Unbound is a recurring feature showcasing new writing and essential poetry—works that challenge, inspire, and redefine the art of language.

In Church of Shadow and Light, Heidi Barr crafts a luminous and introspective collection that explores the tension between sorrow and joy, conflict and peace, shadow and light. Like Mary Oliver, Barr turns to the natural world as both mirror and guide, finding solace in trees, frost, and quiet spaces. With each poem, she asks us to sit with life’s hardest questions: What’s worth going toward with your whole life? How do we find grace amid struggle? How can we hold both the darkness and the light?

Already receiving critical acclaim, Church of Shadow and Light was praised by Kirkus Reviews, which called it “resonant for those seeking peace and beauty in ambiguity.” Describing Barr’s work as vivid and reflective, the review highlights her ability to use nature as a lens for exploring resilience and hope.

For poet and author Sarah Hanson (Conjuring the Hurricane), Barr’s collection is “a balm to soothe even the most long-forgotten aches.” These poems do not just observe nature; they consecrate it, reminding us that the sacred is found in the everyday. Meghan J. Ward, author of Lights to Guide Me Home, describes the collection as “a sorrowful yet beautiful call to consider how we might show up, even when it hurts.” With language that is both tender and fierce, Barr explores what it means to seek peace in a chaotic world, offering an alternative to the cycles of violence and despair.

For Kaitlin B. Curtice, award-winning author of Native and Living Resistance, Barr’s poetry is more than art—it is guidance: “Barr is a prophetic poet and a kind of spiritual guide, leading us deeper into the world and thus deeper into ourselves.” These poems do not shy away from life’s complexities but instead offer a quiet, contemplative path forward, a space where light and shadow are no longer adversaries but companions.

A writer and wellness coach, Barr’s work is rooted in the belief that sustainable, life-giving ways of being are possible for individuals and communities alike. Living on Dakota land in rural Minnesota, she draws inspiration from the natural world, weaving themes of environmental connection, social healing, and personal transformation into her poetry.

In a time when so many are searching for meaning, Church of Shadow and Light is both solace and challenge—a reminder that the divine is always present, in the shadows as much as in the light.

As spring takes hold in the northern hemisphere, we can’t wait to share this extraordinary book with you. Order a copy in our store (i.e., not Amazon) and follow Wayfarer Books for updates.

Enjoy selections from the collection:

Sacred Stretch

Go to the darkening places

where emotion stands tall

making even home ground feel shaky

and ask a silhouette to dance.

Invite someone you trust

to be there with you

in acknowledgment of what is—

even hard places soften

when allowed to move true.

Stories in the Water

I see stories in puddles dotting lake ice

trying to hold on—lake ice not quite ready

to acquiesce to warmth’s transition.

Or maybe it’s just me that’s not ready,

during a winter that never really was, a winter

of unwanted flame and feelings of being cast aside, a winter

that held too much of some things and not enough of others.

Those stories dotting the lake

tell tales of letting go, of reflection,

of seeing beauty existing alongside lament.

Those stories contain truth, the kind of truth

you have to allow in, be patient enough to uncover.

I see stories in puddles dotting the lake ice—

stories that reach across the unwanted

through ripples of winter’s warmth

to offer love through loss.

Waiting for Sunrise

How do you capture fog

racing across newly open water

on a morning when chill laces the air

and bird song fills the stillness?

You can’t, not really—

because wild beauty isn’t containable

by photograph or word or even memory.

But it can be existed within,

every moment of your attention

becoming part of who you are,

claiming you as part of what’s true.

Order a copy today

is a writer and wellness coach whose work is founded on a commitment to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities, and the planet. She lives with her family on Dakota land in rural Minnesota.

Unbound is a recurring feature showcasing new writing and essential poetry—works that challenge, inspire, and redefine the art of language.

With Sylvan Crone, Heather Durham returns with a mesmerizing and deeply contemplative collection of essays that explore the intricate connections between nature, identity, and transformation. An award-winning writer and naturalist, Durham reflects on entering midlife as a single, queer, non-mothering, hypersensitive, forest-dwelling hermit, navigating the shifting terrain of selfhood, solitude, and belonging.

In a world that often sidelines women as they age (especially those who exist outside traditional roles), Sylvan Crone is a defiant and lyrical reclamation. Through encounters with black bears and salmon, cedar trees and songbirds, Durham finds resonance between her inner and outer landscapes, weaving personal history with ecological wonder. These essays do more than observe the wilderness; they surrender to it, offering readers a raw, immersive meditation on what it means to evolve, to endure, and to exist on one’s own terms.

