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Moondust: A Collection of Poems
In Moondust, author Kahlani B. Steele gathers a wide-ranging collection of poems that move from nature’s intimate theatre to childhood memory, grief, love, mental anguish, self-reflection, and finally the strange tenderness of people and places. The book begins with trees, birds, weather, moonlight, and water, then slowly turns inward, letting the natural world become a language for loneliness, desire, inheritance, and survival. I felt the collection’s emotional center most strongly in pieces like “Photograph of Pop,” “Trigger,” “The House of Me,” and “Mabel,” where ordinary images, a fishing line, a daisy, a cracked body-as-house, a lipstick mark on a child’s cheek, carry more ache than any grand declaration could.
Steele notices the world with a patient, almost devotional eye: the old tackle box, the mud on gumboots, the willy wagtail singing before rain, the park bench left alone after the stars depart. The poems are often at their best when they trust those concrete details to do the emotional work. There’s a warmth in the childhood poems that stayed with me, especially the quiet companionship with Pop, because the restraint makes the love feel authentic. I also liked how the book keeps returning to nature without making nature merely pretty. It consoles, yes, but it also bites, drenches, burns, withholds, and witnesses.
Steele’s writing is lush, and sometimes the collection occasionally leans into ornate metaphor. Still, I found that excess part of the book’s sincerity. These poems don’t pretend to be cool or detached. They ache openly. The ideas are familiar in the deepest human sense: grief, memory, heartbreak, aging, disconnection, the need to return to something elemental, but Steele gives them a distinctly tactile shape. Pain becomes frostbite, the body becomes a damaged house, memory becomes a locked room, and loneliness sits like a bench under thinning light.
I finished Moondust feeling that I’d been walking beside someone who pays close attention because attention itself is a form of care. It’s an earnest, textured, emotionally generous collection. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy accessible contemporary poetry with a reflective heart, especially those drawn to nature writing, family memory, grief, and poems that speak plainly but still reach for beauty.
Pages: 110 | ASIN : B0GRHSKLK3
A Balanced Perspective
Spirit of the Cowboy is a poetry collection in which you use the cowboy myth to explore desire, wounded masculinity, and the emotional fallout of America’s inherited scripts. What inspired you to write and publish this collection?
This probably sounds extremely left-field, but I was watching a documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the reporter said something along the lines of, “Every great artist has a throughline in their work that gives the collective whole a unified vision.” That night, a chord was struck in me as I had a slew of test dummy projects under my belt, but didn’t understand what I was creating for other than therapeutic self-expression. Spirit of the Cowboy was born the moment I realized that my life’s work is and will be Coding a New Masculinity.
What first drew you to the cowboy as the central figure for thinking about masculinity and desire?
Brokeback Mountain only scratched the surface for me, reinstating the cowboy as a quintessential symbol of both perception and longing, but left me needing more than another closet to cry in. I wanted to bust the entire privilege of being born a man wide-open, digging deeper into the open wound that being a male attracted to another male entails in the 21st century. We have more language and societal awareness than perhaps ever before in history, yet we are still bruising each other as we become either more or less ourselves in the process of living.
How did you balance personal vulnerability with the larger political and cultural critique running through the collection?
In pursuit of a balanced perspective, I approached this project with a sort of directorial lens, reminding myself often that in order to honestly interrogate my origins, I must also extend the frame to capture America’s.
When writing this book, what did you hope readers might recognize in themselves?
I hoped readers might recognize that the resilience founded upon their rough edges and sharp tongues can co-exist with a genuine sense of belonging and a desire for softer expressions of love.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Paying the Highest Price
Water Your Flowers With Love is a collection of poems covering topics from grief and exile to tenderness and moral urgency, all centered around the notion that faith in love is crucial. What inspired this particular collection of poetry?
