Poetry

Paint The Sky by Keith Hagger is a raw and restless poetry collection with a voice that refuses to sit quietly. It is angry, thoughtful, sometimes romantic, and often deeply frustrated with the state of the world. Hagger writes with the feeling of someone looking around and asking how everything became so broken.

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.

Some books don’t try to tell you a story as much as they try to hold a place in your hands. Winds of Sovereignty: The Mavulis Poems does exactly that—turning the Philippines’ northernmost outpost into something you can feel: the salt in the air, the weight of duty, the quiet pride of standing watch. In this collection, Francis Tolentino uses verse to honor Mavulis Island, the soldiers who guard it, and the idea of sovereignty as something lived and protected, not simply claimed.

In And I Blamed Canadian Winter Again: Poems East & West, Nepalese-Canadian poet Arun Budhathoki reflects on his journey between the snow-laden landscapes of New Brunswick and the towering Himalayas of his childhood.

In a world where poetry often dances around complexities, Jeffrey Heath’s Entropy Loop & Other Poems embraces a refreshing straightforwardness that invites readers into its depths.