Though Sylvan Crone is Durham’s third collection, her voice remains as vital and necessary as ever. Her previous books, Going Feral and Wolf Tree, have been celebrated for their lyrical depth and ecological insight, and early praise for this new collection calls it “a hymn to nature and a meditation on suffering, redemption, and menopause’s transformative power” (Jody Day) and “a book that weaves wounds into words that become medicine for us all” (Sarri Gilman). Durham’s storytelling is both visceral and introspective, a rare balance of intellect and intuition that invites readers to see themselves reflected in the wild.

In an era when conversations about aging, identity, and our fractured relationship with the natural world feel more urgent than ever, Sylvan Crone offers both solace and challenge, a call to embrace the untamed within and beyond us.

A Selection from Sylvan Crone

Grandmother

I don’t remember the first time I met the western redcedar. It must have been sometime around the turn of the millennium when I first moved west to Oregon. Fresh from graduate school in environmental biology, I was awed and inspired by the Pacific Northwest forests. The colossal conifers, in particular, stood in stark contrast to the more humble, diminutive, leafy green trees of my northeastern upbringing. Whether I first distinguished redcedar in a field guide or in the naturalist training program I joined to help me get my bearings (and ideally, a job), I would have first learned the facts.

I learned that the correct common name is in fact “redcedar,” not “red cedar,” because Thuja plicata and its American cousins are not true cedars like the long-needled cedars of the old world. Instead, they are confusingly-named members of the cypress family of scaly-needled conifers.

I learned that the range of the western redcedar spans what I would later come to think of as my own ecological niche—low to middle elevation west side (wet side) forests of the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia to northern California. If left undisturbed in their cool, shaded river valleys and creekside groves, they can grow to eight feet in diameter and two hundred feet high.

In the year 2000, I learned that western redcedars can live upwards of 2000 years, a fact that’s easy to toss around until you really think about it, think about everything these ancient trees might have witnessed, what this landscape might have looked like and who might have known them as saplings. Certainly not any of my ancestors, off among the oaks on the British Isles.

As long as humans have been in this region, whether early Indigenous people or recent colonizers, we have been in relationship with the western redcedar. Not just in the way of most large trees—wood for tools, shelter, or fuel—though redcedar’s rot-resistant, insect-repelling, clean-burning wood is excellent in that regard. Canoes, canoe paddles, totem poles, spear poles, arrow shafts, furniture, boxes, dishes, spoons, longhouse planks, little hermit cabin planks, firewood, and friction fire boards.

But also? Strips of fibrous bark or rootlets woven into baskets, nets, ropes, clothing, or shredded and worked into bedding, blankets, even diapers. Also? Resonant foliage steeped into teas or tinctures as antifungal, antibacterial, infection-fighting immune-stimulating medicine. And? Aromatic incense that energetically and literally (scientifically!) cleanses and purifies the air.

Western redcedar is this region’s Giving Tree, the local Tree of Life. The uses, the facts abound. But sometime around the turn of the millennium, when I first began the process of sinking in to this region of rivers, ravens, and rain, redcedars were there with me, and I started to get to know them personally, intimately, viscerally.

In my forays outside of Portland I enjoyed hiking volcanic peaks and delighted in the rugged Pacific coast, but the forested rivers and creeks in between began to tug at me less from a yearning for adventure and more from a sense of homecoming. I explored many a trail along the Clackamas and Sandy Rivers, and along those trails would seek out just the right place to sit a while, maybe eat lunch, maybe scribble in my journal, bask in the sun with toes in the cool water or hunker down out of the cold rain depending on the season, and also, always, take some time to just sit, and breathe, and listen, and sink in to the forest, let the forest sink in to me. At my back, silent observer and solid support, was the western redcedar.

Warm cinnamon brown bark in vertical ripples, stood smooth and sturdy against my spine. A buttressed base with polished crimson roots spreading just above ground inevitably created nooks and hollows that fit a human body like a throne with armrests. Above, sprays of layered green scales fanned out in arcing waves, collecting raindrops or sashaying in the riverine wind.

