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The Face of Expression 3: Fall of A King
The Face of Expression 3: Fall of a King by Aaron Woodson is a sprawling, deeply personal poetry collection about faith, masculinity, love, Black identity, heartbreak, endurance, and spiritual repair. It moves like a long testimony, beginning with surrender in “Chess With God,” swelling into declarations like “Leading With Love,” “Black By Popular Demand,” and “Heart of A Lion,” then circling through romance, loneliness, self-worth, social pain, fatherhood, exhaustion, and legacy before arriving at the title poem, “Fallen Kings,” and the quieter ache of “Swan Song.” The book feels less like a neat, curated volume and more like a life poured straight onto the page, sometimes polished, sometimes raw, but almost always emotionally direct.
I felt the force of that in poems like “Still on My Feet,” where the speaker is bruised but refuses to retreat, and in “Quitting,” where the honesty turns darker, wearier, and more vulnerable. Woodson writes often from the posture of a king, a soldier, a lover, a believer, but the most moving moments come when the crown slips a little and I can see the tired man underneath it. In “Anchor,” the prayer isn’t ornamental. It sounds like someone genuinely close to breaking, asking God to hold him in place before the storm takes him. That kind of naked need gives the collection its heartbeat.
Woodson’s style is conversational, repetitive, sometimes sermon-like, and he often leans into big declarations rather than subtle turns. I admired the sheer openness of the voice. Poems like “Waves” and “Pilot” stretch an idea almost playfully until it becomes metaphor, memory, flirtation, joke, and testimony all at once. “Black By Popular Demand” has a proud, pulsing confidence that feels communal rather than merely personal, while “Hello Handsome” turns self-affirmation into something funny, sensual, and strangely tender. The ideas in the book are not shy ones. Love heals. God rescues. Blackness is beautiful. Men hurt. People fail each other. Grace remains.
By the end, I felt like I’d spent time with someone determined to bless the wounds that shaped him, not deny them. The Face of Expression 3 isn’t a delicate book, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s loud, searching, romantic, wounded, faithful, proud, and full of hard-earned hope. This collection works best when read as a testimony in motion, not as a pristine literary object. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy confessional, faith-centered poetry with a strong spoken-word current, especially those drawn to reflections on Black manhood, resilience, love, and spiritual recovery.
Pages: 414 | ISBN : 1953526322
Discover A Glimpse Of Truth
More Other Such Matters is a collection of spiritually searching poems that circle around identity, love, mortality, truth, and the persistence of the thinking mind that asks what remains when the thinking mind finally grows quiet. Do you see thinking as a barrier to truth, or a doorway that must be passed through?
I see it neither as a barrier, nor as a doorway. The mistake we make is that we get attached to our thoughts and mistake them for truth and then identify ourselves via those thoughts. Truth reveals itself when thoughts are left behind. In that sense we can use thoughts until they exhaust themselves and in the exhaustion, in that dead end, we might discover a glimpse of truth.
Many poems read like questions rather than declarations. Why is inquiry more important than certainty for you?
The origin of my poems lies in the questions that have posed themselves around everything, ever since I was young. When I started writing those questions I usually found that the things I thought I knew revealed themselves to be mere outer layers of deeper truths, which in turn, at some later point, would probably get turned on their head by more questions.
Declarations, while giving the impression of safety, a ground to stand on, are mostly self-defeating, rigid and therefore not really compatible with life. Life itself is constant change, a constant adventure of discovery. Once you draw the circumference of certainty around things, around your mind, it turns rigid and eventually gets suffocated inside dead concepts. If you dig deeply enough and with inner honesty, you will find that certainty does not really exist.
Are the more intimate poems, like those centered on love and loss, harder to write than the philosophical ones?
Not at all. I don’t set out to write poems of a certain category. All my poems start out with a kind of urgency of something wanting to be explored or said, or maybe even screamed out. I just follow their lead and sit down to write them down. They usually emerge fully formed, even though I often don’t have the slightest clue where they are taking me. Sometimes a poem about loss, for example, turns philosophical in the process of diving into the loss itself rather than avoiding it, by merely describing it from the outside.
You asked about a doorway before. The doorway is the very process of not avoiding anything that wants to show up, of digging into the deepest places I can reach, whether jubilant or terrifying.
I wonder whether purely philosophical poems that do not spring from love, loss, longing, happiness, loneliness, grief or fear can even spring from a pen. That would be more like a disembodied, scientific dissertation … or something like that.
What do you hope a reader feels—not just thinks—after spending time with this book?
I would hope for them to experience some of what I experienced when I wrote them. Would love for the readers to go inside themselves and allow themselves to ask their own questions or maybe recognize some of the landing spots I discovered in the process of writing. I would love for them to feel inspired to go on their own journey of exploration of what lies under the surface of their own being and burst out in wonder when they discover the sweetness that lives inside them.
Author Links: Website | GoodReads | Facebook
Discover More Other Such Matters by multiple award-winning artist Fella Cederbaum—the fourth installment in her poetic legacy.