In today’s chaotic and at times dark world, we are all in need of a hopeful message. The collection has been inspired by and derived from my personal life experiences and today’s events and trends that shape our world. I wrote Water Your Flowers With Love hoping to raise awareness of today’s issues that still affect so many people, and children, and to portray that through love and compassion we can do better. The idea is that within all the darkness and chaos in the world, there is still light within each one of us, and together we can create a better world. The collection aims to invite readers to look beyond themselves into our world and also at what we all share as humans. It portrays the power of love and compassion and spreads a message of hope.
The collection often returns to children affected by war and displacement. What draws you to that perspective?
Children are the flowers of the world. They shape our future; they are our gold. We owe it to them, for the future, for humanity, to make sure they have the right to live, laugh, play, and grow old. And yet, children are still paying the highest price. Having experienced war myself as a child and living through its debilitating effects my entire life, I want to depict the effects it has on everyone, and especially on children.
Are there poems in this collection that changed significantly from their first draft to their final form?
No, not really. None of them has changed significantly.
Looking back on Water Your Flowers With Love, what did writing this collection teach you about compassion—both for others and for yourself?
Writing Water Your Flowers With Love reinforced my belief in humanity and showed time and again that compassion, along with love, exists within each one of us. They are both ingrained in our psyche; they are both part of the light that exists within us all. At times, we might need to look deep within, past the walls we have built, but the light is there, waiting to be manifested.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
From the chambers of pain
That were supposed to hold
Only love on their walls.
They were left alone…
To fight on their own.
Maybe they “cared,”
But they were too scared?
-Koula Hadjitooulou
In a narrative between past and present, Koula Hadjitooulou paints a current picture of the ugliness and beauty of today’s world. She portrays the power of love and compassion and spreads the message of hope. Koula ponders the human spirit, the strength of our inner selves, and the light within each one of us.
Screaming At the World
Realistic Meat Substitute is a collection of poems covering themes ranging from conspiracy and commodification to digital alienation and political hysteria. Did you write these poems with a specific audience in mind, or was it a more personal endeavor?
I do a lot of screaming at the world in my poems.
Pointing in laughter, recoiling in horror. Singing with joy, sighing in relief where beauty and goodness can be found. It’s deeply personal, of course, sometimes cathartic. I write with the hope that it might resonate with pessimists and optimists alike—that my fellow human beings on planet earth can relate. But, if a machine intelligence (or something otherwise) gets it, too—great! Welcome aboard.
How do you begin a poem—image, phrase, rhythm, or idea?
I like to improvise and fiddle with language. Usually no plan, no preconceived ideas to start. I don’t want to know what the puzzle is until I solve it, I guess. Open the box, dump the puzzle pieces on the table and get started. Start with the middle or the border pieces? Let intuition be the guide. Musicality is also important. Paying attention to the beat and rhythm of the line, I’ll experiment and play with juxtapositions—see what might stick. What does it mean? What’s it trying to say? Sometimes I’ll have a scene or a situation in mind, so I’ll start with something descriptive of that image. Meaning, subject, theme—whatever the poem is “about”—that generally comes later, if at all.
Was it important for you to balance satire and intensity with genuine emotional vulnerability?
I think the better poems balance the head and heart, the emotional with the cerebral. Absurdity and irony, with sincerity. Tender, but with bite. If the satire works, it can activate the mind, make you smirk and think, but it’s also driven by emotion. It can be a way of coping with baffling contradiction, trouble, hurt and pain. But, like a ruthless, criminal gangster/bad guy from a story—there’s got to be some relatable humanity to the character, otherwise there’s no emotional investment offered to pull a reader/viewer into the story.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Realistic Meat Substitute?
Well, here’s a few things. I hope they enjoyed the ride. I hope I earned the reader’s attention. Life is crazy. Poetry can be many things. Open up and pay attention. To quote artist/musician Laurie Anderson: “Don’t be afraid of anyone, get a good bullshit detector, and be tender.”
