Formally various, balanced on the edge of order and chaos, the poems in Magnifier cry out for “something more” from the “nothing but” even as they zero in on the damage we have done.

In The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, Gillian Cummings gives voice to her version of Ophelia, a young woman shattered by unbearable losses, and questions what makes a mind unwind till the outcome is deemed a suicide.

Invoking spiders and senators, physicists and aliens, Lauren Haldeman’s second book, Instead of Dying, decodes the world of death with a powerful mix of humor, epiphany, and agonizing grief.