gives the collection more than darkness. Even when the poems enter frightening or surreal territory, they keep reaching toward connection, whether through a partner, a parent, a grandparent, an animal, a remembered landscape, or the act of writing itself.
What makes the collection memorable is the sense that every poem has been wrestled out of experience rather than calmly observed from a distance. Somerfleck’s voice can be raw, funny, grotesque, affectionate, angry, and unexpectedly gentle, sometimes within the same piece. The result is a book that feels intensely personal while still opening outward toward questions many readers will recognize: what families pass down, how pain changes perception, why love survives its own damage, and how imagination gives us somewhere to go when reality closes in. Love Her Blind & Other Poems turns bruised memory into fierce, strange music that keeps sounding after the page goes quiet.
Pages: 90 | ASIN : B0GN54HFYQ
Visual Remembrance
Ain’t the Land is a collection of place-rooted poems that moves through Appalachia town by town, exploring weather, memory, labor, family, faith, hunger, animals, old speech, and stubborn grief. Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?
That’s a great question. The first poet that I latched on to during this process of writing the poems was Cynthia Cruz. Her poem “Sparks, Nevada,” published in the May 2014 issue of Poetry Magazine, really floored me. I didn’t discover it until several years afterwards, and I’m not even sure how I came by it, but the imagery, the dream-scape, the sense of loss and mistaken, even unavoidable tragedy stayed with me, and I decided to write an imitation poem titled “Unaka Springs, Tennessee.” A few years later, I found Richard Hugo’s essay, “Triggering Towns,” while doing research for my thesis on the underappreciated yet immense 20th-century Tennessee poet, George Scarbrough. Hugo’s essay explores the importance of the strange town in releasing the poet’s imagination to free language from emotional attachment. And I figured I had been through many of these towns, yet they weren’t my hometown, so I based these poems on what I remembered of the towns, and they sparked my memories from other places, my own family. It really became a sort of visual remembrance in a persona’s voice mingled, as these ventures are, with what Margalit Fox called “the hazy place where truth, fiction, and memory meet.” Maybe because I had just completed my thesis on Scarbrough, I also began to stray from Cruz’s line structuring and utilize what I found in Scarbrough’s poems: embedded classic ballad meter in loosely structured stanza poems. Finally, I was reading E. B. Miles’ naturalist study, Our Southern Birds, and also reading a lot of English ballads recorded in the Southern mountains from the early 20th century during the writing of all 52 poems.
Faith appears throughout the collection, sometimes as comfort and sometimes as something to wrestle with. How has your own spiritual life influenced your poetry?
Oh, I’d say religious imagery is very real and palpable to me, and using it in poetry helps me to understand, or better yet, envision these mythical scenes from antiquity in our century so insistent on the “now.” I remember using the Ezekiel Wheel—that old trope—in a poem (I think it’s “Shouns, Tennessee”), and of course the religious symbolism is clear yet mystical—the Holy Ghost at the center of life (of matter) like a wheel spinning within a wheel. I don’t know why I like re-imagining these mythical scenes from my religion, but I guess it has to do with context, and I guess my poetry is asking, “Is God here?” I remember growing up and singing these famous hymns with elevated scenes of the risen lamb, like stuff out of Revelation. I was stumped. I didn’t want to sing a lie, so my dad recommended that I use my imagination. That helped. I stopped worrying about whether what I sang was what I believed; I started singing to see. I’m trying to just answer off the cuff, like I was hearing you ask me these questions, and this middling attempt may be the best I can offer right now, but it’s a relief to get a question about spirituality as a viable influence on the writing of a poem. An editor once told me that some of the poems in this series were “speculative” because they included religious tropes, and I was tickled pink. Spiritual reality is about as separate from material reality as water systems are “separate” from the land, but I guess we don’t always engage in the less visible systems with fear and trembling.
How did you decide the order of the poems, and did you want readers to experience them as a journey through Appalachia?
I took the cue for the poems’ organization from their form. I figured I had pairs of lines in couplets, so I should look for echoes between poems and join them up in a sort of journey through the seasons in three series or years. Since the book was mostly drafted in a three-year period, there are several distinct groups of poems on the same season yet with different tones. Yet the poems are not chronological, maybe chthonological–organized by earth, not time. So, there endf up being “pairings” throughout the collections—poems in close proximity with similar topics, images, referents, etc. As I was submitting the poems to periodicals and literary magazines, I started to notice how I was favoring the idea of certain of them going toward the front or toward the end, and so on. A friend and great poet, Jesse Graves, recommended that the poem “Duffield, Virginia” be the first poem, and I liked that idea, so I did it. He said that the highway scene of the poem would complement the tone of the book—vignettes or visitations. The reader is more like the pilgrim in contrast to the voices in the poems, which are staid. I wouldn’t call this a tour. Many of the places included in the book aren’t what you might call destinations—out of the way for many, even dyed-in-the-wool Appalachians.
