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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
Dog Tags and Ghost Roads
Dog Tags and Ghost Roads is a poetry collection about military service as both a calling and a haunting, moving from enlistment and duty into combat, homecoming, healing, and legacy. D.C. “Buddy” Lee writes from a place of deep reverence for veterans, families, faith, brotherhood, and the invisible weight that follows people long after the uniform comes off. The book begins with the solemnity of “The Oath” and “For God and Country,” then widens into the dust, salt, fear, and fellowship of service before settling into some of its most affecting terrain: the kitchen-table quiet of coming home, the startled body that still hears war in a slammed door, and the slow mercy of therapy, love, and ordinary mornings.
What moved me most was the book’s emotional honesty about what service costs. Lee doesn’t treat sacrifice as a clean, polished word. He lets it drag sand into the house. In “The Echoes of Service,” honor becomes heavy enough to make breathing hurt, and in “Where Shadows Wait,” home is warm but not simple, because safety feels like a language the veteran has forgotten. Those moments stayed with me because they feel intimate rather than ceremonial. I believed the wife’s hand on the shoulder, the daughter’s laughter in the kitchen, the veteran sitting on the edge of the bed watching the dark. The best pieces in the collection understand that war doesn’t always announce itself with gunfire. Sometimes it lives in a hallway, a cup of coffee, a flinch.
The writing has a strong, thunderous pulse, full of flags, storms, steel, salt, sacred vows, and ghosts. At times, that grand register gives the poems real force, especially in the sea poems like “Underway,” “Run Silent, Run Deep,” and “A Life in Salt and Wind,” where Lee’s Navy background brings texture and authority. I loved those sensory touches: brine, deck, whistle, harbor, anchor, tide. The collection uses repeated images of fire, bone, flame, honor, and eternal watchfulness. When Lee lets the poem breathe in a specific room with a specific person, the book becomes richer and more piercing.
I felt that Dog Tags and Ghost Roads is interested in bearing witness, and there’s something earnest and worthy in that. Its ideas are rooted in respect, resilience, faith, service, and the conviction that healing is not weakness but another form of courage. This is a heartfelt, reverent book with its strongest power in the places where public honor meets private pain, and I’d recommend it especially to veterans, military families, caregivers, and readers who want poetry that speaks openly about duty, trauma, love, and the long road home.
Pages: 92 | ASIN : B0DST3795Y
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
Unavoidable Element of Time
What’s It Like To Be Old? is a candid poetry collection that addresses what happens when the self still feels vividly alive, but the body has other ideas. Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?
I guess life was the main source of ideas and insights for this book. I have always admired Thomas Hardy’s excellent poetry, much of it written in the context of his old age. And of course Dylan Thomas and W. B. Yeats made famous statements about old age. But those tended to the heroic, and I wanted to explore the day-to-day consciousness of being old, a rather different thing than a defiant whoop. I did not find many writers who looked steadily at the life of the old, happy, painful, resigned, or entered into a psychological state that I defined as ripeness from Shakespeare’s touching lines.
How do you know when a poem is truly finished?
My poems often come out from a deeper place in my mind where they seem to be always already finished. I might struggle to find words for the middle, but the beginning and end seemed already written, and when the final lines came out, though I might mess with them a bit, I knew the poem was written: a rather mysterious process, I grant.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in putting together this poetry collection?
I had a great number of poems on the subject of what it is like to be old. I had recently entered into the life of older people, my 70s, when I would hit upon a statement, or a dramatic voice of someone, or a point of view, and so on, and I would create a poem. I edited all the poems very carefully, but then came the hard part: picking the ones worth putting in a book of poems on the subject. If they had made it through my editing process, they had some value, and it was hard to know which to select. I settled on distributing them into a kind of plot of poem sections that would eventually constitute the major sections of the book. It was then easier to see in a comparison of those in each section which would provide a new perspective and a superior poetic statement. Still, I was sorry to see certain ones have to go.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
I have finished four more books that are already slated for publication: these are a book on life in the unavoidable element of time, entitled Being in Time and Change, a work that follows many of the themes of time in What’s It Like To Be Old? Another is called Political Poems and asks the reader to think about our national and social hopes and despairs– so potent just now; it focuses on dominations and their harm. Next is a book of vivid impressions of life as we experience it daily; it is called Seasons: Moments and explores directly our brilliant or terrible life on the planet. Then there is another book of poems focused on my wonderful dog, Maisie, and her remarkable experiences in a life outside in Central Park.
I am now pulling together and editing a collection of reflections on dying and death, and our response to these realities. As with my other poems, they offer a panoply of points of view, personal, social, or eternal. I am liking these poems as I go through them, even though the subject itself is so unlikeable.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
A Glowing Gateway
The Soundless Symphony is a collection of poetry that covers themes of inner fracture, romantic ache, fantasy realms, and the wonders of the natural world. Why was this an important collection for you to share?
