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Coyote Snow
I found Coyote Snow to be a deeply rooted, season-bound poetry collection that moves through two intertwined states of being: winter itself, and the long psychological habit of bracing for it. Laurie Lynn Muirhead writes from the intimate facts of prairie ranch life, where feeding cattle, checking calves, watching weather, and reading animal signs become inseparable from grief, marriage, faith, memory, and endurance. The book begins in the ache of January and gradually turns through thaw, birth, summer labour, drought, autumn vigilance, and the first returning skiff of snow, so that by the title poem and the closing winter pieces, the land feels less like backdrop than moral atmosphere. I came away feeling that the collection’s real subject is not simply nature, but what repeated exposure to hardship does to tenderness, and how tenderness survives anyway.
What stayed with me most was the emotional honesty beneath the pastoral surface. These poems are never prettified. In “Messenger,” mourning a brother while moving wire for impatient cows, the speaker is followed by a chickadee until grief breaks open into something like grace. In “Pain of a Warm Womb” and “Death in a Cold Land,” calving season is rendered with an almost unbearable mixture of reverence and brutality, and that refusal to sentimentalize loss gives the book its backbone. I admired, too, the way love is written here. The marriage poems do not pretend that devotion cancels irritation, fatigue, or weather-beaten resentment. In “Love’s Slow Thaw” and “Valentine’s Day,” affection arrives through work, sharp words, forgiveness, and bodily nearness in the cold. That felt true to me, and moving because of its earnedness.
As writing, the collection has a rough lyric beauty I responded to strongly. Muirhead’s best lines have real grain to them. They smell of willow, wood smoke, wet wool, afterbirth, coffee, frost, and turned soil. I liked the way she keeps reaching for the sacred without floating away from the physical world. A pink moon can become healing, but only after the speaker has gone out in wet mitts and a parka full of farm. A drought poem such as “What Does It Matter” widens from dead barley and empty dugouts into the emotional desiccation of a marriage, and that braid of outer weather and inner weather is one of the book’s great strengths. The voice is so lived-in, so unembarrassed by longing, that I trusted it. By the late poems, when “only two seasons” remain, or when the speaker watches a mangy coyote in “Without Camouflage,” the book has earned its bleakness and its mercy in equal measure.
I thought Coyote Snow was affecting, resilient, and quietly memorable. It’s a book that understands survival not as heroism, but as repetition, care, humility, and the stubborn decision to keep loving what can wound you. I’d recommend it especially to readers who like poetry grounded in place, labour, weather, and family, and to anyone drawn to writing where beauty arrives scuffed, hard-won, and completely sincere. This is a collection for people who know that the heart doesn’t bloom apart from the season, but inside it.
Pages: 102 | ASIN : B0FPBV5RKQ
Along The Journey of my Growth
To Woman, From Man is a heartfelt poetry collection that honors women across history, family, love, and spiritual life through accessible, uplifting verse rooted in praise, witness, and encouragement. Why was this an important collection for you to write and publish?
With Women’s History approaching in March, I wanted to put together my poetry and prose in a book that would be relevant to women, that would honor women (both famous and non-famous women), and that would acknowledge the discredit, noncredit, and abuse of women over centuries. Also, I wished to challenge women to rise up for themselves and against challenges of today’s world. It was also important for me to acknowledge and express gratitude to significant women to me over my lifetime, including three of my school teachers, a college instructor, my Sunday school teacher, and the mother of my first male, neighborhood, childhood friends. Moreover, I dedicated To Woman, From Man to my dear mother who was the most significant woman in my life—a mother who was always present and supportive, who didn’t drink alcohol, smoke, or go to nightclubs.
How did your experiences with admiration, memory, faith, and counseling influence the voice and structure of this collection?
