Prose poems, chants, litanies, simple songs, cadenced prayers, brief bursts of rhythmic observation, elegies to little moments that are not little at all in the least whatsoever--welcome to the melodic world of Brian Doyle's "proems," swirling with voices unreeling tales, souls telling stories, moments photographed with ink. Accessible, easy to read, blunt, brief, and sometimes unforgettable, "these are not poems," says the author, "but life set to the music of poetry." In A Shimmer of Something, Brian Doyle's characteristic humor and sincerity combine to make this collection a delight to read. From his conviction that miracles breed ripples that do not cease, to his lack of faith about the life of an elderberry bush, to the amusing story of a friend's experience of driving the Dalai Lama to Seattle, to the humorous experience of his second Confession, to an intimate story of love and loss, Doyle's lean stories of spiritual substance inspire, entertain, and captivate.

Prose poems, chants, litanies, simple songs, cadenced prayers, brief bursts of rhythmic observation, elegies to little moments that are not little at all in the least whatsoever—welcome to the melodic world of Brian Doyle’s “proems,” swirling with voices unreeling tales, souls telling stories, moments photographed with ink. Accessible, easy to read, blunt, brief, and sometimes unforgettable, “these are not poems,” says the author, “but life set to the music of poetry.” In A Shimmer of Something, Brian Doyle’s characteristic humor and sincerity combine to make this collection a delight to read. From his conviction that miracles breed ripples that do not cease, to his lack of faith about the life of an elderberry bush, to the amusing story of a friend’s experience of driving the Dalai Lama to Seattle, to the humorous experience of his second Confession, to an intimate story of love and loss, Doyle’s lean stories of spiritual substance inspire, entertain, and captivate.

Shimmer and Shine love to make everything sparkle.

A book of inquiry, Mark Irwin's Shimmer queries how the worlds of poverty, terrorism, ecology, species extinction, mortality and race interface and affect one another through electronic reproduction and transmission. Not as spectacles but as events that often seem too familiar, many are featured on YouTube: a horse still alive, dragged to be slaughtered; a homeless mother with an infant; a terrorist disguising a bomb, a Vietnam veteran attempting to commit suicide, a mother, unable to speak, who communicates by drawing different colors. Shimmer explores those places where metropolis and the natural world collide, where virtual technology attempts to convey the spirit. The incursion of electronic communication throughout society as a form of human language, has radically distorted and impacted notions of form and space in contemporary poetry, just as it has impacted the idea of what it means to be human.

Porsha O's debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance. These poems dip their hands deep into the fabric of black womanhood, pulling out all of its threads. This book establishes Porsha O firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, pulling equally from Audre Lorde and Danez Smith. This is a book of gentle breaking and inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self-care, and community-care - the pursuit of building a world that will keep you alive.

Lyrical and rife with utterance, Salt Body Shimmer asks of the violence we inherit: who speaks from "the threshold throat" inside "the dark's dark"? Interior driven and intimately political, the poems in this stunning debut coax and trouble form, traversing the landscape of trauma and survival with a deft musicality of time, family, and slippery memory. At the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Foreman makes a song of the body-it's howl and jubilation-and invites us to confront our interior lives in the listening. Bold in its quest for knowledge and refuge, Salt Body Shimmer articulates a contemporary American experience, aware of the histories unsaid and unfaced, where women can inhabit their lives fully and freely, knowing safety is fragile and must be grabbed by whatever thread we can find.

Since 1889, mysterious lights have appeared outside Rostov, a remote Texas town. Ranchers believed them to be the campfires of rustlers, but campfires don’t rise and fall, merge, and change colors. In World War I, the locals believed that the lights came from German forces massing on the Mexican border. In the Second World War, the US military built an airfield there and used planes to try to discover the secret of the lights. In 1980, the entire town set out on a “Ghost Light Hunt.” For more than a century, each attempt to get close to the lights met with horrifying results. Now police officer Dan Page follows the trail of his missing wife from New Mexico to Texas and discovers that she and hundreds of spectators have become enraptured by the lights. After a crazed gunman fires obsessively into the crowd, the stage is set for more death. To save his wife, Page must confront the mystery of the lights. His desperate search reveals a government conspiracy that dates back to World War II. The abandoned airfield is more than what it seems. So is a nearby observatory, with a purpose even more mysterious and lethal than the lights themselves. Drawing his inspiration from the real-life Marfa lights, critically acclaimed Morrell packs The Shimmer with his trademark blend of action and terror.