Rivers are ancient, but on a human scale, cedars seem nearly as old. And if rivers drew cedars, it seems, cedars drew the rest of us. Sword fern, wild ginger, bleeding heart. Salmonberry, huckleberry, elderberry. Pacific wren, Swainson’s thrush, Townsend’s warbler. Pine marten, flying squirrel, coyote. We all came for these places redcedar created, the space they hold.

I sit with redcedar to find quiet. I sit there to find stillness. I sit there to shed the static electricity of the insular human world and remember my place in the wild one. Redcedar at my back—solid and steady, sweet-smelling and earth-bound.

Sitting there I start to get it. Sitting there I start to feel it, feel ego and self fade a little, allowing outside to seep inside. My breath a tree’s exhalations. My exhalations a tree’s breath.

I moved on to other rivers, other Cascadian rainforest watersheds. Snoqualmie, Skykomish, Skagit. There, I always found redcedar. Starting over with new jobs and new residences in new communities these friendly familiars helped orient and ground me. Coming home at the end of an overwhelming, frazzling day among my own baffling species I would seek out that one particular redcedar I’d chosen, or, perhaps, who’d chosen me, and get my bearings in the more-than-human world.

Redcedar’s gifts extend beyond those riverside groves. Like many of those rooted in Pacific Northwest soil, I’ve lived in many a cedar plank home and warmed myself by clean-burning sweet-smoking redcedar fires. And, as a student of natural and cultural history, of deep nature connection that seeks direct experience beyond the facts, I dug in further. Tried my hand at friction fire, the “bowdrill” method that spun redcedar spindle into redcedar fireboard to create black dust and then a glowing coal that when added to shredded redcedar bark could be blown into flame. I wove bark strips into a traditional redcedar basket. I carved and sanded a redcedar branch into a spoon. I steeped redcedar needles into soothing tea for a chest cold. Tinctured needles in alcohol to make an immune-supporting, anxiety-calming, rash-dispelling medicine for my fiery disposition.

I don’t remember when it happened, but Thuja plicata would no longer be just a tree with certain characteristics and uses. Redcedar refers to living, breathing, unique beings I’ve known, who’ve supported and sustained me and who’ve become an essential element of Home.

When I found my little cabin on the creek, I wasn’t surprised, then, to find an ancient western redcedar standing at the center of the property, next to the front steps. Of course there was. Maybe that specific tree wasn’t an essential item on my list— I would later discover several others from sapling to elder scattered around the property and into the forest. But this one, likely hundreds to over a thousand years old, stood by the front steps and told me: Yes, this is the place for you.

Her branches reach over my roof and roots weave under my floor, holding my fifty-four-year-old house and forty-nine-year-old me in a loose embrace. Whenever I return home, she is there to greet me, her perfume washing over me as soon as I step out of my car, my hand brushing her weathered skin in greeting as I walk up the steps. When I am frazzled or upset, happy or calm, angry or confused, I can sit with her and feel content to be whomever I happen to be.

Others, too, are drawn to her. Red-breasted sapsucker tap-tap-taps dotted lines of sap wells along her trunk so that her bark appears as an ancient hieroglyphic text. Douglas squirrel strips paper-thin bark from her outer branches to line a winter nest. Barred owl perches hidden in her foliage to stalk a deer mouse blundering into the open. Wild strawberries crowd around her base, the primary location I’ve found them on the property. These are just a few of those I’ve observed so far, though I know countless other lives have lived in, among, around, above and below my redcedar. I look forward to witnessing more of them, to understanding her multitudes better in the time we have together.

I know. It’s just a tree, right? What kind of loony tree-hugger nonsense is this, right? Go out and find some real friends, right? Or maybe, at least, get some cats already? I know. I hear you. And yet…

I made a new tincture last spring, snipping green tips of redcedar foliage into alcohol and infusing it for six weeks. The resulting liquid is a green-amber concoction that unlike many medicinal tinctures, retains the strong cedar smell and taste. I siphoned it into dropper bottles, labeled them, then squirreled my medicine away in the cupboard for when I might need it.

Just two months later, I needed it.

I’d been outside standing on a rickety ladder left with the house, more comfortable than I should have been, more careless than I should have been. Painting, touching up some of the worn and stained redcedar house planks using a free gallon of paint also left with the house. As I reached up, leaned a little to the side, the old ladder shifted, twisted out from under me, and I fell.

Unlike the typical ladder-fall injuries involving bumps and bruises on the lucky end and head injuries or worse at the unlucky end, my fall and resulting injury took a unique turn. Falling, I reached an arm under me to break my fall and caught it in a thin electrical cord pulled taut between the house and a metal grounding rod.