Famous author, the late Alex Haley, once stated as speaker at a conference that I attended, “If you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know that it had to have help to get there.” I have, especially in my latter years of life, appreciated and reflected back upon people who have helped me along the journey of my growth and achievements. Many of these people have been women of character who cared deeply about me as they did about others. Moreover, I taught college courses in psychology and counseling and psychotherapy, mainly graduate students, with classes of more than 80 percent women, many who worked jobs and/or cared for their children while pursuing their studies for a master’s or doctoral degree. I respected these women’s perseverance and courage in pursuit of a higher academic degree. In addition, I counseled and supervised counseling cases of women who had been physically or sexually abused. These experiences, among others, influenced my thinking and worldview.
Moreover, I taught public school for one year after my bachelor’s degree, two full-time teaching positions at day and evening or night. Many of the students in the night school were pregnant, because during that time girls who became pregnant had to drop out of day public school and enroll in a night school program. One very rewarding class that I recall was a class of all pregnant teenage girls who were highly motivated to learn and listen. It was a joy to see them each evening and teach them, because I believed that they were learning and completing their high school diploma in order to provide a good life for their unborn child.
Of all the themes in the book, motherhood, grief, love, friendship, healing, and leadership, which felt most urgent for you to speak to, and why?
I don’t usually choose comparatively or use superlatives, because, in the case of these themes, all of them have their importance depending on a woman’s situation and the period or stage of her development. Regarding these themes, all women deal with most of these circumstances, challenges, and emotions at some point in their lives, such as untimely death of a child, death of a spouse or parent, marital divorce, loss of or conflicts in friendships, marital or relationship problems, gender discrimination in the job market, challenges of leadership, joys and challenges of motherhood, health problems, and physical/sexual abuse.
What guided your choice to include both globally known women and everyday, non-famous women in the same collection of tributes?
To me, all women, especially those of character or importance to others, are worthy of recognition and appreciation. For example, To Woman, From Man pays tribute to a housekeeper who works two jobs to put two children through college, a woman on the front desk of my fitness club who always greets members with a smile and by name and is always voluntarily helpful; a mother of nine children that included my childhood, neighborhood male friends—a mother who worked tirelessly as a wife, mother, neighborhood worker, and church member. Moreover, I include famous women of exceptional achievement whom I like and respect due to their character and high achievement against the odds—women such as Helen Keller (who achieved highly regardless of being both deaf and blind), Marie Curie (who earned two Nobel Prizes in science), Tina Turner (who transcended spousal abuse to excel in entertainment and become a positive role model for women), Harriet Tubman (for her courage and leadership), Serena Williams and Misty Copeland who rose to the highest level of their profession against odds, as well as other women of character and achievement. I also acknowledge and express gratitude to my three female medical doctors, my woman barber of 19 years, my woman accountant of 14 years, the two mothers of my sons who remain my close friends, a constant woman friend of more than 55 years, and my two amazing granddaughters.
Author Links: Website | Facebook
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Poetry
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes poets who demonstrate exceptional artistry and proficiency and push the boundaries of language and expression. The recipients are poets who excel in their technical skills and evoke deep emotional responses, challenge thoughts, and illuminate new perspectives through their work. The award honors those who contribute to the literary landscape with their unique voices and powerful words.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
To Say Goodbye Again
To Say Goodbye Again is a short but emotionally wide-ranging collection that moves through grief, memory, love, masculinity, work, faith, family, and trauma with a striking lack of self-protective distance. Author Jac Winters writes in a mode that is part confessional poetry, part personal testimony, and part manifesto, so the book feels less like a curated sequence than a life speaking in bursts. It begins in mourning, circles through pieces about childhood, parents, romance, trucking, and the death of a beloved dog, and culminates in “Princess,” a devastating autobiographical account of childhood abuse that recasts much of the book in a harsher, sadder light. What stayed with me most was the sense that Winters is trying, again and again, to turn private pain into language sturdy enough to carry it.
There’s very little irony here, and almost no cool detachment. Winters writes as someone who means every line, and that sincerity gives the collection its force. “To Say Goodbye Again” and “Please Remember Me” ache with a plainspoken fear of loss and disappearance, while “Big Ben,” about the sudden death of a dog, is so direct in its grief that it almost disarms criticism. Even “No Matter Where I Go,” with its return to the childhood block, has an unguarded tenderness that I found genuinely affecting. I believed the emotional stake in nearly all of the poems. The book’s warmth comes not from polish but from exposure. Winters is willing to sound earnest, wounded, grateful, furious.