After writing from a place of instinctive emotion and creation, I wanted to reveal the experience to other readers to feel, reflect, and interpret in their own way. The collection is varied in its themes but still emotionally and atmospherically coherent. It’s also open enough to invite rather than to only tell.
I understand that ambiguity will circle the collection because of such an approach, but I see it as a glowing gateway rather than a path of darkness. Although I do accept that ambiguity can be a trap for writers as well as a tool, yet it’s often the readers that decide which one you chose and whether it was successful.
I do enjoy the deep aspects of such an approach which allows for thinkers and wild imaginations, all the while still holding shape and intention. It’s also an intent that I hope to share with my readers.
Are you someone who writes from inspiration, discipline, or a combination of both?
Definitely more from inspiration, though that can be as frustrating as it is wonderful at times. Yet that very nature and unpredictability of creativity are what make the gift of creation so rare and special.
Often, as with many writers, my work carries my influence of life experiences. I do believe inspiration needs a tide to carry the ethereal muse.
Although I naturally lean towards the lyrical as my voice is innate in that sense, I still really appreciate the depth and soft interpretation that vivid imagery leading from that instinct encourages. I feel it gives you the ability to weave both feeling and seeing into verse which endures in a lingering and atmospheric way.
Mythological and fantasy elements appear throughout the collection. What draws you to those worlds?
I love to read about the Greek and Roman gods, goddesses, and mythical creatures just as much as I love to read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and faerie lore.
The myths and legends often hold elements of human nature, morals, and sometimes hard-earned truths. At the same time, the other-worldly essence that lingers in the stories and their golden threads gives them a glittering allure that draws and holds my gaze. They allow both the glimmer of reality and escapism of fantasy to intertwine, and that is something that has always fascinated me.
If readers could take away one message from the collection, what would you hope it would be?
For me, I would say it’s about seeing the truth often veiled, whether by ugliness, beauty, silence, or sound. As for the readers I feel each deserves to reach for and to find their own inspiring message.
This is the first and opening volume. Poems of lost innocence, yearning, and the beauty that masks the truth and turmoil beneath. It is the beginning of the seeking journey, preparing to step into the later darkness. As with life, the feelings and messages are bound to change.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
These poems move between the earthly and the ethereal, touching fragments of myth, hidden emotions, and memory’s quieter corners, bringing to light lostinnocence, yearning, beauty, and turmoil.
With imagery both tender and haunting, capturing the unspoken music of human experience,
The Soundless Symphony is the first volume in A Seeking Soul, a trilogy exploring transformation through myth, feeling, and the night.
Tracing Lines
Tracing Lines is a poetry collection about learning to see life as a set of sacred, intersecting paths: through nature, grief, homesickness, prayer, memory, and ordinary hilarity. Lori Hershberger moves between the mountains and rivers of Thailand, the prairie winds of Kansas, the ache of leaving and returning, and the steady presence of faith beneath it all. The book begins with the idea that human creativity is a kind of tracing, not creation from nothing, but a grateful following of lines already given. That image holds the whole collection together. Whether she is lying small in a cradle of pine needles, watching floods swallow roads and homes, missing the “little white mother” across the world, or laughing over stolen cheese and Sunday Smarties, Hershberger keeps returning to the same quiet conviction: to notice deeply is to be alive.
What I liked most about this collection is how emotionally unguarded it feels without becoming shapeless. The poems have a devotional core, but they’re not thin or merely comforting. Grief is allowed to be strange, physical, even morally uncomfortable, as in “Some Other Person’s Grief,” where the speaker admits the frightening selfishness inside her first prayer after a motorcycle accident. That moment stayed with me because it’s so human. Hershberger is at her strongest when she lets beauty and sorrow touch without smoothing either one down. In “Mothwings,” the rains bring the earth back to life just as death arrives from the other side of the world, and the broken wings on the porch become almost unbearable in their delicacy. I felt that same hush in “Delta 7850,” where lost hours on a flight become minutes mingled with tears in “God’s bathroom cabinet.” It’s a risky image, almost oddly domestic, but it works because it makes heaven feel intimate rather than ornamental.
The writing itself is lush. Hershberger loves repetition, personification, rivers, wind, dusk, birds, and the long ache of distance, and I admired the musical confidence of that recurring language. When the concrete detail anchors the lyric impulse, the work sings. I loved the yellow cat beside the coffee, the cabbages tumbling from trucks in Mae Hong Son, the mother slowly spelling love into a text message, the farmhouse phone of the past ringing into static. Those details make the larger spiritual ideas feel earned. The humor in the final section also surprised me in the best way. After so much ache and altitude, “Life” with its goats, ants, spilled lemonade, and stubborn picnic blanket feels like a deep breath from someone who knows that joy is not the opposite of sorrow, but one of its bravest companions.