What do you hope readers who have never visited Appalachia will come away understanding after reading Ain’t the Land?
I have to remind myself that I’m not an Appalachian poet writing poetry to advance the region or its customs. I’m a poet above all else, and the poem is the ends and the means, but in many ways, these poems are more rural or remote. That being said, a lot of my neighbors are thoughtful people, but they don’t always think about things that have broad appeal to “average” Americans (of course, this is just my impression after watching the nightly news these some odd years). So, I guess you could say that the concerns or topics of the poems don’t have broad appeal. If someone struggles to feel relevant when they journey through arcanus, they would do well to spare themselves from my little book. However, if a reader enjoys the occasional break from our self-obsessed, technocratic, newfangled age, then these poems may have something to offer. A friend of mine told me that he likes to go to the woods for fun to bike, camp, hike, you name it, and he told me that when he read these town poems, he was “in the woods,” which is the sort of compliment that I am sure I will never be able to fully fathom or appreciate.
Author Links: Website
Within and Without
Within and Without, by James Richard Hansen, is a compact poetry collection built around attention to: morning light, ocean sounds, music, dreams, grief, love, and the strange private weather of the mind. The book begins in quiet observation, with poems that often use nature as a doorway into reflection. In “Dawn,” Hansen writes, “Every nuance of tree and flower, / breeze and glittering light, / shows the way to freedom,” and that line captures much of the collection’s spirit. These poems are less about dramatic turns than about noticing what’s already there and letting it open into feeling.
The first half of the book moves between landscape and inner life with a steady, meditative rhythm. The Pacific, rain, moonlight, fire, trees, and stars appear again and again, not as decoration, but as companions to thought. In poems like “Oceanic Events,” “Finding My Stride,” “Catharsis,” and “Peace,” Hansen uses the natural world to describe the self coming into focus. His images are clear and accessible, and the poems often feel like moments from a walk, a window, or a quiet evening that slowly become something more personal.
There’s also a recurring sense of struggle in the collection, but it’s handled with restraint. “Serpent,” “Reconciliation,” “Night,” and “Internal Itinerary” bring in fear, loneliness, frustration, and spiritual searching, yet the book keeps returning to renewal. Hansen’s speakers look inward without getting stuck there. Even when a poem begins in heaviness, it often finds a small source of steadiness: dawn, music, rain, or the act of looking closely. That makes the collection feel honest without becoming bleak.
The second section, Love Poems to Kristen, gives the book a more intimate center. These poems are direct, affectionate, and openly devoted, moving from desire to gratitude to long-term commitment. The language is sometimes grand, but it’s grounded by the sense that these are poems written for a real person over real years, including birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine’s Day. One of the loveliest moments comes in “Reverie,” where the speaker misses the green flash at sunset and concludes, “But the idea was enough.” That small realization says a lot about the section’s emotional world: memory, love, and anticipation can be as vivid as the event itself.
Within and Without is a sincere and reflective collection about perception, healing, wonder, and devotion. Hansen’s poems are plainspoken in a way that makes them easy to enter, and their best moments come when a natural image and an inward feeling meet cleanly on the page. It’s a book for readers who enjoy poetry that’s contemplative, emotionally open, and rooted in everyday encounters with beauty. The title fits well, since the collection keeps moving between the outer world of sky, sea, rain, and light, and the inner world of memory, longing, faith, and love.
Pages: 64 | ASIN : B0794GLD97
Ain’t the Land
Ain’t the Land, by William Rieppe Moore, is a collection of place-rooted poems that moves through Appalachia town by town, from Duffield and Boone Gap to Tellico Plains and Bluffton, gathering weather, memory, labor, family, faith, hunger, animals, old speech, and stubborn grief into a single rough-hewn music. The poems feel less like postcards from a region than like weathered boards pulled from an old barn, each one holding a different stain of rain, blood, smoke, sunlight, or sorrow. Again and again, Moore writes from the charged border between belonging and estrangement, where the land is beloved but not romanticized, where beans are picked, hens are killed, fires are built, and the past keeps breathing under the floorboards.
