Latest Books from
Grand River Poetry Press
Love Garden at the End of the World
Christine Stephens-Krieger
Praise for Love Garden at the End of the World:
“There is talent and energy here, and hard-earned truth. Christine Stephens-Krieger’s poems are exuberant and effusive in their physicality, a celebration of childhood, motherhood, of violets and clavicles, heartache and joy, the human, animal/vegetable surrealism of everyday life.”
—Dan Gerber, author of Sailing through Cassiopeia and A Primer on Parallel Lives
“Christine Stephens-Krieger’s debut volume of poetry Love Garden at the End of the World is a richly mythic, sensual and feminist exploration of womanhood. Readers will recognize and thrill with the West Michigan landscape and with lush descriptions of the natural world. The whole book is steeped in the landscape of Michigan’s dunes and lakes. There are many pleasures for readers—especially Christine Stephens-Krieger’s wide open stance embracing life, adventure, and especially love and relationships. Her writing is best when it surprises us, as with a line like ‘Time is a grenade in the chest / with the pin pulled at birth.’ This is a book of becoming, of growing, just like gardens grow. Some of the most memorable poems here are ones about her father, several love poems, and others that wrestle with the concept of death, especially ‘The Art of Death’ and a late one in the volume called ‘Last Will and Testament.’ I look forward to the path of Christine Stephens-Krieger’s poetry in the future and am confident other readers will want to follow her as well.”
—Patricia Clark, author of O Lucky Day and Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars
There is Room in Horse for the Whole Boy
Barbara Saunier
“With formidable imagination,…Barbara Saunier elevates the natural world and rural living, even an old pickup truck, to spiritual excellence.”
—Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of Secular Audacity
and Capture Theory
”Thanks to an artist’s eye and Gaia-like sensibility, Barbara Saunier’s poems—complex, multi-layered, compassionate, wildly imaginative—lift up even the lowliest creature.”
—Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, author of One Less River and Maumee, Maumee
”Barbara Saunier in her startling and long-awaited collection There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy reveals and embodies how wrenchingly difficult it is to be human trying to be humane.”
—Jack Ridl, author of All At Once, Losing Season,
and Practicing to Walk Like a Heron
“This collection is clearly the work of a serious, sophisticated poet.”
—Summit Series of CMICH Press
Moonlight Rose in Blue: Collected Poems 1971–2024 gathers over five decades of David Cope’s groundbreaking and compassionate poetry. From war-torn landscapes to working-class streets, from intimate love poems to visionary ecopoetics, this monumental collection traces a lifetime of devotion to the craft. Cope’s work—praised by Allen Ginsberg and shaped by mentors like Robert Hayden—balances raw documentary realism with formal invention, bearing witness to personal, political, and planetary transformation.
Spanning early pieces influenced by Reznikoff and Williams to late prophetic chants and dream-etched elegies, Moonlight Rose in Blue is a living archive of the American poetic conscience. Cope draws from deep reservoirs of experience, including his correspondence with literary giants, his editorial legacy, and his global travels. This collection is both a retrospective and a final statement—urgent, grounded, and unmistakably human.
Moonlight Rose in Blue
Collected Poems 1971-2024
David Cope
Small Gestures
Melissa Wray
Small Gestures is a collection of poems that dwells in the intimate, often invisible labor of love, illness, and daily survival. Melissa Wray writes with restraint and precision, letting silence, breath, and pacing carry emotional weight. These are poems attentive to the small moments that define a life: a touch, a sigh, a bedside vigil. At the heart of the book is the experience of parenting a medically fragile child, but the collection extends beyond diagnosis into a broader meditation on embodiment, resilience, and presence.
Wray’s language is plainspoken but luminous, unfolding with a quiet intensity that refuses sentimentality. Her poems confront mortality, pain, and uncertainty while also making space for beauty, play, and joy. Small Gestures honors the rituals of caregiving and the strength required to endure, offering a voice that is both vulnerable and unflinching. This is a debut of remarkable clarity and emotional intelligence, rooted in lived experience and hard-won insight.