This thought-provoking collection invites you to journey inward. Her verses reach beyond the ordinary, capturing the essence of what it means to live authentically, love deeply, and rediscover the divine spark within. Within the pages of this powerful collection of deeply probing poetry, Fella explores themes of love, truth, feelings, societal challenges, and the art of staying present in the unfolding of human experience.
Through poems like “Before You Were You,” “Show Me Who You Are,” and “The Orchid and the Daisy,” she distills profound wisdom into elegant simplicity—offering readers moments of pause, reflection, and transformation.
Often described as a true Renaissance woman, she brings her relentless questions to inspire self-examination and introspection. More Other Such Matters is an intimate companion for the soul—perfect for reflection, meditation, or quiet contemplation. This latest collection continues to remind us to be grateful, to breathe, be still, and return home to our most authentic selves.
The versatile Fella Cederbaum has achieved success in many creative endeavors—as a poet, author, painter, independent filmmaker with nearly two dozen short films, and skilled composer and arranger. Her earlier writings, two volumes titled Of Life and Other Such Matters, Speech Acrobats, and her two poetry with music albums, Truth and Destiny and Speech Acrobats, have solidified her reputation as a versatile and accomplished artist. She has been exceptionally well-reviewed and described as “an artist who is brave enough to be an original.”
Cederbaum’s has received over 120 awards ranging from Best Short, to Best Soundtrack and Best Script. She has garnered not one, but two coveted IndieFest Humanitarian Awards.
The Magical World of Poetry
The Magical World of Poetry by Sandy Whiting is a warm, classroom-friendly collection that introduces young readers to acrostics, cinquains, concrete poems, free verse, haiku, and rhyme before sending them into poems about animals, sports, food, weather, holidays, and fantasy. It feels both like a poetry anthology and a gentle workbook, with prompts, definitions, playful illustrations, and an answer key that invite children not only to read poems, but to notice how poems are made.
I found the book at its best when it lets silliness and tenderness sit beside each other. A karate-kicking cat, a clownfish that refuses to act like a clown, and a snake enjoying the swing set all have that childlike “what if?” sparkle, but then a poem like “Secret Ingredient” quietly changes the air, turning baking with grandma into memory, flour, love, and ache. The book doesn’t treat children as though they can only handle jokes or only handle lessons. It trusts them with wonder, grief, goofiness, pride, and imagination.
The writing is approachable, sometimes simple, and that’s its strength. Some rhymes land with an easy bounce that would be lovely aloud, especially in pieces like “Who’s There?” and “Fun Without Sun,” where repetition gives the poems a bright, chant-like energy. Other poems feel more instructional than surprising, as though the form is carrying the piece more than the image or music. Still, I admired the clarity of the book’s purpose. The poems open doors. The concrete poems, the haiku, and the free verse pieces such as “Keep Swimming” and “Cyclone” show young writers that poetry can be funny, shaped, breathy, anxious, brave, or quiet.
The book’s real magic wasn’t in any single poem, but in its invitation to participate. It’s a book for children who are curious about writing, for teachers building a poetry unit, for families who like reading aloud, and for young readers who need permission to play with words before worrying about perfection. I’d recommend it especially to elementary and middle-grade writers who are just discovering that a poem can be a joke, a memory, a spell, or a small hand reaching toward the world.
Pages: 138 | ASIN : B0GL9QNGY5
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
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.
Unleashing The Power Within: A Journey of Self-Discovery Through Poetry
Unleashing the Power Within is a short, heartfelt collection of inspirational poems that moves through self-worth, recovery, faith, gratitude, nature, and personal renewal. Lisa McCarthy writes as someone who has suffered, endured, and come out the other side determined to speak encouragement over both herself and her reader. The book’s emotional arc gathers force as recurring ideas echo across the collection: breaking free from harm, setting boundaries, trusting intuition, reclaiming one’s voice, and finally rooting identity in God. What gives it shape beyond affirmation is the sense that these poems arise from lived experience, especially when the book turns personal in pieces like “My Freedom Day” and “From Silence to Self-Acceptance,” where liberation stops being an abstract slogan and starts to feel earned.
McCarthy isn’t trying to be sly or ironic, and that lack of distance gives the collection a disarming openness. When she writes about blooming “beneath the ashes and dirt,” or compares healing to pushing toward light, the imagery is simple, but it lands because she means it. I felt that again in the poems about the natural world, especially the red cedar trees, the Gulf of Mexico beach, the lavender fields, and those bright little “Golden Finches in the Rain.” Those poems briefly loosen the book’s grip on exhortation and let it breathe. They offer a quieter kind of restoration, and I found myself wishing there were even more of them, because McCarthy’s voice is often at its most vivid when she pauses long enough to really look.
McCarthy returns to the language of empowerment, destiny, courage, and self-belief. I respected the clarity of the ideas. This is a book deeply invested in healthy boundaries, in refusing negativity, in choosing gratitude, and in seeing survival not just as escape but as transformation. Even when the phrasing is familiar, the conviction behind it feels real, and that reality matters.