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
left of the soul when everything else is artifice and imitation.”—Randomly Chosen AI Chatbot, after prompts by the book’s author to construct a blurb
for the back cover of Realistic Meat Substitute*
*AUTHOR’S NOTE: ABSOLUTELY NO POEMS CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK
Water Your Flowers With Love: A Collection of Poems
Water Your Flowers With Love is a poetry collection that moves through grief, memory, exile, tenderness, and moral urgency without ever letting go of its faith in love as a sustaining force. Across poems about childhood, a lost father, immigration, war, kindness, and the consolations of the natural world, Author Koula Hadjitooulou keeps returning to one central conviction: the human spirit is fragile, but it isn’t finished. The book’s title poem crystallizes that vision by turning childhood harm into an aching plea for gentleness, while poems like “Cyprus and the Girl with the Water Jug,” “Warrior of Life,” and “Three Little Birds” widen the emotional field into displacement, survival, and the cost of violence borne by children.
What stayed with me most was the book’s emotional sincerity. This is not guarded poetry. Hadjitooulou writes as someone who means every line, and that directness gives the collection its pulse. The poems about her father especially landed hard for me. In “I Can Still Feel His Warmth” and “Letter to My Dad,” the grief isn’t abstract or ornamental. It feels authentic, almost tactile, as though memory itself were giving off heat. I also found myself moved by the recurring image-world of flowers, stars, hills, wind, and birds. In another writer’s hands, that language might feel overly sweet, but here it often works because it comes from a genuine instinct toward repair. Even when the book turns toward atrocity and abandonment, it keeps searching for what she calls “pockets of light,” and I admired that refusal to surrender to bitterness.
What I appreciated about the collection is also where I felt its limits. The writing is strongest when Hadjitooulou anchors her hopeful, exhortatory style in a specific story or image, as she does with the child carrying a water jug in a refugee camp, the young girl forced into marriage in “She Was Only Fifteen,” or the immigrant soul suspended between two worlds. In those pieces, the poems gather weight and texture. Elsewhere, the book leans on affirmation, repetition, and uplift. The ideas are earnest and relatable, sometimes beautifully so. What I felt was a writer trying, again and again, to make compassion usable. And in a collection so preoccupied with survival, resilience, and the moral necessity of tenderness, the insistence itself becomes part of the art.
Water Your Flowers With Love gave me the feeling that I had spent time with a voice shaped by hurt, gratitude, and an almost stubborn belief in mercy. I’d recommend it to readers who like accessible, heartfelt poetry, especially those drawn to poems about healing, family, displacement, inner strength, and the attempt to keep faith even when the world makes that difficult.
Pages: 160 | ASIN : B0G4F2K2TC
Realistic Meat Substitute: Poems and Whatever Else
Realistic Meat Substitute is a jagged, feverish collection of poems and hybrid pieces that feel steeped in the fumes of late-stage American life. Across sections like “Uncanny Valley,” “Thoroughly Cooked,” “Frankenstein Complex,” and “Kool-Aid or Hemlock,” author Chris D’Errico writes out of a world saturated by conspiracy, commodification, digital alienation, political hysteria, ecological dread, and a stubborn, battered hunger for something more human.
What stayed with me most was the book’s texture: its collision of the grotesque and the lyrical, the absurd and the mournful. One moment we’re in the carnivalesque overload of “Post-Organic Afterworld” or “The Idiot’s Guide to Coup D’etat,” with their clang of slogans, grift, and synthetic identity, and the next we’re in something unexpectedly tender and elegiac, as in “Rock Formations,” with its dead friend Reggie and its gentle ache of memory, or “Departures,” which softens into grief, time, and farewell.
I admired the momentum of the language. D’Errico has a gift for startling phrasing and hard, memorable turns of image. He can be funny, ugly, and very beautiful in the space of a few lines. “Truth Is a Bust” turns truth into a whole unstable, disreputable character, grubby and theatrical and impossible to domesticate, and that poem captures much of the book’s method at its best: personification pushed until it becomes social diagnosis. Elsewhere, pieces like “NOLA Elegy” and “A Love Supreme” show he can do something looser and more melodic, letting place and music carry emotional weight without losing his edge.
