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The prose poem is the literary sphinx, the literary chimera, minotaur, gryphon–part one thing, part another and at their best, they're magical, mythical. Fantastic Imaginary Creatures collects the best contemporary prose poems that demonstrate the potentiality and plasticity the form allows. Some of these poems have been previously published, and some are brand spanking new.The Contributors:Valerie Bacharach, Ujjvala Bagal-Rahn, Ned Balbo, Madeleine Barnes, Michelle Boczek Evory, Rick Campbell, Joseph Capista, Gary Ciocco, TS Coody, Jim Daniels, Anthony DiMatteo, gary fincke, Jeff Friedman, Molly Fuller, Joy Gaines-Friedler, George Guida, Luke Hankins, Gretchen Heyer, Tom Hunley, Anna Jacobson, Peter Johnson, Richard Jordan, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Gerry LaFemina, Joseph Lerner, Geri Lipschultz, Lorette C. Luzajic, Gary McDowell, Kathleen McGookey, Jennifer Militello, Robert Miltner, Erin Murphy, kerry neville, Robert Perchan, Christine Rhein, Jane Satterfield, Katherine Smith, Joshua Michael Stewart, Virgil Suárez, Matthew Thorburn, Eric Torgersen, Patricia Valdata, Elinor Ann Walker, Greg Watson, Cathy Wittmeyer, George Yatchisin, Michael T. Young

This collection addresses issues of identity as two people find themselves living in an uncommon landscape. Through hybrid narrative prose poems, Hank and an unnamed narrator try to navigate their relationship and understand their identities amid a landscape that offers them almost nothing. The continent at first seems empty, but something emerges in the vacuum of Antarctica. The narrator's gender skips and changes, and the characters'self-awareness grows into a sort of horror. Dennis James Sweeney's poems consider the fullness of emptiness, revealing attempts to love and grow when surrounded by a white and frigid landscape that seems to go on forever. The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world. In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.

Dian Cunningham Parrotta looks skywards for a beguiling mixture of dramatic performance and information while celebrating art and nature from watching those slow-moving puffy cumulus, feathery cumulus, and those low-wide riding blankets of gray stratus clouds along with swirling storm clouds forming impermanent and overpowering countless configurations. Dian brings back the fun of seeing patterns in random clouds and in those mysterious universes found inside of nighttime skies always finding meaningful patterns between unrelated or random into spontaneous connections and newly found miracles. She takes you on magical carpet rides and never lets it land low or stop flying. She first wondered about cloud and night-time sky formations when she attended Stony Brook University, which was only a one-hour trip from her Brooklyn home, and was mesmerized at how many stars could be seen since there were no stars in Brooklyn. Then she traveled as a Peace Corps volunteer and saw the spectacular sky above the Red Sea in the Yemen Arab Republic and had seen phytoplankton for the first time shimmering like fireflies but inside of the sea and splashing up on the shoreline always looking like twinkling stars sitting for a while on Earth. Dian then lived in Sudan and would sit by the Nile River, which inspired creative images to come alive in the clear desert night. This poet finds nature to be a perennial source of her inspiration.

Burnt Offerings is David Ray's twenty-fourth book, mostly poetry collections, with subjects varying from concerns of wars and those who fight them, responses to living in India, Australia and New Zealand, family, grief for a lost son, the environment, and the lives and influence of various famous literary figures. The latter category includes a book-length volume of poems called Hemingway: A Desperate Life. A memoir, The Endless Search, describes a childhood in Depression-era Oklahoma and family traumas.David Ray went on to graduate from the University of Chicago and has taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Cornell University, Reed College, the University of Iowa, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City from which he is Professor Emeritus and where he was founding editor of New Letters magazine and'New Letters on the Air'radio program.He has received awards for his writing, including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maurice English Poetry Award, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Poetry Award, and others.David Ray currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.