Winters often reaches for grandeur, piling image on image, and sometimes that intensity lands beautifully. Even when the phrasing grows ornate, the ideas underneath are clear: love dignifies us, work hardens and defines us, grief rearranges the soul, and survival demands that a person stop hiding. I found “Fueled My Drive” especially revealing in that respect because it frames self-acceptance not as branding or self-help, but as a hard-won moral act. And once I reached “Princess,” the whole collection changed shape for me. Its lyrical approach to such unbearable material won’t work for every reader, but I found it haunting precisely because it preserves the confusion of a child’s memory alongside the adult voice trying to name what happened.
I came away feeling that To Say Goodbye Again is vulnerable and deeply felt, which is also why it resonated with me. I think its greatest strength is emotional candor, the feeling that someone is finally saying the thing they’ve carried too long in silence. I’d recommend it to readers who value autobiographical poetry, reflective writing about grief and endurance, and books that care more about truth-telling than literary neatness. This is the kind of book that doesn’t ask to be admired so much as it asks to be felt.
Pages: 52 | ASIN: B0G4S75CW1
Spirit of the Cowboy
Spirit of the Cowboy is a lean, bruising, often striking poetry collection about masculinity, queer desire, American mythology, and the psychic wreckage left behind when those forces grind against one another. Author Cody Draco takes the cowboy, that old national idol of hardness and freedom, and turns him into both a fantasy and a wound. Across poems that move from erotic memory to political indictment to self-invention, he keeps asking what kind of man can be made after the inherited script has already done its damage. The result is a book that feels restless and intimate at once, full of dust, shame, lust, rage, and a stubborn, searching hope.
I found the collection’s emotional candor very compelling. Draco doesn’t write about queer longing as something neat or safely resolved. In poems like “Spirit of the Cowboy,” “Spanish Moss,” and “Your Mouth Heading South,” desire comes tangled up with humiliation, danger, nostalgia, and genuine tenderness. That tension gives the book its pulse. I felt, again and again, that he was writing from inside a conflict rather than about it from a comfortable distance. Even when the language veers into confrontation, there’s a vulnerable human ache under it. The best poems understand that longing can make a person feel exalted and trapped in the same breath, and Draco is especially good at catching that paradox before it slips away.
I was also taken by how ambitiously the book tries to connect the personal to the national. Sometimes that reach is thrilling. “Guns Are Our Babies,” “Alzheimer’s is an American Tradition,” and “Ramblings of a Soapbox Prophet” show a poet trying to diagnose not just his own inheritance, but the country’s, and I admired the nerve of that. He has a real instinct for memorable phrasing, and when his voice locks in, it can feel serrated and luminous at the same time. There are moments when the rhetoric outpaces the poem, when declaration crowds out discovery. But even then, I never doubted the force behind it. The writing has conviction, and more importantly, an authentic heat.
Spirit of the Cowboy is a book about trying to speak oneself into being while staring down the dead weight of gender, religion, memory, and America itself. I found it raw, intelligent, and unexpectedly moving, especially when its bravado gave way to grief or yearning. I’d recommend this vivid collection most to readers who like contemporary poetry with teeth, readers interested in queer reimaginings of masculinity, and anyone drawn to work that would rather risk excess than settle for bland safety.
Pages: 43 | ISBN: 1300307544
Tides of Light
Tides of Light feels to me less like a conventional poetry collection than like a long, shimmering meditation on love, memory, grief, imagination, and human connectedness, arranged as a journey through different “forms of light,” from the prologue through sections like “Radio Waves,” “Visible Light,” and “Entangled Light.” The book keeps returning to the same emotional and philosophical currents: the beloved as mirror, poetry as bridge, memory as a tide, and consciousness itself as something radiant, unstable, and shared. The prologue makes that ambition plain by treating poetry as a way of riding emotional waves and finding “a safe shore,” and the later “Entangled Light” section sharpens the idea into a worldview, where perception is always partial and truth arrives as reflected light rather than certainty.
