The Next Monsters by Julie Doxsee

This collection of poems creates a world where language has special powers. The syntax of the sentences builds thoughts into a beautiful mess. The grand intention of these ideas was not misspent.

Too Heavy to Carry by Cat Dixon

The strengths of this poetry collection come in the image based prose poems and compelling narratives. The themes of abandonment, the circus, the nature of God, and the nature of motherhood causes the reader to see the speaker of these poems as a whole person. There is a stark honesty in these poems that discusses the world as it is, not as we want it to be.

Lying by Lauren Slater

When Slater discusses illness, she discusses what she cannot control in her life. By discussing what she cannot control, I as a reader, am caused to question what illnesses fill my life and what those illnesses keep me from experiencing. While questioning the purpose of memoir, this book questions the purpose of illness.

Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth

As someone who primarily reads poetry and literary fiction, I have decided that if one must sacrifice trust in their readers, there should be a big pay off, and in these books the payoff is a strong, direct conversation about courage, selflessness, grief, regret, and human experience as a whole. The repetitive images of judging bodies and appearance, water, tears, the grasping and wedging of hands lends these book to interpretation beyond the surface reading of the events which is not commonly said about teen fiction. The realistic ending that has hope shows that Roth did not take the task of writing a dystopic trilogy lightly, which created a good genre specific reading experience.

Bough Down by Karen Green

I should say reading about the feelings that remain from a suicide is depressing, but seeing an extended image of how one unfolds after tragedy is strangely comforting. I should say that whenever animals can explain an event better than the consistent speaker in a book, it is a true and striking event. I should say chronology is a construct for the stages of grief, but this is only about survival, not grief.

After You Dearest Language by Marisol Limon Martinez

Let's discuss poetry by discussing words and the associations we have with them. Let's discuss creating a new language and syntax for how we string sentences together. Lets discuss why associating one word with another word is a poem in and of itself.