I also loved the recurring fascination with sound, rhythm, performance, and noise, the sense that music is one of the few surviving ways to get back to the body, to breath, to soul. The book’s density occasionally asked a lot of me as a reader. Its mode is often accumulation, barrage, and incantation, which can be exhilarating, though in a few poems I felt the intensity of the language overshadowed some of the deeper emotional or reflective movement.
This is a collection deeply suspicious of false transcendence, macho mythmaking, internet brain-rot, and the various ways people trade complexity for certainty. Again and again, D’Errico returns to the emptiness of slogans and the seduction of ideological theater, whether in “Resist the Fallen World,” “Your Motherboard Doesn’t Love You,” or “The Mirage,” where he cuts through delusion with the plain imperative to go outside, listen to birds, pay attention to rain, traffic, physics, reality. The book is full of contempt for fraudulence, but it isn’t nihilistic. Under all the snarling satire, there’s a real plea for honesty, listening, embodiment, and moral wakefulness. Even the title starts to feel right in that context. So much here is about substitutions: synthetic feeling for feeling, performance for conviction, algorithm for conscience, spectacle for life. And beneath the book’s wild surfaces, I felt a sincere grief over what gets lost when we accept the fake thing as enough.
Realistic Meat Substitute wants to scrape, taunt, lament, and sing, sometimes all at once. That won’t be for everyone, but for readers drawn to politically charged poetry, surreal imagery, beat-inflected verbal riffing, and work that wrestles openly with the psychic junkyard of contemporary life, I think this book has real bite and real feeling. It left me unsettled, impressed, and more moved than I expected. I’d recommend it most to readers who like their poetry feral, intelligent, and unafraid of mess.
Pages: 63 | ISBN : 978-1917272131
Unconventional Narrative
All Told gathers a lifetime of poems shaped by place, memory, travel, politics, and aging, offering a wide-ranging portrait of one life lived across the American South, distant countries, and the quiet rooms where reflection settles in. Did you view the book as a kind of life story while putting it together?
Yes, in a sense, it’s a life story, or at least a story of my last 55 or so years on Earth. I think of it, along with Rites of Passage, as a personal legacy created from a large backlog of work reaching back to the 1970s. It’s a compendium of my poetry that I would like to live on after me, even if it lacks a wide circulation and serves only as a means of preserving a significant amount of my work for anyone who enjoys reading poetry and might find it interesting. It also gave me an excuse to dig through the whole body of unpublished work I’d saved over the years and organize it in a way that I felt would be aesthetically pleasing and offer its readers a perspective on my life and my struggle to create a sort of unconventional narrative that would reflect the changes in my life and my development as a poet.
Your poems often use plain, conversational language. Why does that style appeal to you?
I think the sort of plainspoken style of much of my work came about firstly through the influence of such modernist poets as Ezra Pound, H.D., e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, and the post- modernists, especially those in the New York School — O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Ignatow, et al. — who were attempting to break away from strictly metrical verse and traditional forms and appeal to readers who were highly literate but not necessarily steeped in literary history or the kind of verse taught in most university English courses back then. On the contrary, I followed many other poets of the time in taking the lead of Ezra Pound, who, around the beginning of the last century, envisioned a new style of writing that “will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power… I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.” Secondly, when I moved to Türkiye in 1993, I soon discovered a school of poetry that illustrated this modernist dictum in the movement called “The First New,” headed by Orhan Veli Kanık, who dreamed of writing a poetry so stripped down that it even “dumped words.” This movement arose most significantly as a result of the change of the Turkish script from Arabic characters to the romanized alphabet most commonly used in Europe and the Americas. It also brought European influences into the sphere of Turkish writing, with translations by Veli and other poets of foreign poetry, such as that of the Surrealists. Along with my reading of 20th-Century Turkish poetry that followed The First New, I became aware of the provincial nature of American poetry, which showed little influence of Surrealism and other important developments in Europe that had strongly influenced contemporary Turkish poets. So my view of modern poetry changed radically after I moved to Türkiye, and my own writing began to reflect this change as well. I was elated when the poet Güven Turan, who edited my bilingual collection Galata’dan: the View from Galata, noted on its back cover that I was really as much an Istanbul poet as Orhan Veli, even though I wrote my poems in English. This direct, conversational style of writing came to define my own work, even as I tried to incorporate other aspects of modernism and postmodernism into the poetry I was writing then.
