Read Renoir Gaither’s poems out loud and catch the meaning collapsing into rhythmic meter, as in this tercet in “Morning Papers Waltz”: “Salutations to subway dreams and spearmint gum./Salutations to asphyxiating oil addition and asthmatic Raqqa streets./Salutations to corporate welfare recipients mewing at public troughs.” The same is true of “Envelope” and “Auction.”

Personification meets allegory in Luciana Erregue-Sacchi’s poem “My Apple”—“Eve,/Stands, unrepentant/Venus Pudica”; and metaphor meets personification in “Garden”—“my garden is a map of my brain/Cobalt, cadmium, coral, kidney shaped.” “Volcanoes In Antarctica?” Read the poem to see poetry as analysis.

There is a special resonance in Louis LoRe’s poems. In “Community College of Vermont, the Early Days,” you hear the girl think “with hopes of becoming.” In “When I Awake” you feel the fear as “he rises to his haunches” and escapes. And you realize the boy can no longer be innocent of the apocalypse of nuclear war in “Sunday Morning.”

A spiritual passion awakens in Ann Christine Tabaka’s poetry. The titles instruct: in “Cutting Through the Fog” the brume swallows the poet whole; in “Eternal Games” the story, like uroboros, eternally chases “its own tail”; and in “Brokenness” emptiness reaches out, “searching.”

An unambiguous pathos permeates Clara Burghelea’s poetry in, for example, this line: “I would have grown forgetful, had I stayed” in “My Own Key Slotted in Your Door.” Then, in “Survival” “love gave its sorrow a name/and drowned it.” And “how can I breathe breathless into the air of you?” in “On Life’s Meaningful Pauses.”

In each of Mart-Matteus Kampus’ poems visualization is key. In “Funabulism” a cat devours a mouse, “his red/whiskers/tightrope/walked/in the clear/morning air.” In “Click” the camera eye embraces all of what it sees—“sky,” shy moon,” “gentle summer.” And then there is “Chrysalis”—a feast of imagistic verse.

There is only the dance of poetic rhyme in O’Brien’s poetry, as embodied in the poem “Pegasus,” a moral tale unencumbered by abstraction or opaque allusions: “Rejoice and kick up/the dust/in your/every advance,” the poet commands.

There is a subdued presence in McAllister’s poetry, as if she is whispering in your ear: feel the sensuous in “Vertigo, NC”; see the fox emerge from the trees in “Wisp”; and in “To My Daughter” know “a temple in the mountain.”

When a poet uses figurative language like Soule in “Shipwrecked,” you feel the extended metaphor or conceit alive in the paradox that the men on board will perish, “becoming pearls, their skin coral.” Ditto “A Book Like Mine” and quicksand.

Translated from Russian, Blizniuk’s poetry is imbued with concrete images that place you within their parameters, and yet the abstract moves ever so closely to a Universe of billions where “someone has torn out a wire from the cable of the humanity.”

This is not easy, this telling a story through images that don’t miss a beat in the poetic line, and to tell it so completely, as L’Heureux “La Sabtranenque” and “Leaves” do through the perspective of “I” and the consistency in voice and mood.

To read “thee” and “thou” and “ne’er” and “‘tis” in “The Raven and the Stone” and “Dolphin Song” is like returning to the world of poetry in the 18th century. In Jewett’s hands, this poetic composition is simultaneously playful and dramatic.

Read Pasagiannis poems quietly, as they offer you an opening to the ethereal and spiritual and mysterious. Each poem breathes its own poetic nuance in form and content, but they gather the difference in “Navigating Silence”: “just listen.”

Bats, the revenant gloam, and impermanence are the subjects of Mulvihill’s poetry here. Yes, their commonality may not be obvious, but Mulviill’s storytelling marks her poetry—personal and unequivocally forthright. Her voice is her truth.

Ever heard of the “Dedekind Cut?” Sarnat explains the second part as the “partitioning of philosophical arguments,” and goes on to reveal an ironic vulnerability in “Triangles Reconstructed: Dad’s Last Hospitalization . . . .”

Reading Zvereva’s poetry is like entering a lush garden of words that find meaning in their juxtaposition, and the senses dominate while reason takes a back seat, if only for a little while. Feeling pulls you toward the understanding and not knowing.

Mindful of the philosophical and spiritual, Keshran gives readers an option: they can read at the surface of his poetry or they can move like “the current of the river” and choose “to seek what lies beyond this earth.” There is magic here.

Stanton’s poetry pulls beyond the words on the page. Is it a search for the “suchness” of things, the true self, the true reality? The poet refuses to be trapped in his corporeality to divine the “whatness” of self: “Tathāgata will be my next child.”

Metaphysics pervades Griffin’s poetry, as the references to Newton, Heraclitus, Isaac, and Spinoza’s famous Deus sive Natura are instructive. Pay attention to the titles: “We Are, We Were,” “Think Tragedy, Feel Comedy,” and “Are We Equal Yet?”

An existential fear of unknowing in Heather’s poems is made most explicit in “Dark Sun,” but it is also present in “nag, stone” and “confessing,” irrespective of the irony. Named: “this terror towards time” and “the swirling chaotic mystery of my past.”

The transient nature of life is nowhere more keenly perceived as in Ryder’s poem “Forms.” The irony is obvious: “When I die the world will stop spinning,” and then this: “I will be a form, a shape, a number, a colour, a sound.” A transitory traveller.

Vance drapes “All Things Scarlet” in allusions—colloquial or personal—and metaphors intersect what is linear. In “From Primrose Hill,” the poet concretizes the poem in landscape imagery: “post-war tenement/brick ways, ” “many-wandered fields.” Metaphor reigns in “Untold Miles” in the first three stanzas but focuses on the “not-quite-lovers in the last.

Like a page from a memoir in “The New Adventures of,” the poet rejects her father’s rants and repulses an arranged marriage. A similar feat is fulfilled line by poetic line in “Opa,” the poet having found a fire-opal, “no opal omen of/ruin.” And in “When,” the poet pleas for racial justice and names the names, “Book of remembrance, book of tears.”

The metaphors of water and sun run through Beamer’s poetry, as if pool water and the smell of chlorine can “block the rest of the world,” and the sun’s sinking in the sea at night isn’t the same as drowning. So too “sunlight becomes a hard, palpable thing,” a corrective to her “winter blues.”