Poets Alicia Jo Rabins, Allison Cobb, Ashley Toliver & Hajara Quinn
Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United StatesIn lyrical, unflinching poems, Alicia Jo Rabins's second collection, Fruit Geode (Augury), investigates the passages of pregnancy, birth, and infancy through a constellation of ancient and modern experience. In Green-Wood (Nightboat), Allison Cobb wanders Brooklyn's famous 19th-century cemetery, where the burial ground becomes a portal through which she can explore her own trauma after September 11, and uncover the historical and national traumas leading up to that event. In Ashley Toliver’s Spectra (Coffee House), generous, penetrating, relentlessly sonic poems record the creative potential of the body and the boundaries of the self. Hajara Quinn's Coolth (Big Luck) is a debut collection that suspiciously grabs the rope swing and dives into the lake of un-unbelonging.