Rachel Neve-Midbar’s debut book of poetry, Salaam of Birds, is a fundamental reckoning between the intensity of life in Israel and the earthy beauty of the desert: water, sand, flowers, fruit. The poems within the collection speak to the transformation that comes from holding disparate elements that comprise a homeland like the Jewish state.

Here’s the morning again saying, look, the sun is in the trees,

earth’s hair tangled birded—

the garden a hive wound with color, dressed with names:

dill, cabbage, mustard, phlox, echeveria, aeonium—

Our family was young, the house old, the backyard scorched and empty. We were broke from the down-payment, the legal fees, but we wanted beauty. We found a sugar maple left over from last year, marked down.

Now, how many Russian novels in translation have you read this past year?
- Audre Lorde (“Notes from a Trip to Russia,” 1976)

The line above is the closing sentence of Audre Lorde’s “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” the opening essay in her renowned Sister Outsider. This essay was written during her two-week trip to Russia and Uzbekistan in 1976, before the dissolution of the USSR.

Vermont poet Michael Metivier speaks with Vermont novelist Makenna Goodman about her debut, The Shame (Milkweed, 2020). With humor and vivacity, the book charts the internal struggles of its narrator, Alma.

Good Friday

Smoke alarm, you rouse me
to the dark, my thoughts
like crowds outside my door.

It’s possible one could go their entire lives and experience a single death, only their own. The aftermath of unpredictable tragedy, there would be nothing to observe, nothing to predicate one’s visions and versions of death.

Along the street I watched
them burn plastics.
Farms, often as not,
stretching back throats
to the mountain.

Tropicália is a book that doesn’t pull its punches or steer away from the absurd, pulling in readers from the first line, “She devoured tiny Americans that came out of vending machines.”

Rain won’t fall, won’t fall and won’t.
When I learned the word virga

I learned how full a cloud could be,
Every word worth an extended visit,

Visit meaning to both comfort and afflict.

and every year I still yearn to write them—the leaves,
signature picture of beauty
inevitable
and stock as a sunset.

Dialogues with Rising Tides testifies to how we are inextricably intertwined in a web of ecological disaster, intergenerational trauma, and a persistent murmuring chorus of our own underlying fears and anxieties.