What struck me most was how alive the language feels. Moore’s voice has a wild, bristling confidence, full of Appalachian idiom, biblical echo, botanical precision, and sudden surreal turns. I loved the way a road becomes “a crow ribbon cut loose” in “Duffield, Virginia,” or how the speaker in “Can Lot, Tennessee” can move from Saturn and Jupiter to wanting “a crosscut saw and a man to go with it” without the poem feeling strained. That mix of cosmic scale and woodstove practicality is one of the book’s great pleasures. The diction can be dense, but I found that fitting. These poems aren’t trimmed hedges. They’re briars, bean vines, creek banks, and smoke. You have to push into them a little, and they leave scratches.
Moore is writing about land, but he’s also writing about inheritance, class, ecological loss, faith, violence, and the uneasy dignity of people who know how to make do. In “Fords Branch, Kentucky,” the plea for the “great upland” to speak before places become “the poetry of was” hit me hard because it names one of the collection’s deepest fears: that whole ways of living can vanish into elegy before anyone has properly listened. I also appreciated that the book doesn’t flatten rural life into sweetness. There’s tenderness here, but also cruelty, like the flock eating the cracked last egg in “Almira, Kentucky,” or the possums and shotguns in “Stoney Creek, Tennessee.” Those moments hurt, and they should. They give the collection moral weight.
I came away from Ain’t the Land feeling that I’d been led through a landscape where everything has a voice, even rot, weather, tools, birds, and old sayings. It’s a rewarding collection if you like poetry with muscle, mud, strangeness, and soul. Moore’s writing can be thorny, but it’s thorny because it’s alive and because it refuses to make the mountains merely pretty. I’d recommend this book to readers who enjoy contemporary poetry rooted in place, especially those drawn to Appalachian literature, ecological memory, folk speech, and poems that sound like they were made by someone listening closely to both the dead and the dirt underfoot.
Pages: 64
Healing Powers of Poetry
How I Understand It is a blend of poetry, memoir, therapy-informed reflection, and guided self-inquiry. Did you write these poems with a specific audience in mind, or was it a more personal endeavor?
Writing poetry–especially what I call Bad Poetry is always a personal endeavor, near and dear to my heart and my experiences. Because of this, taking my poems public has been a very vulnerable exercise. It is perhaps because this book has been the most vulnerable project I have engaged in that it has also produced the most delight and been one of the most rewarding experiences.
When I first started writing, I was writing specifically for an audience of one: my young daughter. I felt compelled to transmit information, my hard-earned wisdom, my therapeutic insights, to her in a way that would be accessible, engaging, and informative. I wanted to make a reference tool that she could return to throughout her life, one that would be a source of comfort and guidance if I could not be there in person. (I wanted to make not just something that she could refer to, but something that she would want to refer to.) I wanted her to know me, what I wish for her, and what I have learned about resilience that would be useful to her in different phases of her life. To my surprise, once I started writing, I found that poetry was the best vehicle for this project. The poems that became the core content of the collection poured out of me, one after the other. In writing for my daughter, I found myself all over again, and eventually realized that I was writing as much for me as I was for her. Once I finished writing the collection of poetry, the experience was so profoundly moving that I knew I wanted to extend the project further and bring it to a wider audience.
I started writing the book as a mother doing a very private project. But, as a therapist, I knew that the content of the collection would appeal to a wider audience. I’ve worked with enough clients to know that the topics covered in the book are topics everyone ponders. Bad Poetry is something everyone can do and benefit from. Bad Poetry helps us connect to ourselves and others in meaningful ways. Bad poetry helps us discover the strength within our vulnerabilities. Moving forward with publication was, in a sense, an embodiment of the Bad Poetry ethos.
In my profession, I have taught and experienced creative writing and particularly the healing powers of poetry. There is something magical that happens when we take important information, condense it, and infuse it with layers of emotion, with pieces of ourselves. Our ability to gain insight into ourselves grows. Our ability to engage in perspective-taking increases. Our resilience improves. And- who wouldn’t want that? This poetry collection is for everyone.
The book draws from your experiences as a therapist, mother, former spouse, and individual navigating life’s challenges. How did you balance personal vulnerability with professional insight?
I’ve always been a practical person. And, to me, poetry became appealing when I started to understand its practical applications and specifically how I could use it as a tool for self-improvement, insight, and growth. It is much easier for me to be vulnerable if I understand why I’m doing it and that my vulnerability is serving a purpose worth pursuing. The private matters I discuss in the book, I do so with intentionality and purpose.
