Come feel the cool and shadowed breeze, come smell your way among the trees, come touch rough bark and leathered leaves: Welcome to the night. Welcome to the night, where mice stir and furry moths flutter. Where snails spiral into shells as orb spiders circle in silk. Where the roots of oak trees recover and repair from their time in the light. Where the porcupette eats delicacies—raspberry leaves!—and coos and sings. Come out to the cool, night wood, and buzz and hoot and howl—but do beware of the great horned owl—for it’s wild and it’s windy way out in the woods!

"In late August of 1975 when my wife Gailyn and I and our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter arrived in Bolinas, I was almost 29 years old and had become known for writing minimal poetry sometimes consisting of a single word", Aram Saroyan writes in his introduction to Day and Night. "A young writer's ego is a delicate matter, subject as it is to routine battery and assault. When I wrote the first section of a long poem called 'Lines for My Autobiography' one afternoon on the typewriter in the poet Joanne Kyger's house. I was both exhilarated and uneasy. After all, it was two and a half pages long and I'd never before written a poem of even half its length. I ended up throwing it in the waste basket, but Gailyn fished it out, read it, and told me it was the best thing I'd ever written and to go on writing it". That poem and many others like it -- limpid, direct, revealing, open-hearted essays toward a first-person life story -- make up Saroyan's very appealing book about "big-city boys...becoming farmers" in an eccentric, idealist, crackpot-utopian California beach town in the 1970s. This is an unashamedly youthful book, starry-eyed in its approach to family-starting and community-founding, innocently celebrative of the simple wonders of a life lived close to nature. Glancing back at a glamorous but troubled childhood spent among the bright lights of Manhattan and the luxuriant palms of Beverly Hills, the young Saroyan experiences this new world with a freshness of vision.

Alex Dimitrov’s third book, Love and Other Poems, is full of praise for the world we live in. Taking time as an overarching structure—specifically, the twelve months of the year—Dimitrov elevates the everyday, and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, the speaker is convinced that love is “our best invention.” Dimitrov doesn’t resist joy, even in despair. These poems are curious about who we are as people and shamelessly interested in hope.