I read Unleashing the Power Within less as a formally ambitious poetry collection than as a personal testament shaped into verse, and on those terms it has genuine warmth and purpose. It’s a book about speaking kindly to the bruised parts of the self until they begin to believe they deserve light. I would recommend it to readers who want accessible, faith-tinged, emotionally direct poetry about healing, resilience, and beginning again. For someone coming through loss, self-doubt, or a hard season of change, this book could feel like a companionable hand on the shoulder.
Pages: 96 | ASIN : B0DBVC33S5
More Other Such Matters
Fella Cederbaum’s More Other Such Matters is a book of spiritually searching poems that circle around identity, love, mortality, truth, and the terrible persistence of the thinking mind. The collection moves less like a narrative than like a sustained act of inquiry, each poem worrying at the same great questions from a different angle until they start to glow. Again and again, Cederbaum turns to direct address and cascading questions, asking what remains when profession, doctrine, self-image, fear, and even opinion fall away. Poems like “Before You Were You,” “Faith,” “The Knower And The Known,” and “The Mirror” make the book feel like both a meditation manual and a private reckoning, though its strongest moments are more intimate and embodied than abstract.
What struck me most was the book’s unusual combination of severity and tenderness. Cederbaum can sound almost admonishing, as if she’s trying to shake the reader awake, but there’s warmth under that urgency, and often a real ache. I felt that most sharply in poems where the philosophical pressure gives way to something bruised and personal, like the old tears in “Love Broke Through,” the lonely vastness of “One Single Tear,” or the quietly devastating recognition in “What I Thought I Wanted,” where imagined identities keep turning bland in the hand. Even the more playful poems, especially “My Universe of Cheese,” have that same undercurrent: delight laced with metaphysical impatience. I admired the refusal to settle for easy consolation. This isn’t poetry interested in decorating experience. It wants to strip experience bare.
The book is most effective when its style becomes genuinely musical. Cederbaum has a real instinct for repetition, for the pressure of a recurring phrase, for the way a question can become its own rhythm. Her best lines have lift and clarity, and her images can be surprisingly memorable, as with the orchid and the daisy, the cat as a silent teacher in “Medical Journeys,” or the mirror that keeps changing with praise, desire, and self-doubt until the poem lands on a wiser, steadier truth. The poems return often to oneness, surrender, and the unreliability of thought. But even then, the voice is unmistakably authentic.
I found More Other Such Matters earnest, searching, and often deeply affecting. It’s a book less interested in polish than in penetration, less interested in literary coyness than in saying the largest things as plainly as possible. I think readers drawn to spiritual poetry, contemplative writing, and emotionally candid meditations on selfhood, love, and impermanence will find a great deal here.
Pages: 156 | ASIN : B0FR37DNSZ
Inspiring Others Through Your Work
Poetic Mind 2 is a raw and emotionally direct collection of poetry that transforms pain, memory, and inner conflict into language that comforts, challenges, and urges others to keep going. Do you see this book more as self-expression, communication, or a form of support for readers?
All of the above. I believe the biggest purpose of writing to be inspiring others through your work. That’s what is big to me. I do have a lot of fans, but to me, writing is a platform that I can use to inspire. I’m not in this for the money. I do this because I love writing. I can express myself and communicate through it. Take someone who is going through rough times and motivate them by picking up a book and reading about the things that come from my imagination. We all need reminders, at times, to keep pushing forward. Through pain and mistakes…that is how we learn. I love touching the lives of others in a positive way through my poetry.
How do you approach writing about difficult experiences like grief, trauma, or war without losing authenticity?
By being 100% genuine at all times. I only write about what I have lived through and I do not judge others. There is always someone out there in a more difficult situation than us, regardless of what we go through. I write raw and uncut because I am not ashamed of who I was, and nobody else should ever be either. We are all human, and we cannot dwell on the past.
The collection often feels like it’s reaching directly toward the reader. Do you write with a specific reader in mind who might need these messages?
Absolutely. I want everyone to know that regardless of how you grew up, whether you are white, black, or brown, rich or poor, young or old, gay or straight, and especially those who feel they don’t fit in and have been bullied…we are all somebody. I have posted many poems on social media, and my favorite days are when people comment that they have also been in that situation, and my words helped them. It moves me beyond words and is proof that deep down inside, we are all somewhat alike.
What did you want Poetic Mind 2 to do that your earlier work didn’t, and are there themes you feel you’re still trying to fully capture?
I decided that I wasn’t finished yet. Poetic Mind is going to be a trilogy, with Poetic Mind-Lyrical Storm, the final installment coming in 2027. Poetic Mind 2 is a storm within the mind. Some funny, some serious, some explosive. Like the journey we all go through with our emotions each day. It gets more intense with each book. Poetic Mind 2 has set the stage for a lyric storm, where all of my emotions will hit at once, and that will come to fruition in the final Poetic Mind installment.
Author Links: Facebook | Website
At once reflective and piercing, Poetic Mind 2 invites readers into the restless landscape of the mind, where ordinary moments open into something enduring, and where language becomes a way of understanding the world, and ourselves.