Additionally, my book is all about how I understand my experiences and life. I don’t know that I can separate my understanding of my experiences from my professional insights because my profession has informed me and shaped me profoundly. Becoming a therapist has given me the language to talk about my experiences in a way that I find deeply satisfying.
What misconceptions about healing do you encounter most often?
So many that it is hard to list!
I will say this: More often than not, healing requires us to confront pain, hold it, and metabolize it.
Many people believe that they cannot handle pain. That to confront the emotional pain would be too life-threatening. It is, in fact, more life-threatening to avoid your own emotions and pain. It leads to so much disconnection, suffering, and stagnation- much more so than if you took the initiative to confront, hold and metabolize it.
If you are anything like I once was, and thought that poetry was a frivolous, self-indulgent luxury, I have news. Bad Poetry is a way to take the initiative and gently metabolize pain, at your own pace. And it works!
What do you hope readers take away from the sections dealing with relationships and codependency?
Hope!
Everyone wants love, to have it, to give it… Humans are wired for connection. We just can’t help ourselves. Relationships are wonderful. Connections and especially romantic connections are ways that we learn more about ourselves, and they are how we learn how to give and receive love. Difficulties in relationships, such as codependency issues, are invitations to examine our relationship with ourselves and erroneous conceptions that we might have about what constitutes love. It is worth the effort to fully be present for your relationships, to listen to your emotions… It makes space for real love to grow.
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How I Understand It is a candid, unconventional collection of poems, reflections, and clinical insights from a therapist who isn’t afraid to call out codependency, detail the emotional complexities of grief, or tell imposter syndrome to go f*ck itself. Each chapter explores a universal theme-love, divorce, dating, trauma, forgiveness, grief, motivation-blending raw poetry with therapeutic commentary and journaling prompts that invite readers into their own journey of insight and growth. The book culminates with a guide on how to build your own collection of poetry for resilience, making it a practical therapy tool for anybody looking to upgrade their self-expression repertoire.
Whether you’re a therapy client, a clinician, or a human navigating the tender terrain of adulthood, this book is here to remind you: your emotions make sense, your perspective is valid, and your story is still being written.
This is not your average poetry book.
This is not your average self-help book.
This is How I Understand It.
Jazzoetry Lives
Jazzoetry Lives is a slim but spiritually packed collection of poems rooted in Black history, jazz, memory, grief, and resistance. Author J. Vern Cromartie frames “jazzoetry” as a living form, one that moves through The Last Poets, Langston Hughes, blues traditions, Black Arts voices, and the ache of contemporary racial violence. The poems travel from Congo Square and the Satilla River to Alabama, Oakland, Ohio, and beyond, carrying tributes to figures like John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Kamau Seitu, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Zahieb Mwongozi, and Langston Hughes. What emerges is less a conventional poetry collection than a call-and-response across generations, with music acting as both memory and medicine.
Cromartie’s lines often return like a chant, and at their best, that return feels ceremonial rather than merely structural. In “Alabama,” the repeated cry of the title and the invocation of Coltrane create a sorrowful music that gathers Birmingham, the 16th Street Baptist Church, capitalism, and mourning into one long, bruised breath. “And the Killings Go On” is even more direct, almost painfully so, naming Bobby Hutton, Betty Scott, Melvin Black, and Oscar Grant in a cadence that refuses the reader any easy distance. The book isn’t interested in decorative grief. It wants the wound visible.
The writing has a raw quality that feels tied to performance. Some poems read as if they’re waiting for drums, a bassline, or a room full of people murmuring back. “A Gathering of Sounds” captures that beautifully, with music exploding into fragments and sheets of sound before slipping into silence. I liked how Cromartie treats jazz not as background atmosphere but as a way of thinking, remembering, and surviving. At the same time, the collection can feel uneven when its political declarations become too blunt, as in “Elon Musk has a God Complex,” where the anger is clear. Even there, I respected the book’s refusal to soften its judgments. Its ideas are fierce, ancestral, and unapologetically Black, and its best moments make history feel less like a record than a rhythm still beating under the floorboards.
By the end, especially with the inclusion of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” I felt the collection circling back to its deepest concern: the freedom of Black artists to speak from their own ground without apology, translation, or disguise. Jazzoetry Lives is warm-blooded, grieving, insistent, and often moving. I’d recommend it to readers who care about Black poetic traditions, jazz-inflected verse, political poetry, and work that carries the weight of cultural memory with both tenderness and fire.