The rest of my body’s bumps and bruises were minimal. My arm—sliced open like a block of cheddar on a cheese cutter.

An ER visit, tetanus shot, morphine shot, several shots of Novocain, twenty-seven stitches and an antiseptic bandage later, I’d thought the worst was over. Soon afterwards, though, I developed a severe skin allergy to the chemical bandage, leaving my stitched-up arm looking even more like a bad makeup job from a slasher movie—Technicolor bruised, scarlet blistered, swollen and spurting various fluids at any moment.

I am intensely grateful for medical doctors and nurses, pharmaceutical pills and ointments, and health insurance. I am thankful for my neighbor who drove me to the ER, and coworkers who picked up my slack at work. Returning home to an empty house, however, drugged out and still feeling the most uncomfortable mashup of pain and intense itching I’ve ever experienced, made this loner hermit reevaluate her situation. It forced me to ask all the what-ifs and consider worst case scenarios, even if I’m not normally the type to do that when it comes to my own health and safety.

Did I yearn for someone to hold and comfort me, to cook and clean for me in my convalescence? To open jars and cans and all the other mundane tasks I never realized can be near impossible with only one working arm? To help me shower, clean and rebandage my tattered arm to save me from my awkward shoddy attempts? Or at the very least, at the beginning, to come running when I fell, pick me up off the ground, bring rags to apply pressure and dial the phone so I didn’t have to manage that myself, adrenalated and bloody?

I probably should have. Might have, once upon a time in my younger days. But I didn’t. The thing about loner hermits is, we get used to picking ourselves up off the ground and doing what needs to be done. Maybe, we don’t remember any other way.

Also, I didn’t feel alone—not the way I used to in my insular, human-focused youth. That redcedar tree keeping watch over me, my house, and this land—she did comfort me. Not in the way of my own species, but in her own ways. Drug-addled and broken, I sat with her, and she held me, that ancient grandmother, familiar and friendly, sweet, solid, and strong at my back. Her weathered skin against my bandaged arm, her medicine in my steaming tea.

Yes, she’s just a tree. And I’m just a human, a relative newcomer to this landscape and this earth, a mere sapling rooting in her shade. We two living, breathing beings are in relationship now. And if that makes me a loony tree-hugger, so be it.

About the Author

Heather Durham is a bird-watching, tree-sitting, journal-scribbling hermit with an MS in environmental biology and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is the author of Wolf Tree: An Ecopsychological Memoir in Essays from Wayfarer Books (2022), and Going Feral: Field Notes on Wonder and Wanderlust from Wandering Aengus Press (2019). Born and raised in New England, Heather currently lives, writes, and plays on the traditional lands of the Snohomish and Snoqualmie tribes, in the Cascades foothills of the Pacific Northwest.

Unbound is a recurring feature showcasing new writing and essential poetry—works that challenge, inspire, and redefine the art of language.

Unbound Spotlight: And This House is Only a Nest by Jose Oseguera

Imagine standing in front of a house that isn’t quite balanced, its walls heavy with memory, its rooms echoing with voices that never learned to whisper. In And This House is Only a Nest, poet Jose Oseguera invites us inside, to a place where childhood was more survival than innocence, where an abuelo’s presence loomed large, casting shadows long enough to shape a man.

But this isn’t a tale of blame or bitterness. It’s a journey of transformation, of reckoning with the past and choosing what to carry forward. Through vivid, unflinching language, Oseguera captures moments that linger: three kids, two strikes, and a father watching from behind prison bars. “Realistic scenes rendered like Dutch paintings,” writes Gary Soto, each poem is a snapshot of life as it was—a life that somehow made room for hope.

These poems don’t just tell stories; they reveal truths you didn’t know you were waiting to hear. Elizabeth MacDuffie (Meat For Tea, The Valley Review) urges us to “take heed: ‘When you do find your wolf, don’t be so quick to kill it...instead, put your knife away, and listen.’” And that’s what this collection asks of us: to listen, to see the beauty in the struggle, to understand the love woven through even the most painful memories.

Read a poem from the collection below.

From Where I Stand

So I’m off on the road that I see might be coming and those dreams that I hold all for this child of mine. —The Road by Zero 7

You’re not the shoes— the skin or the sole—

the toes, the metatarsals or cuneiforms

or any bone, muscle or sinew in the foot;

you’re not the callus, thickening yellow

with every step, stride and shockwave up the tibia,

or the sweat that swaddles the ankle

as a wet nurse who removes the calico from her breast

to suckle another’s baby.

