“Kindred Poets”: Gregg Shapiro, Nicole Tallman, Julie Marie Wade & Shelley Wong

Completing his trilogy of poetic pop-culture explorations of family, love, and memory, Gregg Shapiro‘s Fear of Muses: Poems explores the evolving depth of love and becoming through a delicate and fine-tuned reckoning with familial and relational history. Through the spare beauty of haiku and fineness of belles-lettres, Nicole Tallman‘s Something Kindred: Prose & Poetry is a testament to the living, not the dying, in an evocative and stirring account of grieving that echoes with ache in our hearts, but also soothes us with the understanding that love is immortal despite our losses. The poems in Skirted by Julie Marie Wade glisten with precise and honest lines that chart how their queer speaker measures and crosses water in all its incarnations. In this dissonance, the discomfort of being a slowly ripping apart and reforming continent, Wade exposes new lyric heights pushed up from the grit and magma of realizing “impeccable geotropic design.” Shelley Wong‘s debut, As She Appears: Poems, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming, in which a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love, writing in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are.