As a poet, you know when you’ve touched the right voice(s). With practice, Voice comes to the table more and more often. It wants to be fed. I like it when you can tell a poet’s voice is fat from writing.

“The Internet is not your friend—you shouldn’t let it tend to you so soon.“

I usually am drawn to narrative poetry that almost feels like listening to a good song. Also, if I see something formally or visually unique and striking, it definitely stands out to me.

In the seven stories in Because We Were Christian Girls, Virgie Townsend’s young characters walk the tightrope of faith above the pit of eternal damnation: millennial popular culture. Through their eyes, Townsend blurs the lines between church and the secular world and casts doubt on the very existence of hell.

Thunderhead features lyrical narrative poetry that reveals the darker side of Emily Rose Cole’s upbringing and present-day struggle to reconcile trauma. This trauma stems largely from a verbally abusive mother, now deceased. Cole employs persona poems as well, forming striking parallels between her past and the lives of imaginary heroines, most notably Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz.

A former writing professor of mine calls the novella “the perfect form.” It requires the concision and pacing of a short story but is long and deep enough to draw the reader into its world and hold them there. As it happens, Kevin Lichty understands the challenges and rewards of the form, the sitting or two in which the reader lives inside a narrator’s life, rather than the weeks or months it might take to invest in a longer work.

They really did you in Mr. Angelo, didn’t they, just when you thought it was going to be ok and the quarter of a million dollars they offered to transfer to you via a square white briefcase would be your ticket out of here, new face or old. And the rotten part is that no one will ever recognize you for who you are, outside or in, or that you did it all for Lorraine, who thinks you’re still abroad somewhere doing secret work for the government.