You’re not the legs—

the splints that tingle down the shins and calves

like a line of ants on a flower’s calyx—

or wanderlust, or any impulse or motion that propels

someone from the beginning to the end,

you’re not what lies ahead or is left behind,

the light born in the east like a golden chalice

or the darkness that consumes its ambrosia in the west;

you’re not the sun that follows the walker

as a leashed dog or the moon that hides in the dark like a cat

only to reveal itself flat and empty

like famine on a plate,

white chipped porcelain in the sky;

you’re not hunger or thirst,

the waybread or warm canteen water;

you’re not the garbage whirling past,

possessed with the immediacy of someone with somewhere to go;

you’re not the trip or the fall, the autumn, the shade

or whatever it is that makes the leaves turn brown and take flight;

no, when someone asks you what it’s like to be a parent,

you tell them that it’s like being the road—

dust, dirt and everything that’s stepped on—

bumps and cracks for stumbling,

suggestions that stray away from the path.

But as the graying ashes remember the heat of the fire,

and the moon nurses the caliches wrought on her flesh by earth,

will I too remember the indentations left behind by his first steps?

His destination, bluntly wedged in clay,

is a cuneiform written in motion and gravity

illegible from where I stand.

About the Author

Jose Oseguera is the author of the poetry collection The Milk of Your Blood (Kelsay Books). His poems have appeared in Chautauqua, Sonora Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Catamaran and elsewhere. He was named one of the Sixty Four Best Poets of 2019 by the Black Mountain Press. He was the recipient of the Nancy Dew Taylor Award in 2019 and placed 2nd in the 2020 Hal Prize Contest. His writing has been nominated for the Best of the Net award (2018, twice in 2019) as well as the Pushcart (2018 - 2020) and Foreword (2020) Prizes.

Unbound: A showcase of bold, necessary, and transformative writing.

Unbound is a recurring feature showcasing new writing and essential poetry—works that challenge, inspire, and redefine the art of language.

In Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies, Mubanga Kalimamukwento crafts a powerful tapestry of grief, memory, and survival. This multilingual, hybrid collection of essays and poems is a haunting exploration of loss, weaving together personal narrative and cultural wisdom with raw emotional resonance. Shortlisted for the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize, Kalimamukwento’s work resonates as both self-excavation and a communal conversation between past and present.

At its core, the collection is an unflinching confrontation with the absence of a mother and the enduring echoes of early love. Kalimamukwento navigates this emotional terrain with lyrical precision, moving fluidly between scenes, fragments, and meditations. Her words challenge the linearity of grief, embracing its complexity and transforming it into a space where memory and loss coexist. As Sihle Ntuli notes, the collection explores “the everchanging shape of a grief we humans tend to carry and how we ought to find a place to put it down.”

Drawing from the Bemba proverb tapafwa noko, apesa umbi (translated as another mother does not come when yours dies) Kalimamukwento reckons with the permanence of loss and the cultural wisdom embedded in ancestral sayings. Yet, she refuses to settle into sentimentality or easy resolutions. Instead, she invites readers to sit with the ache of absence, to reflect on the bonds that shape us long after loved ones are gone. It is this delicate balance between mourning and memory that makes the collection so unforgettable.

Kalimamukwento is no stranger to navigating complex narratives. A celebrated Zambian author, attorney, and editor, she is also the voice behind The Mourning Bird, unmarked graves, and Obligations to the Wounded. Her literary career is marked by a series of prestigious accolades, including the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Angie Cruz, and the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, chosen by Carmen Giménez. Her words have resonated globally, appearing in publications such as Overland, adda, Waxwing, and Contemporary Verse 2, and even finding their way to Netflix.

Through her multifaceted storytelling, Kalimamukwento brings a uniquely diasporic perspective to contemporary African literature, artfully weaving together the linguistic textures of Bemba and English. Her work is deeply rooted in Zambian culture, yet universal in its emotional reach. As Cheswayo Mphanza describes, Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies is “foundational work” for contemporary African letters, offering readers a nuanced, introspective journey that defies easy categorization.

