In Spiking the Sucker Punch, Robbie Q. Telfer's first published collection, the author profiles the modern comedian from the inside out - starting with the innards and moving toward a damaged laughter. His work blends surrealism and narrative, bending grammar and expectations along the way. These pieces interrogate identity, place, and lead the reader to a much higher understanding of bears. This gloriously bellowed lyrical and linguistic chaos, this ‘mess of crossed wires and mixed seagulls,’ will make your status quo ache, your perceptions implode, your horizons widen and shatter. -Patricia Smith, “Blood Dazzler” Robbie Q, our dazzling shooting star sparking the gritty Chicago heavens, crackling with the surprising and contradictory rhythms of life on the run and in the heat. Keep on, Brother Q, dance the dialectic, your wild inspired unruly convergence and conspiracy. -Bill Ayers, activist/educator/author In Spiking the Sucker Punch, Robbie Q. Telfer rocks out a bestiary of antic poetics all his own. In his open and generous hands, speech acts zoom in and out of our collective desire to live and love. You will feel alive again reading it. -Daniel Nester, “How to Be Inappropriate”

Hello teachers! We know you work hard. Besides ninjas, you have the hardest job in the world. Between the teaching, the testing, the grading, and the nurturing it’s difficult to seek out new materials for your classroom. We are here to help. As poets and teachers, we know the power of the spoken word in the classroom. All you have to do is attend a youth slam or find a clip of one online and you will see the positive impact modern poetry has on our young people. It is able to engage students from any background in a way that classical poetry simply cannot touch. A complaint we’ve heard from many teachers is that they would love to use spoken word in their classrooms but they are afraid of getting in trouble with rough language and themes. So behold! We asked some of the best contemporary spoken word and slam poets to give us poems that would be appropriate for the classroom. This means you will not have to sift through this book with a highlighter to try and find the F’s and the S’s and the B’s and the Z’s. We’ve provided poems from national slam champs, world slam champs, fellow teachers, and poets we feel are the best of what’s around. We’ve also included some amazing lessons in its companion book for the teacher, sold separately.

Open Your Mouth Like A Bell is ultimately a book of love poems to poetry itself, or rather, to the gift of language and its powerful mercury. "Sincerity is the only currency I bring," writes Mindy Nettifee in her haunting poem "Election Eve," a piece composed in a state of not-knowing, just days before the 2016 U.S. election that delivered the presidency to Donald Trump. In this third full-length collection of poetry, Nettifee's powers are on the wax. The book follows a course of descent, tapping wells and constructing thresholds to underworlds. She's plumbing the dark unknown, in search of wild memory and buried trauma and the stories of the dead. She is seeking the roots of the personal, familial and cultural madness blossoming aboveground. Her studies of the unconscious mind, archetypal psychology and western mysticism are in conversation with punk chaos, feminist politics, and the evolution of kissing. The lineage of poems as spells is humming and cracking beneath the surface, asking questions about what it takes to imagine, create and enact change. Nettifee won't banish the mystery, but does not leave us in the dark. By the end of the book we are led up and full circle, reinitiated into the bright, light-filled, mundane world. Only everything has changed. Here, in the surreal real and the strange and sacred ordinary, we must use our own voices to emotionally echolocate, to sense new landscapes both inside and out. We must tell the stories it is impossible to tell. We must speak until we feel the ring of truth.

Brown is our modern-day Neruda, hailed as the king of the fast gut punch and champion of the unforgettable line. Here is a brilliant imagination working at its highest level of creative force and naked, cinematic intimacy. Winner of the 2013 Texas Book of The Year for Poetry and owner of Write Bloody Publishing, Derrick C. Brown, author of UH-OH (“...a rekindling of faith in the weird, hilarious, shocking, beautiful power of words.” Joel Lovell, The New York Times) and Born in The Year of the Butterfly Knife, elevates his newest collection of writing in Hello. It Doesn’t Matter. with short burst of dazzling light, dark humor and longer bouts of sorrow and rise. This road-traveling bard fearlessly delivers on laughter and unashamed romance.

Jeanann Verlee's second book, Said the Manic to the Muse, takes a deeper, more focused look at the erratic, whimsical, ominous, and sometimes perilous ways manic depression functions. Introduced through the careful prophecy of three archetypes: Medea, Jezebel, and Kali–each a woman largely misrepresented and wholly misunderstood–these poems detail the story of one woman's struggle to maintain both strength and sanity in the face of abandonment and aging. From dangerous trysts and barroom brawls to "grief-induced psychosis," Said the Manic to the Muse recounts the year she lost everything, including her mind.

Heartbreaking and hilarious poems reaffirming our youngest conclusions about the world. Known for his dreamy abstraction and the emotional ferocity on the page and on the stage, this is a birthday card from the phenomenal world to our wildest selves. No approach to writing (odes, codes, lectures, letters, tests and attendance sheets) is left unexploited as a means to poetry. This is his second collection.

Buddy Wakefield’s third book, Gentleman Practice, documents the figurative contents of a man’s body attempting to stand firm in the presence of all that is. It’s a poetry book, from the perspective of a journal entry in the National Archives. The National Archives live in a building in Seattle behind barbed wire, directly next door to the Center for Spiritual Living. This is no accident. Gentleman Practice is a disarming de-haunting of accidents. There are no stunt doubles performing the honesty in this book. Head raised and victorious, he has crafted a translation of the human spirit on a small, practical patch, with a very fine tooth indeed. And, while many poetry books read like a thick epic series of sections, Gentleman Practice will no doubt rest in your hands like a well-oiled novel.