Janine DeBaise

Trail to Table Press / Wandering Aengus Press | 2022 | 65 pages In a poem set in a Denali winter, a place where “a lichen may thrive for a thousand years,” poet Andrew Gottlieb asserts that “time is not light but layers.” We watch him excavate those layers in Tales of a Distance, a stunning collection of place-based poems filled with memory and meaning—powerful poems that are complex and nuanced.

“Forest Walk” by Holly Norval During the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, it was a dog who saved my sanity. Quarantine began in early March, which is still winter where I live, in a central New York community that includes my elderly parents and four grown children. The college where I work sent our students home and told us faculty to “shift our classes online,” a phrase that made the process sound deceptively simple.