Verde Mar writes as if feeling deeply is itself a moral act, and I found that moving. Again and again the poems reach for tenderness through images of eyes, rain, music, moonlight, tides, memory, and desert light, and when that imagery lands, it lands beautifully. Pieces like “Only Your Eyes Can Stop Time,” “The Shared Poetry of a First Kiss,” and “Polishing Cherished Memories” have that dreamy, ache-filled romantic charge the book does very well, where longing becomes almost atmospheric and intimacy feels suspended outside ordinary time. I also liked how often music enters the poems, not as decoration but as structure, as if songs and poems are different weather systems of the same emotional world.
What kept the collection from fully overwhelming me, though, is also part of its identity. The language is lush to the point of saturation. At times I was completely swept up by that incantatory excess, and at other times I wanted a little more silence, a little more resistance, a sharper edit. The constant return of certain motifs can feel hypnotic, but it can also blur individual poems together. That said, I don’t think the book is merely dreamy or abstract. There are flashes of anger and public grief that cut through the romantic and metaphysical haze with real force, especially in poems like “Please,” “American Eulogy,” and “The Fall of the American Empire,” where the voice turns outward and the emotional register hardens. I appreciated that tension. It kept the book from becoming weightless. Under all the cosmic imagery and quantum vocabulary, there’s a very human insistence here on empathy, loss, injustice, and the need to remain emotionally awake.
Tides of Light feels like it’s a book more interested in resonance than precision. It asks to be entered rather than decoded. I don’t think every poem is equally strong, but the collection’s emotional weather is unmistakably its own, and its best passages have a bruised, searching beauty that stayed with me. I’d recommend it most to readers who enjoy lyrical, image-rich, philosophically inclined poetry, especially anyone drawn to love poems, meditations on memory, and language that wants to sing before it explains. It’s a book for readers willing to drift a little, and be changed by the drift.
Poetic Mind 2: The Collection
Poetic Mind 2: The Collection felt to me like a long, earnest conversation between bravado and vulnerability. Across poems about self-belief, grief, love, fantasy, war, exhaustion, and social cruelty, John Nevel keeps returning to the same central impulse: to turn pain into encouragement, and imagination into a kind of shelter. The book moves from the chest-thumping creative comeback of “Return of the Machine” and “Born a Legend” into more tender and wounded terrain such as “Shadows,” “PTSD,” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” then loops back toward resilience in poems like “Like a Phoenix” and “Change.” What held it together for me was that sense of a mind trying, over and over, to wrestle darkness into language and come out with something useful for another person.
What I responded to most was the book’s emotional directness. Nevel isn’t coy, and he isn’t interested in hiding behind irony. When “Shadows” lingers with the dead through scent, television reflections, and the strange comfort of almost-seeing someone again, it has a real ache to it; when “Take My Hand” and “Keep Your Head Up” insist on dignity for the lonely, the poor, the traumatized, and the judged, the tenderness feels lived rather than borrowed. Even the poems that lean hardest into uplift carry some friction under them, because again and again the speaker sounds like someone who has actually been bruised by the world he’s trying to repair. I liked that sincerity.
The collection is at its strongest when the swagger relaxes and the image gets room to breathe. The blizzard in “Snowfall,” the resurrected beast of “Revenge of the Dragon,” the handmade panic and recovery in “Destruction of Words,” and the barracks-to-Iraq movement in “Operation Iraqi Freedom” all gave me something concrete to stand inside. At the same time, the book’s habits are very clear: it loves repetition, declarative endings, motivational refrains, and an almost performative intensity. Sometimes that gives the poems a pulse and a stage voice. Even when I found the rhetoric a little relentless, I rarely doubted the conviction behind it. And I did admire how fully Nevel commits to his ideas, especially his belief that poetry should comfort, testify, and push back against humiliation, prejudice, and despair.
