BLOOM STORE

Cheryl B. / Rafael Campo / Mary Beth Caschetta / Angelique Chambers / Clifford Chase / Michelle Cliff / Qwo-Li Driskill / Tim Doud / Suzanne Gardinier / David Groff / Marilyn Hacker / Daniel Hall / Gail Hanlon / Reginald Harris / Christopher Hennessy / Holly Iglesias / Dean Kostos / E.J. Levy / Timothy Liu / Mary Ann McFadden / Ron Mohring / Carl Morse / Letta Neely / Mendi Lewis Obadike / Carl Phillips / D A Powell / Gretchen Primack / John Rowell / Elaine Sexton / Roxa Smith / Stacey Waite / John Weir / Tiffany Lynn Wong

Mark Beard / Mark Russell Brown / Guillermo Castro / Lenore Chin / Jan Clausen / Lorraine Healy / Kristen Henderson / Kate Lynn Hibbard / Eloise Holland / Walter R. Holland / Robert Leleux / Chip Livingston / Emily Lloyd / Cynthia Lollar / Jessica Lowber / Mary Ann McFadden / Jeff Mann / B.V. Marshall / Dante Micheaux / Keith Miller / Miller Oberman / Ronald Palmer / Michael Perez / Dennis Rhodes / Ruthann Robson / Lee Ann Roripaugh / Patrick Ryan / / Maureen Seaton / J. Ely Shipley / Su Small / D. Antwan Stewart / Teresa Stores / Terry Wolverton / C. Dale Young / Patrick Youngblood

David Altmejd / Maggie Anderson / David Bergman / Christopher Bram / Michael Broder / Nicole Brossard / Marie Carter / Jeff Crandall / Tony Feher / Louise Fishman / Richard Foerster / Brad Gooch / Terri Griffith & Nicholas Hayes / Luis Jacob / Maurice Kenny / Juliet Latham / Eleanor Lerman / Margaree Little / Raymond Luczak / Elizabeth Macklin / Jaime Manrique / Linda Matalon / Kamilah Aisha Moon / Delisa Mulkey / Eileen Myles / Peter Pereira / Rita Mae Reese / Naomi Replansky / Adrienne Rich / Richard Tayson / Brian Teare / Bradford Gray Telford / Amber Flora Thomas / David Trinidad / Cover by Tony Feher

Lisa Alexander / Nickole Brown / Austin Bunn / Brent Calderwood / Monica Carter / Cheryl Dumesnil / Jim Elledge / Gina R. Evers / Jan Freeman / Celeste Gainey / Thomas Glave / Daphne Gottlieb / James Allen Hall / Matthew Hittinger / Alicia Shandra Holmes / Saeed Jones / Joan Larkin / Abbie J. Leavens / Daniel W.K. Lee / Chip Livingston / Bo McGuire / Michael Montlack / Miguel Murphy / Robby Nadler / Yinka Rose Reed-Nolan / Erin Roth / Eric Sasson / Maureen Seaton / Elaine Sexton / David Trinidad / Stacey Waite / Phillip B. Williams / Stephen Zerence. Cover art by Gabriel Padilha.

Terra Brigando / Cindy Carlson / Doug Paul Case / Joshua Charles / Niamh Corcoran / Jeanine Deibel / David Eye / d. gilson / Eloise Klein Healy / Theodosia Henney / A. Naomi Jackson / Michael Klein / Dean Kostos / Alyse Knorr / Jill Leininger / Hunter Liguore / Richard McCann / Kelly McQuain / Christopher Nelson / Karen Lee Osborne / Suzanne Parker / Kate Partridge / Peter Pereira / D.A. Powell / Anne Marie Rooney / Donika Ross / Jacques Rancourt / Michael Wolfe / Patrick Youngblood Cover art by Luciano Martinez

“‘It is a long road to Moxie,’ notes the speaker in ‘The Reality Show,’ one of the contemplative and ultimately hopeful poems that make up A Conversation with My Imaginary Daughter. Moxie, a throwback expression denoting the ability to face difficulty with spirit and courage; aggressive energy; initiative; skill and know how. So the poems in this chapbook give us the view, forwards and backwards, along that long, strange road. A sad, shrewd humor permeates this collection, as does a palpable sense of gratitude. What’s Franchot Tone to the fight one wages for identity against one’s mother, or Moses to the zeitgeist, except, in every life, connections to a vibrant imagined past mark the borders? As the speaker notes in ‘Second Banana,’ ‘Unity is the moment when living becomes history.’” —Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, 2012 poetry judge