With her fearless exploration of grief, memory, and identity, Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a literary voice that demands to be heard. In this latest work, she transforms personal loss into a powerful meditation on the ties that bind us across time and space. Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies is more than a book; it is a lyrical homage to love and survival, an invitation to wade into the depths of remembrance and emerge transformed.

vertigo

Or my mother, 23 and bursting at the seams with hope. She is a daughter of independence, bled from her mother in the blur that is Nzambi enzi, Rhodesia and Zambia. There is my father, filled with the arrogance of the freshly educated in a time when not many like him are. Together, they trade words in the language which university tables have woven into them. They spill laughter and scatter birds from rooftops. My mother, 23 and foolish, misnames the flutters which swell in her gut “love”. My father, 29 and broken, flees the weight of this responsibility. The doctor scribbles Gravindex one on scrap paper, and just like that, at the tail end of January on a Friday drenched in rain, 1988, a daughter, bursting at the seams with dreams, is born. She is a daughter of Hope, bled from her mother in the blur that is the GRID age, multi-party democracy and Zambia.

& then there I am, filled with the arrogance of the freshly educated. I think I know better, now that I am fluent in the language which university tables have woven into me. When I spill my laughter onto Chachacha, I let it float with dust devils, across the blistered tar and listen to its echo expand between the buildings as fat as all my most foolish dreams. I am 24 and I know better, even as I misname the flutters which swell in my gut “love”—as the man I marry shrinks in the face of this new responsibility. Gravindex one, say the doctors, and just like that, on the tail end of April, a brittle Monday, 2013, a boy is born. And I, drunk with the madness of birthing and loving and terror, dare to hope, together, may we trick fate.

About the Author

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian poet; her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Tusculum Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and Passengers Journal and has been translated into Italian by Menelique. She won the 2021 Deborah Keenan Poetry Scholarship and the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Prize, selected by Carmen Giménez.

Unbound is a recurring feature showcasing new writing and essential poetry—works that challenge, inspire, and redefine the art of language.

Rebecca Dietrich’s Under the Stars of Turtle Island is an urgent and lyrical exploration of love, grief, cultural heritage, and the lasting weight of colonization. Through poetry that is both intimate and unflinching, Dietrich charts a course across history and memory, where the echoes of the past shape the present and survival is an act of resistance.

Early praise for this collection speaks to its depth and emotional resonance:

“A deep dive into the many facets of the human psyche… Dietrich captures the essence of what it is to love, lose, and choose to love again: tragic and wonderful.”
—Jay Perry, author of Seasons: Love, Life, and Loss in Tanka

Dietrich, a Cherokee poet and photographer from Atlantic City, New Jersey, has already established herself as a formidable voice in contemporary poetry. Her debut chapbook, Scholar of the Arts and Inhumanities, won the Literary Titan Book Award for Poetry, and her work has appeared in Red Coyote, Havik, Steam Ticket, and more. With Under the Stars of Turtle Island, she continues to carve out space for voices and histories too often overlooked, writing with a clarity and passion that is impossible to ignore.

This is a book that does not ask for permission to be heard—it simply speaks, and in doing so, demands that we listen.

About the Author

Rebecca Dietrich is a Cherokee poet and photographer from Atlantic City, New Jersey. Her debut chapbook Scholar of the Arts and Inhumanities (Finishing Line Press, 2023) won the Literary Titan Book Award for Poetry. She has also published The Last Lullaby (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and On Colonized Ground (Alien Buddha Press, 2024). Dietrich’s poetry has been published in Red Coyote, Havik, Steam Ticket, and elsewhere. She holds a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Stockton University. You can follow her on Instagram @limericks_and_asphodels.

Unbound: A showcase of bold, necessary, and transformative writing.

Unbound is a recurring feature showcasing new writing and essential poetry—works that challenge, inspire, and redefine the art of language.

subhuman. is a searing and deeply necessary collection of poetry written during Kashawn Taylor’s incarceration. Through the lens of a Black, queer man navigating life behind bars, Taylor exposes the stark realities of imprisonment (both its physical, emotional), as well as the spiritual toll while also finding space for survival, imagination, and art.

At a time when mass incarceration continues to disproportionately impact Black and brown communities, and when LGBTQ+ individuals face heightened risks of violence and discrimination behind bars, subhuman. stands as both a testimony and an indictment. Taylor’s poems do not just document life inside; they illuminate it, challenging us to bear witness to the human cost of a punitive system that rarely allows for dignity or redemption. These poems remind us that incarceration is not just about confinement—it is about erasure. And yet, through language, Taylor refuses to be erased.