Poetic Mind 2 is heartfelt and thought-provoking. It’s not a chilly, mannered collection that wants to be admired from a distance. It wants to reach across the table, grab you, and tell you to keep going. I think that urgency is the book’s identity. I’d recommend it most to readers who like accessible, emotionally candid poetry, especially anyone drawn to themes of resilience, recovery, faith, military memory, and everyday encouragement. This is a book for readers who want poetry to mean what it says.
Pages: 193 | ASIN : B0GSKK2TWC
Reacting to the Reality of Lowell
Q: The Fraud of Eternity is a compact, bleakly beautiful collection of poems that circles death, suffering, and spiritual exhaustion in the industrial landscape of Lowell, Massachusetts. Was this always intended as a thematic collection, or did it evolve organically?
Darryl Houston Smith: Honestly, it started from the ground up—literally. I didn’t sit down with some grand master plan to write a bleak treatise on spiritual exhaustion.
It was just me, reacting to the reality of Lowell. When the cold brick of the mills surrounds you, the gray teeth of the Merrimack, and that heavy quiet in the cemeteries, that kind of everyday decay gets into your blood.
At first, I was trying to capture that visceral darkness with as much raw honesty and sharp imagery as I could muster.
But as the pieces started piling up, all that chaotic emotion needed a cage. That’s where the thematic unity really took over. I found myself leaning heavily into strict ABAB and ABCB quatrains, using really dense, hyper-metric lines to rein it all in.
The project naturally evolved into an obsession with dualities—the tension between the sacred and the rotten, the living and the dead. So, while it absolutely began as an organic reaction to my surroundings, enforcing that rigid structure is what ultimately hammered it into the thematic foundation for the rest of the trilogy.
Q: Was there a specific emotional progression you wanted readers to feel?
DHS: Absolutely. The whole point was to make them feel the crushing weight of the oncoming reveal. I didn’t want to offer a gentle, healing arc—it had to feel like a slow, suffocating build. From the very first line, I wanted the reader to experience a creeping dread, a visceral sense that the floorboards of their faith are rotting out from under them.
It’s an emotional progression anchored tightly in those dualities I constantly return to.
You’re pulling the tension tighter and tighter between the sacred and the profane, between the living and the dead, until it simply snaps. By the time that final reveal hits, I want the reader to feel completely, physically exhausted—as if they’ve been dragged through the same heavy, industrial dark that birthed the poems in the first place.
Q: Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?
DHS: Oh, without a doubt. You can’t write about the rot of the modern soul without standing on the shoulders of the masters. Baudelaire and Rimbaud were constantly in my head—they understood how to drag unflinching truth and terrible beauty out of the gutter, which is exactly what I was trying to pull from the industrial ruins here in Lowell.
Then there’s Blake. He is the ultimate architect of dualities, that vicious tension between heaven and hell, which feeds directly into the dyads and strict structures I use to lock my poems together. Poe, naturally, gave me the blueprint for that creeping, psychological dread—the slow, suffocating build toward the dark reveal we just talked about.
And, of course, Jim Morrison. His influence is the bleeding edge of it all, bridging raw, visceral chaos with deliberate poetic intent. Since this collection is the bedrock of the entire trilogy, Jim’s shadow was always going to stretch across these pages. I wanted to take their collective darkness and compress it into something heavy, metric, and entirely my own.
Q: What does the phrase “fraud of eternity” mean to you personally?
DHS: To me, the ‘fraud of eternity’ is the great, comforting lie we’ve all been sold about salvation. We are taught to quietly endure the suffering of the present—the cold, the grit, the spiritual exhaustion of the daily grind—in exchange for the promise of some peaceful, golden forever. But it’s a scam. Eternity isn’t a transcendent afterlife; it’s the dirt of the cemetery. It’s the cold brick of the mills outlasting the flesh of the people who bled into them.
That phrase is about confronting the duality between the lie of heaven and the visceral truth of the grave. People want the romanticized comfort of the divine, but as a poet, my job is to look at the rot and call it what it is. The ‘Fraud’ is the false hope we use to numb ourselves to the present darkness. This collection is about stripping that hope away and forcing the reader to sit with the unflinching reality of our own decay.
Author Website: darrylhoustonsmith@gmail.com