Tracing Lines felt to me like a book written by someone who has lived with two homes in her body and has learned to make poetry from the pull between them. It’s tender, sincere, sometimes ornate, often beautiful, and most memorable when it trusts small things to carry enormous feeling. I closed it with the sense of having been invited to look harder at my own ordinary lines, the weathered ones and the golden ones alike. I’d recommend this collection to readers who enjoy faith-inflected poetry, nature writing, reflective poems about place and belonging, and work that treats grief with reverence while still leaving room for cats, mangoes, and laughter.
Pages: 121 | ASIN: B0GTGCT8Y7
Learning to Trust My Voice
Mouthy is an intimate poetry collection in which you write from the layered experience of being Black, queer, femme, soft, and often misread. What was the biggest challenge you faced in putting together this poetry collection?
The biggest challenge was allowing the collection to be honest without over-explaining itself. So much of MOUTHY comes from the experience of being misread before I even open my mouth. Blackness gets misread. Femmeness gets misread. Softness gets misread. Queerness gets misread. I had to resist the urge to defend every part of myself on the page.
I wanted the poems to have teeth, humor, tenderness, and grief, but I did not want the book to feel like I was begging to be understood. The challenge was learning to trust my voice enough to let it stand. Some poems are loud. Some are wounded. Some are funny because laughter has always been part of how I survived. The work was bringing all of those selves into one room and letting them speak without apologizing.
Softness appears repeatedly as a source of strength rather than fragility. What drew you to that idea?
I think I was drawn to softness because I spent so much of my life watching people treat it like a weakness. Growing up Black, queer, femme, and Southern, softness often felt like something I was supposed to hide or harden into something more acceptable. But the older I get, the more I understand that softness is not the absence of strength. Sometimes softness is the thing that keeps you human.
For me, softness is the ability to still love, still feel, still create, still laugh, and still reach for beauty after the world has tried to make you smaller. That is not fragile to me. That is powerful. MOUTHY is very much a collection about reclaiming the parts of myself I was taught to shrink.
The prose piece about returning to your small town is especially restrained and reflective. What was it like to write about a place that shaped you so deeply?
Writing about my small town required a lot of care. I did not want to write it as a villain, because the truth is more complicated than that. The place that hurt you can also be the place that made you funny, observant, stylish, spiritual, careful, and strong. Erin, Tennessee shaped my ear, my humor, my fear, my longing, and my understanding of silence.
That piece had to be restrained because returning to a place like that is not always dramatic on the outside. Sometimes the drama is internal. It is in what your body remembers. It is in the roads, the churches, the family names, the rooms where nobody said what everyone knew. Writing it meant honoring the child I was there while also recognizing the adult who survived long enough to look back.
What do you hope readers who may not share your experiences nevertheless understand after reading the collection?
I hope readers understand that being seen is not a small thing. For people who live at the intersections of race, queerness, gender expression, body, class, and place, being misunderstood can become a daily weather. It shapes how you move, how you speak, how you love, and how safe you feel taking up space.
But I also hope they understand that MOUTHY is not only about pain. It is about voice. It is about humor. It is about beauty. It is about refusing to disappear. Even if a reader has not lived my exact experience, I hope they recognize the human desire underneath it: the need to be loved without translation, without apology, and without having to become smaller first.
Author Links: Instagram | Facebook | Website
A poetry and reflection collection for anyone who was told they were too much—too loud, too soft, too sensitive, too honest— and learned to shrink in order to survive.
Written in lyrical prose, affirmations, and guided selfreflection, Mouthy explores what it means to find your voice after years of silence. It speaks to the ache of being misnamed,
misunderstood, and asked to make yourself smaller for the comfort of others. Through themes of identity, softness, survival, and self-return, this book invites readers to unlearn the belief that quiet equals safety and volume equals danger.
Rooted in Black, queer, and femme lived experience, Mouthy is both deeply personal and widely resonant. It moves between poetry and prompts, confession and encouragement, tenderness and defiance. Each section offers space to breathe, to write, to remember who you were before the world told you how to be.
This is not a book about becoming fearless. It is about becoming honest.
Mouthy speaks to those who have learned to armor their gentleness, who have rehearsed apologies for things that were never wrong, and who are ready to stop negotiating their worth. It honors the versions of ourselves that stayed quiet to stay alive—and gently releases them from that burden.
This book is for readers who love contemporary poetry, healing literature, and introspective writing that sits at the intersection of self-growth and self-expression. It is for those navigating identity, reclaiming confidence, and learning to take up space without apology.
Mouthy is not asking you to shout. It is inviting you to stop disappearing.
Come as you are. No smaller.
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