Though subhuman. is Taylor’s debut collection, his voice is already making waves in the literary world. His work has been featured in Poetry magazine, and his writing has been recognized for its unflinching honesty and lyrical brilliance. As Darcie Dennigan describes, this book is “an impeccable and radiant cri de coeur... intimate and gorgeous.” Yukari Kane calls it “a call to empathy, a celebration of resilience, and a testament to the indomitable human spirit.” And Alexis Ivy highlights Taylor’s remarkable voice, which “bares beauty and grit, giving us his world, which includes hope.”

In a moment when conversations about prison abolition, racial justice, and LGBTQ+ rights are more urgent than ever, subhuman. arrives as both art and argument—a visceral, poetic refusal to let the stories of the incarcerated remain in the shadows.

Under the Courthouse

under the courthouse
they strip you of time
of seconds and minutes
then days of your life

they strip you of you
the one you’ve always known
and ignore the now faceless
shell you call home

under the courthouse
everything starts to hit
your face burns red-hot
your mind starts to split

pacing and pacing
between future and past
how long you’ve been here
how if you went back

you’d make better choices
drive straight home that night
so when your eyes open
they burn bright with sunlight

not in a stuffy cell
or a dorm so minute
but this is first run
not the fucking reboot

under the courthouse
what you know is all gone
is three years enough
to fully write my wrongs?

About the Author: Kashawn Taylor holds a BA in English and Psychology and an MA in English and Creative Writing. Before his incarceration, he established a strong academic foundation, which he has continued to build upon during his time in prison. His "prison writing" has been featured in several publications, including Prison Journalism Project, The Blotter Magazine, Minutes Before Six, Evening Street Review's DIY Prison Project, and Indiana Review. Taylor's work will also appear in the inaugural issue of Beyond Bars from Georgia State University and Poetry Magazine.

What if love wasn’t just an emotion or even a virtue, but the fundamental structure of the universe?

In God Is Love: The Heart of All Creation, the latest volume in a series of unpublished contemplative works by Father Thomas Keating, readers are invited into a radically expansive vision of faith, one where divine love is not static or abstract but evolving, dynamic, and deeply embedded in the fabric of reality itself. With the clarity of a seasoned teacher and the humility of a lifelong seeker, Keating opens a doorway into a theology both ancient and emergent where evolution is the language of God, and the work of transformation is ongoing.

Structured as a series of conversations with his longtime friend and fellow contemplative, Fr. Carl Arico, this book distills decades of mystical reflection and theological inquiry into accessible, yet profound, exchanges. The tone is intimate but far-reaching. Cosmic in scope, but grounded in practice.

Keating begins with what he calls “evolutionary consciousness” highlighting the understanding that matter, life, and spirit are all part of an unfolding process. Drawing on the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Brian Swimme, as well as quantum physics and cosmology, he argues that creation is not a finished act but a living invitation. As humans, we are not separate from this unfolding, we are participants in it. And our capacity for love, for awareness, and for surrender is part of the divine movement of becoming.

This isn’t abstract theology. For Keating, it’s personal. Throughout the book, he reflects on his own journey—from the rigidity of early religious formation to the expansive freedom of contemplative practice. He offers honest glimpses into his inner life: the joy of silence, the difficulty of letting go, the humor and humility that arrive with age and awakening.

One of the most striking chapters explores Keating’s view of divine play. He writes with gentle irreverence about God’s possible love of basketball, about hide-and-seek as a metaphor for the spiritual life, and about the humor that underlies even the darkest moments of faith. Here, we see Keating not just as a monk or mystic, but as a human being who has dared to meet the mystery with openness and awe.

At the heart of God Is Love is the practice of Centering Prayer; not as a technique or discipline alone, but as a vehicle for deep interior transformation. Silence, for Keating, is not the absence of noise but the presence of God. In silence, the false self dissolves, the ego loosens its grip, and the Divine begins to move more freely in and through us.

In the later chapters, Keating turns his attention to interreligious dialogue, the universal nature of Christ, and the necessity of moving beyond exclusivist theologies. His reflections are grounded in Catholic teaching (particularly the affirmations of Vatican II) but point toward a future where all wisdom traditions are honored for their role in humanity’s spiritual evolution.

He is clear: no one religion holds the whole of truth. And salvation, he insists, is not reserved for a chosen few but offered to all who open themselves to love.