Many poems reflect on aging and reflection. How has your perspective changed over time?
I’ve tended to measure the course of my life in phases. This can be seen as well in the course of my poetic experience, wherein the dominant “themes” change from one phase to the next. For example, in my twenties the principal idea that directed my writing was that of a “Muse,” gleaned largely from the writings of Robert Graves, and this idea changed, or evolved, into a Jungian vision of psychic forces that replaced the Muse figure with a spiritual “you” that for several years animated my poems and infused them with a “meaning.” Other phases reflected my discovery of Taoism and Sufism, philosophies whose main principles I’ve adopted and tried to apply to all aspects of my life. I found that I could trace the movement of my life through these phases that have determined the nature of my development as a human being and writer. I can’t clearly articulate the phase I’m in now except to say that it seems to concern my present role as an elder in my “tribe” and involves a further consolidation of the ideas and experience that form the basis of the ongoing questioning and quests in my work and life.
Looking back over this collection, what surprises you most about your own journey?
I’m newly surprised almost every day by my incredible luck at being who I am and to have survived and, for the most part, enjoyed my life’s journey up to this point. I think the poems in All Told express this feeling in both direct and indirect ways. I’m not religious in a conventional sense, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve somehow been guided and protected by forces that exist somewhere beyond my individual perception or understanding.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Genetic Testing
The Killing Gene follows a genetic research team as they discover the gene pattern they believe is linked to violent tendencies and serial killers. Where did the idea for this book come from?
My niece was getting IVF, and I overheard that she had selected certain characteristics, eye, hair, skin, and educational background. Then I recalled my son’s genetic testing for Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis, and it made me think about the pro-life/pro-choice issue. I wondered–and it’s in no way related to my niece’s child–after seeing parents being taken to court for the crimes their sons committed in a school shooting. What if there is a serial killer gene that is passed along to the children, which is triggered, apart from the nature vs. nurture theory?
Can you share a little about the research process required to put this book together?
First, I had to find other illnesses found in genes that are passed from grandparents, skip a generation, and affect the grandchild. I finally found a disease like cancer that affects the whole family or a gender only. I did not want to write a science book, but I had to mention basic genetic testing and technology like CRISPR that can identify genes and order.
Many characters are described as relatable and even flawed. Was that intentional to mirror the complexity of the book’s central question?
Yes, I went with the simple answer with triggers to activate the “killing gene,” a violent sexual act towards the grandfather, Malcom Lynn. The lead geneticist, Tatiana Mirzo, also had a sexual trigger that is kept silent but shows up during the act. The journalist, Maggie Rally, had old-school determination and limited time to solve the murders and was not afraid of getting too close.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Yes, I have a new book, and I have about 90% done, but I had an accident and have trouble typing fast enough to finish. The new book is called The Suicide Council, inspired by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I always wanted to know why, especially when the victim does not leave a note. So this is a fantasy, I do not know if it is classified as a thriller because it involves a Spiritual Council of saints and prophets who visit the victims just before they commit the action. They record why, but they have rules. They cannot change their mind because of free will. And close ones can find out why it happened only when they reach heaven. They can look up the files of the victim’s life filed by the Suicide Council. So I have a collection of stories about victims, different situations, and characters.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
From current choices for parents to make about what their babies will look like. In the near future, parents will be able to find a gene that will show a psychopathic tendency leading to violence. The parents will be able to decide on the birth of a child with Down syndrome. With characters involved with the geneticist’s background and suspecting colleagues, and a report that connects the dots on an ongoing Serial killer investigation with the help of the Main geneticist
