Titles
Luisa Muradyan, I Make Jokes When I'm Devastated
I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated evokes love, grief, hope and longing across generations, continents, and devastation in Ukraine. Midwest grocery stores, Tony Soprano, murderous internet moms, Soviet scientists, and the Cheesecake Factory populate these poems, as Muradyan brilliantly uses humor to contend with what it means to mother one’s children in the midst of immense loss. I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated is at once a sidesplitting comedy special and a reverent poetry of witness. In this remarkable second collection, Muradyan renders humor an amplifier, obliging us to hear laughter as clearly as we hear an entire world’s weeping.
Aaron Smith and Maureen Seaton, Beautiful People (two-books-in-one), August 2025
Beautiful People was written back and forth over the course of several months by poets Maureen Seaton and Aaron Smith. Bold and inventive, it moves from sonnets and sestinas to prose poems and so much more. While its center is a love for poetry and art and laughter, the poets also grapple with mortality, sadness, and what it means to be alive on a broken but beautiful planet. Through their literary friendship, they put a mirror to all our lovely faces.
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, Tilt (two-books-in-one), August 2025
In Tilt, Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton (1947-2023) write through climate change, Maureen’s illness, and the pandemic with their signature wit and poignancy. Their feminist curiosity leads them to poems about gender identity, marriage equality, and the complexities of national politics. Assembled shortly before Maureen’s death, the poems in Tilt tell the story of a friendship rooted in collaborative artistic play. The title of the book gives a nod to the earth’s tilt, which gives us seasons, but also hints that the poems were written at full tilt, these poets hyperaware they only had so much time left to write with one another.
