Latest Books from
Grand River Poetry Press
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.