New Titles from Grand River Poetry Press
Moonlight Rose in Blue gathers over five decades of poetry by David Cope, a major voice in American literature whose works bridge the grounded clarity of objectivism with the expansive range of postmodern experiment. From early anti-war poems and working-class portraits to visionary meditations and love lyrics, Cope weaves a lifelong commitment to compassion, honesty, and formal innovation. Influenced by mentors like Allen Ginsberg and Robert Hayden, Cope's poetry traverses American life with sharp-eyed witness and deep feeling-bearing witness to war, labor, loss, ecological peril, and moments of transcendence.
This definitive collection includes poems from every phase of Cope's career, including selections from his celebrated books Quiet Lives, On the Bridge, Fragments from the Stars, and The Invisible Keys, among others. Whether writing in lucid narrative or jazz-inflected free verse, Cope builds a poetic language both elegant and accessible. Moonlight Rose in Blue stands as a vital testament to a life lived in poetry, and a final statement from one of America's most underrecognized but enduring poets.
There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy is a lyrical and deeply affecting collection by Barbara Saunier that explores the sacred interstices between human and animal, memory and body, grief and grace. With a voice at once tender and unflinching, these poems move through barns and bedrooms, fields and family kitchens, tracing the invisible threads that tether us to the earth and to each other.
Structured in four sections-Hide & Seek, Fences, Choir, and Sanctuary-the book ranges from elegies for winged creatures and domestic losses to mythic invocations of Gaia and Argiope, spinning a cosmology where children imagine themselves into horses, glue sings with the ghost of a gelding, and frogs praise the road with delirious urgency. Whether contemplating the hands of Amish boys, the geometry of a labyrinth, or the silent prophecy of roadkill, Saunier's poems offer a world alive with moral and sensual complexity.
Her language is rich with tactile detail and formal grace, weaving metaphysical reflection into the pulse of rural life. Like the title poem, many pieces meditate on bodily shelter-how one being might carry another in intimacy, grief, or play. Always attentive to transformation, this collection reveres the ordinary as a site of mystery and insists that wonder and sorrow often dwell side by side.
Barbara Saunier's voice is one of fierce attentiveness, humor, and spiritual weight. There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy is a collection to read slowly and return to often, a profound and resonant debut from a poet whose compassion reaches into the very muscle of language.
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
“Christine Stephens-Krieger writes of a child’s thrilling sense of the fullness of her being and of the beauty and power of mature love. In her nuanced, skillfully wrought, and compelling poems, she pays close attention to our daily common risks while vividly portraying creative mystery, adult vulnerability, and the paradoxes we live with: the ‘secret no one knows / the same one everyone knows.’”
—Lee Upton, author of Wrongful and The Day Every Day Is
“This book is a miracle of poetics and a testament to what can be said when poetics truly, effectively, actually express the human heart’s passion. I’ve learned more about love from reading this book, and there’s no greater gift than that. It is so brave in its vulnerability. This book is a true gardener’s guide for the greatest kind of thing we can grow as human beings. I can’t wait ’til I can buy a copy and share these poems with others in my life. I feel blessed to have read them and I’m thankful for their light.”
—Neil Kaufman, author of Jungle Gyms for Monkey Minds
“The poems of Christine Stephens-Krieger explore the little everything that makes up each passing moment,its nuance and flavors, blue slag glass retrieved from a lake, onion trucks and giant windmills, kids playing statues, tomatoes just off the vine. Lovers holding hands ‘in a rainy cemetery.’ The body going about its own mysterious changes. Nothing stands still; these poems honor and cherish how, on a daily basis, in grief and in love, we too keep on going: ‘We’re rich with cargo. We travel.’”
—Nancy Eimers, author of Oz, A Grammar to Waking, No Moon, and Destroying Angel
