Review by Jami Marcarty

In Elegies of Herons, Sarah Wetzel weaves ecopoetics together with a poetics of tristezza. The mournful “current running” through the poems speaks to losses that shatter us. In “We are in pieces,” we learn the nature of those profound losses for Wetzel:

“The death of my mother, the death
of my best friend, a dog, a marriage, the loss
of an entire Mediterranean city I used to call home—”

In “Harbingers,” Wetzel asks “what // comes afterwards”? One reply: Poetry. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” Through self-aware poems spanning the elegy, ekphrastic, epistle, and nocturne forms, Wetzel examines the tensions at the heart of the “human experience” — “hope or helplessness,” “poison or antidote,” “full-throated joy” or “folly of love.” Her poems function as wishes: “a friend to live longer, a lover to love us more.” They become songs honoring those lost, offering “sounds / other than silence.” Wetzel accepts the “danger / in making this misery / memorable” to serve her “soundtrack / for loneliness.”

The herons that haunt this collection, standing motionless at water’s edge, embody the vigil grief requires: the waiting, the watching, the acceptance. Through this natural imagery, Wetzel locates personal devastation within ecological time, where loss is neither exceptional nor redemptive — simply inevitable. The Mediterranean landscapes, the shifting waters, the birds in flight all remind us that memory itself is migratory, arriving and departing on its own rhythms.

The poems of Sarah Wetzel’s Elegies of Herons, “confront grief,” insist on attention, on the act of naming what has been lost, even as that naming acknowledges its own inadequacy.

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Elegies of Herons by Sarah Wetzel. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, June 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.

Review by Jami Macarty

In her debut chapbook, When Sad Ones Go Outside, Monica Wang offers readers an immersive journey through landscapes both real and fantastical. With sensitivity and skill, Wang weaves together fabulism and lived experience to create a collection of prose and verse poems where readers encounter “ancient ones,” family members, romantic partners, and fairy tale characters, such as the “koi woman and tigerlily.”

In Wang’s garden of mirrors, her cosmos of ghosts, family members are often in peril or have left the earthly realm. Ancient ones appear to impart wisdom to our heroine, “adventuring” in the forests and brambles of her life. The characters from fairy tales offer commentary on power struggles, especially between genders. Each figure becomes a guide through the tangled woods of grief, memory, and self-discovery.

Whether outside — under the stars, on a walk, in a garden — or inside bedrooms, libraries, or traversing the inner terrains of written or unwritten pages, Wang’s writing seeks not only to understand sorrow but also to transmute it. What makes this collection special is Wang’s commitment to transformation through language. She seeks to shed the “bitter language” of past encounters in favor of words that can be heard “between whispering or shouting.”

“She lays down the mass of flame-colored blooms, where it burns without sound for the one who’s gone” is emblematic of her ability to transform grief into something beautiful, ineffable, yet deeply felt. Reading Sad Ones Go Outside is an invitation to experience mourning and magic side by side, to walk “hidden paths,” where loss blooms quietly into beauty.

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When Sad Ones Go Outside by Monica Wang. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, June 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.

Review by Jami Macarty

The poems in Sullivan Summer’s chapbook Performance Anxiety examine the many roles society imposes — and expects us to play. Our guide is a self-described “adopted Black daughter,” leading us through poems shaped by “complex culture.” While society claims to value “progress” and “perspective,” Summer reminds us in the poem “The Truth in American Fiction” that we still “cast villains” and exploit those we claim to protect.

The chapbook is arranged as a dramatis personae, introducing us to a cast of fifteen: the Adoptive Mother, Coroner, Corpse, Daughter, FBI Agent, Husband, Nail Tech, Police Officer, and others. These characters each inhabit scenes of violence, dismissal, and trauma. At the center stands our “Star of the Show,” the survivor who’s lived to share her story.

Summer asserts her agency — she is “the woman / herself who decided whether she remained anonymous and silent.” In a powerful feminist act, she breaks that silence and emerges from the hostile places where she “had been.” Fittingly, her poetic forms are experimental, hybrid, and distinct.

One standout poem, “Five Parables of Mothers or Daughters,” meditates on four-letter words and their “connotations.” Singular words — “more,” “need,” “less,” “self” — anchor the poem’s exploration of the line between performance and real political action. The poem is a call to action disguised as parable.

