Grief is an everpresent echo, and each of these poets grapple with their own incredible loss and the duties of memory. In Waking Up Alone, Michael Hettich processes the death of his wife, recording his acute pain through an unfiltered lens. Anne Marie Macari confronts gun culture in Amerigun, navigating both memory and medical documents as she recounts the years-ago loss of her brother to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Catherine Esposito Prescott’s Superbloom is a heart-rending tour de force of maternal grief, as she finds beauty in the natural world while reconciling the loss of her son. Dean Bartoli Smith chases both impermanence and inheritance with a certain ruthlessness, chronicling his journey through a series of losses, fractured families, and places he can no longer return to in Magic Show: Poems.

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