Middle West Press

Part memoir, part multimedia experiment, part catharsis, Amalie (“ah-MAHL-ee-ah”) Flynn explores how the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 both shatter and echo in us—both as individuals and as a culture. Flynn is author of the 2013’s Wife and War: A Memoir , and is also the poetry editor of the monthly literary journal The Wrath-Bearing Tree . Her poetry collection September Eleventh grew first from a 2011 series of blog posts at septembereleventh.wordpress.com . In 2021, she recrafted the work as a random-access constellation of 130 social-media posts and companion YouTube videos. Collected and presented now in print and e-book, the work can be read sequentially, or browsed by flipping among pages. “Leave it to a poet to unlock something fresh and new in the space of ‘remember that day” stories, writes the publisher. “Here is a narrative that both invites participants to recall their own experiences of a trauma in our nation’s shared history, while also recreating the immediacies...

 “Every poet,” warns journalist and poet  Randy Brown , “has a heart filled / with shrapnel.” In his new chapbook  SO FRAG & SO BOLD , the former U.S. Army “brigade staff jester” takes aim at endless wars, parent traps, social media, and stodgy religious beliefs. It’s an iconoclastic cluster-munition that’s bursting with more hundreds of haiku, aphorisms, philosophical puzzles, and other experiments in pithy and pulpy poetry. Brown’s careful constructions of line-breaks and language are intended to variously provoke chuckles, empathy, and thought. “Any poem is a device,” he writes, “improvised to explode with meaning [...] ignited by a trigger / word.” In addition to other accolades, Brown is a three-time poetry finalist in the  Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards , administered annually by the Chicago-based literary journal  Line of Advance . His debut collection, Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire , was awarded a 2016 Gold Medal di...

Inspired by great works of visual art, writing, and sculpture, as well as small insights alongside her child and dog, a seasoned poet and spouse of a U.S. Marine explores through poetry the invisible forces and frictions at work in our lives. “In her word-experiments with the unseen forces at work in our lives—the pushes-and-pulls of parenting, the moments of quiet natures observed, the energies stored and released by objects of art both great and small—Lisa Stice captures an essential and modern magic,” says Middle West Press editor-publisher Randy Brown. “If you’ve ever been a military kid, parent, or spouse—regardless of age or era—you’ll find a welcome home in her words,” says Brown. Lisa Stice is the author of the previously published poetry collections Uniform (Aldrich Press, 2016), Permanent Change of Station (Middle West Press, 2018), and the poetry chapbook Desert (Prolific Press, 2018). Her work appears in print and on-line journals worldwide. She is a poetry editor for I...