In Performance Anxiety, Sullivan Summer invites us to witness more than just stories of survival — she calls on us to question the scripts we accept in our own lives. Through her willingness to unsettle, she exposes the tension between “lust and loathing,” “appropriation and appreciation,” borrowed roles and the truths we risk telling.

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Performance Anxiety by Sullivan Summer. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, June 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.

Review by Jami Macarty

In More Beautiful Than The Dead, Danny Bellinger crafts an “anthem” to his family and neighborhood, set against the turbulent backdrop of 1960s America marked by racial violence and war. His poems question allegiances, mourn an “unforgiving / world,” and cherish the sense of belonging found in backyard gatherings, on porch steps, and at neighborhood haunts. As Bellinger writes, “The war was over, but nobody could tell you who won…”

The chapbook’s twenty-one poems span odes, portraits, elegies, contrapuntal, and prose forms. Accompanied by the soulful sounds of Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, The O’Jays, Johnny Taylor, The Sensational Nightingales, Isley Brothers, and The Temptations, Bellinger moves between the worlds of the living and the lost. His “funeral company” includes a “cantankerous aunt,” a “half-dead brother,” “The Prince of Kingsway Projects,” and icons “Kennedy, King, Bobby, and Jesus.” In lines that go off like “sparklers and cherry bombs,” Bellinger balances the bitter and the sweet, bringing alive a past he wants to “get off [his] chest.”

In the end, Bellinger’s More Beautiful Than The Dead is not just a reflection on hard times, but a testament to the resilience found in memory, music, and family. His poems remind us that even amid personal loss and social upheaval, beauty can be salvaged — and shared — from the everyday moments that never quite leave us. This chapbook lingers “in wonder,” echoing the voices of the past, inviting us to listen closely and hold our history a little tighter.

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More Beautiful Than The Dead by Danny Bellinger. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, June 2025.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.

Review by Jami Macarty

In the chapbook à genoux, the “soft words” of Morgan Christie’s poems respond to Virginia Chihota’s intimate, folkloric artworks. à genoux, from the French “on one’s knees,” is the focus of both the poet and the artist who consider the various reasons and calls to bend a knee, ranging from protest to prayer.

Which gesture of kneeling has to do with willing supplication and which power dynamics?

how soundly the reason fumbles
from the tellings and retellings

they all took knees before
but only when they were told (“—white lines”)

When we “hear someone yell / get down on your knees” we know we are not being told “to pray.” To “recognize the distinction” between “having to bend” and wanting to “means to understand the sacred.” Ultimately, “longing for what is ours is why we keel.”

As Christie is brought to her knees by the history of subjugation, she bows to the strength of family. When “we think of kneeling / we don’t have to be on our own.”

Indeed, in à genoux, Morgan Christie and Virginia Chihota “kneel together” as “the truths” of their words and colors draw a warm “blended bath / of change.”

Gentle Reader, regardless of what Auden wrote, together Morgan Christie’s poetry and Virginia Chihota’s paintings make something happen. So does Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, who made this stunning, full-color chapbook!

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à genoux by Morgan Christie; artwork by Virginia Chihota. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Review by Jami Macarty

In this gorgeous Black Sunflowers Poetry Press poet and artist series chapbook, Harryette Mullen’s haiku and essayettes grow in a garden of delights and despairs along with Tiffanie Delune’s lush floral tableaus.

Mullen’s Open Leaves: poems from earth is a study and choice of attention:

Every flower a
reminder of all that we
miss when not looking.

Of course, where there are gardens, there are plants, their watering and growth, hungry grasshoppers, and a “Kneeling gardener.”

Given the rapaciousness encouraged by the business magnates who brought to society PayPal, Tesla, Amazon, etc., in this context gardening is resistance. And, it is the insistence on connection—to family and Earth.

In Mullen’s poems, gardening is connected especially to the strong women in her family: “Somehow, after he’d left, and his father had died, his mother held on to their acres, even during the Great Depression, and beyond.” Great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother taught her: “You won’t starve if you can grow your own food. If you take care of your green patch, it will take care of you.”

Despite “snagged skin, / bruised fruit, hurt feelings,” gardening offers Mullen a sense of being “Firmly planted here” and a place for sustaining inquiry and her life: “When she scoops a handful of black earth, she thinks of living things that keep the soil alive.”

Gentle Reader, read these poems, and your heart blossoms, your soul alive!

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Open Leaves: poems from earth by Harryette Mullen; artwork by Tiffanie Delune. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, March 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.