“Here is a story that goes after large themes through small and intimate gestures, a story that’s as human and warm-hearted as it is well made. ‘A Small Uprising’ achieves strong feeling through a language that’s plain and direct and strongly felt. At the end, the resolution comes with a wonderful lightness of touch.” — Richard McCann, 2010 Judge

"There’s something about this voice that makes it impossible for me to put these poems down. It would be easy to say these are narrative poems but that’s too simple and does them a disservice. These are poems that speak into you, they are worlds. Capital City at Midnight is a testament not merely to a poet whose poems I want to see more of but of a poet whose line I want to see more of. There are new structures being dreamt of here no matter how traditional the poems look on the page. This is a blueprint for something remarkable that’s on its way.” — Gabrielle Calvocoressi, 2014 poetry judge

“Eastertide is a fragmented story of lost and found connections, a narrative both lifelike and realistically inexplicable. The subtle turns of awareness in this telling echo the social-sexual shifts many of us who’ve spent our lives in queer worlds will remember from the late 1980s, that dimming time when AIDS was just beginning to permeate our daily grasp. This is a narrative made of small and succinctly embodied intimacies. On their own these moments are understated but strung together they form a moving portent of the coming tempest.” — Barrie Jean Borich 2013 nonfiction judge

“'Ladies' is a wonder of a story. It effortlessly bridges countries and generations, time frames and points of view. Featuring rich, precise language and beautiful imagery, it touches on themes of colonialism, gender, and social mobility. But ultimately it’s a love story, and what a romance it is—full of humor and heart, longing and loss, with an ending that’s both redemptive and heartbreaking.” —Nina Revoyr, 2011 fiction judge

“Sixes and Sevens displays an often sophisticated, wry wit, an awareness of the larger world beyond a child’s/young person’s [sometimes] solipsistic universe, and handles with quiet deftness and confidence issues of ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and gender difference (and sometimes class difference as well), without ever becoming didactic. Stylistically and structurally, too, the work ventures into intriguing territory.” —Thomas Glave, 2014 nonfiction judge

“States of Independence gathers the cultural expressions of literature, cinema, art, architecture, dance and even religious ceremony in order to illuminate how all creative artifact is, at its core, a testament to human mortality. The most recognized masterpieces, Klein shows us, are but mirrors of the everyday person’s unacknowledged emotions and unfulfilled desires—gestures of beauty no less valuable because they’re silent or secretive. By turns poetic and elegiac, these wondrous reflections invite the reader ‘to love the world of what is here and what departs the world; to experience sadness without reaching for a solution to sadness; to join the sadness’.” —Rigoberto González, 2011 nonfiction judge

“The writing is lively and imaginative, without being quirky. A bright vein of humor strengthens the exploration of mortality. Best of all, the author brings the love among the three women fully on the page without ever being sentimental. It’s a rare story that successfully tackles love or death, and yet the author of The Dark Between the Stars brilliantly delivers both.” — Lucy Jane Bledsoe, 2014 Fiction Judge

“It seems almost impossible that a writer could combine the candor of a memoir with the insight and engagement of a literary essay, but ‘Tremolo’ seamlessly weaves together the writer’s search for sexual self-knowledge with insights into the poetry of Galway Kinnell. The prose here is both exact and inventive, the sensibility as restlessly probing as it is concise. These brief pages convey the sense of an entire lifetime, and the impact is as powerful as any a reader could hope for.” —Bernard Cooper, 2012 nonfiction judge

“‘The tongue I try to master / is a sticky one, forked and full of tricks,’ is the opening of a poem in Velvet Rodeo, and it becomes a point of return for the collection. These poems understand that to tell the truth, one must lie, play tricks, and even dare to say the unbelievable. Careful and exacting, these poems exact a price from a reader. They linger with you long after you have finished reading them.” — C. Dale Young, 2013 poetry judge