In Soul Cake, Lisa Russ Spaar makes late-life, hibernal forays into ecstasy, God hunger, soul-making, language, beauty, and an unquenched desire for the b/Beloved.
Lisa Russ Spaar’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Soul Cake, which takes its title from an ancient mummer/wassailer’s carol, leans with late-life, hibernal ecstasy into Spaar’s flood subjects: God hunger, soul-making, language, beauty, and an unquenched desire for the b/Beloved. Bodily and mysterious, the poems wrest from their rich, sumptuous, surprising lexicon flashes of dread, beyonding, and gnosis.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of a novel, Paradise Close; six acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems; and The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, a collection of poetry history and criticism. She was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors and awards. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the MFA program.
——
In her heartrending sixth collection of poetry, Anne Marie Macari communes with a brother decades gone and calls out a gun-obsessed America has enabled countless similar deaths.
In Amerigun, a stunning collection of loss and rediscovery, poet Anne Marie Macari revisits her brother Edward’s long-ago death by a self-inflicted gunshot. Interweaving and disentangling her own memories and those of her family, and by reconstructing a legal and medical paper trail, Macari begins a dialogue with the dead, bringing her brother’s lost voice back to her after years of sealing herself off from him. Embedded in her story is the devastation of a culture that elevates guns and violence over the sacredness of human life. Yet, out of that devastation, Macari writes a kind of love story, renewing her connection with her brother, as well with other departed friends and family. By revisiting grief, she uncovers a deeply-felt gratitude for the world around her—and indeed for her own life.
Anne Marie Macari is the author of five books of poetry. Her first book, Ivory Cradle, won the APR/Honickman first book prize. She is also the co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. Macari’s poetry and prose has been widely published in magazines. In 2005 she was the recipient of the James Dickey Prize for poetry from 5 Points Magazine. She lives in New York City.
——
With language flush with and supercharged by Eros, Carey Salerno’s third book is a poet’s elegy to her uterus, her love letter penned in an overcrowded room to autonomy and desire.
Having been debilitated and rendered infertile by endometriosis, endured rounds of infertility treatments that landed her in miscarriage and selective reduction treatments, and suffered a cancer scare that left her body incapable of conceiving, Carey Salerno responds with these maximalist poems. Through them, she dives headfirst into the world with an intense hunger to live to the fullest, to release the shame the she has amassed about her own body and its refusals to function, reflecting on and redefining what it means to be a woman when so much is taken from her.
Carey Salerno serves as the executive director & publisher of Alice James Books where she has been dedicated to broadening the spectrum of the American poetic voice since 2008. She is the author of The Hungriest Stars (2025), Tributary (2021), Shelter (2009), and a co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She is the recipient of a 2025 Pushcart Prize and a 2025 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council. Salerno serves as co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and teaches publishing arts and poetry writing for the University of Maine.
——
Spaar, Macari, and Salerno will be in conversation with Chloe Yelena Miller, who lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, child and their many books. Her poetry collection, Perforated, is forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books (2025) and her debut full-length Viable, was published by Lily in 2021. Her poetry chapbook Unrest was published by Finishing Line Press. Her work has been published in Alimentum, The Cortland Review, McSweeney’s, Narrative Magazine, Poet’s Market, and Storyscape Literary Journal, among others.