Author: Aida C

Poetry collections often live or die by one thing: whether they feel like a collection of disconnected thoughts, or a body of work with an emotional current strong enough to carry the reader through. From the Shallow End to the Deep End succeeds because it clearly belongs to the second category. AJ Streator does not present these ninety-five sonnets as an exercise in form alone. From the beginning, he frames the book as a deeply personal undertaking born from “Darkest Times,” and that context matters because the collection reads like a long emotional excavation of memory, family, faith, fatherhood, identity, regret, and endurance.

Peering Into Infinity: Mirrors of Love & Grief is a poetry collection that stares straight at the kind of loss most of us circle around in euphemisms. Steven Lewis writes in the wake of his grandson Rory’s death, and the book becomes a record of what grief does to time, language, faith, memory, and the body itself. These poems don’t try to “resolve” mourning into something tidy or inspirational. Instead, they track the daily weather of it—shock, numbness, rage, tenderness, flashes of humor, and the occasional, startling moment of lightness that doesn’t erase the dark, but sits beside it.