Pages: 54
How I Understand It
How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience is a deeply personal blend of poetry, memoir, therapy-informed reflection, and guided self-inquiry. Author Margaret Bryden writes from the overlapping places of therapist, mother, former spouse, wounded person, and stubbornly hopeful human being, moving through love, belonging, divorce, pregnancy, aging, trauma, grief, parenting, imperfection, and creative resilience. The book’s central idea is simple but surprisingly fertile: “bad poetry” can be a brave, playful way to tell the truth, make sense of pain, and build a more compassionate relationship with yourself.
I appreciated the book’s refusal to act polished in the ways books about healing often do. Bryden’s voice can be funny, blunt, tender, profane, and oddly ceremonial, sometimes all within the same page. I found that tonal looseness disarming. A poem like “Making Love Alone,” with its cookie, its solitude, and its sweet redefinition of intimacy, captures the book at its best: warm, strange, embodied, and quietly radical. I also liked the way Bryden keeps returning to personal responsibility without turning it into punishment. In poems about boundaries, codependency, and divorce, she doesn’t soften the bruises, but she also doesn’t linger in helplessness. The writing is not traditionally elegant all the time, and it doesn’t seem to want to be. Its charm is more ragged than refined, more alive than sculpted.
The ideas in the book stayed with me because they’re grounded in emotional reality rather than neat self-help slogans. Bryden’s treatment of grief, especially the long case-study sequence on grief avoidance, is messy and uncomfortable in a way that feels honest. Her reflections on pregnancy and motherhood are just as affecting, particularly when the body becomes both a site of wonder and bewilderment. I was moved by how often the book turns toward paradox: selfishness as a path to deeper love, boundaries as a way of drawing the right people closer, success as boring and humble, and death as a reason to live more fully. There’s a real pulse here, a sense that the author has earned her insights by walking through the smoke herself.
By the end, I felt that How I Understand It is less concerned with being a perfect poetry collection than with becoming a companion for people trying to hear themselves clearly. Its ending, especially the defiant tenderness of “Imposter Syndrome Can Go Fuck Itself” and the practical invitation to make one’s own poems of resilience, gives the book a satisfying sense of arrival. This is a heartfelt and emotionally generous book. I’d recommend it to readers who like therapy-adjacent writing, reflective poetry, journaling, and books that speak plainly about love, grief, trauma, and the difficult art of becoming kinder to yourself.
Pages: 234 | ASIN : B0H2FPMTS9
Voicings
Voicings, by Carroll Blair, is a collection of brief poems, meditations, aphoristic fragments, and more formally elusive lyric pieces that circle the inner life with unusual persistence. The book moves through solitude, spiritual hunger, artistic struggle, nature, language, ego, suffering, and the quiet courage required to keep becoming oneself. Its two parts feel less like separate sections than two movements of the same long listening: one rooted in the search for vision, the other widening into sharper social observation and a deeper tenderness toward the fragile, unfinished human soul.
I found the strongest pieces in Voicings to be those that marry plain-spoken insight with a sudden image that makes the thought bloom. “Never Completely Alone,” with its crickets singing through the cool of night, turns loneliness into something porous and living, while “Going On” compares the artist to a battered prizefighter still moving without quite knowing where the strength is coming from. That image stayed with me because it captures so much of the book’s emotional center: endurance without self-pity, faith without prettiness, and creativity as a form of survival. Blair’s ideas can be bracing, especially when he writes about ego, attention, and the cost of truth, but there’s warmth beneath the severity. He seems to believe that life wounds us into awareness, and I responded to that belief because it’s neither sentimental nor cruel. It has the ring of something earned.
The writing is at its best when Blair allows thought and image to lean into one another. I loved the musical simplicity of “Alphabets,” where letters become notes and words become “music for the eye as well as the ear,” and I admired the quiet grace of “A Child’s Exploration,” where the flower and the child seem to recognize each other. The book’s texture has force. Its language can be rough, gleaming, prophetic, tender, and strange, sometimes all within a few lines. I often felt challenged in a way I respected. Blair’s voice asks the reader to slow down, to accept difficulty, and to meet language as an event rather than a vehicle.
Voicings left me with the sense of having walked through a mind that refuses the small comforts of distraction. The closing poems, especially “Every Moment of One’s Life,” “Keeping On,” and “Who Lift Their Eyes,” gather the book’s many concerns into a final affirmation of attention, growth, and spiritual reach. It’s best for those who enjoy philosophical poetry, meditative fragments, and writing that treats the soul as both a wilderness and a workshop. I recommend Voicings to reflective readers who are willing to sit with mystery, wrestle with abstraction, and be rewarded by moments of sudden, piercing clarity.
Pages: 154 | ISBN : 978-1936430215
