North Window by Emily Axelrod

Emily Axelrod’s fine ear transmutes the world as she sees it with her fine eyes into memorable poetry. And luckily for the reader, she is a world traveler, both geographic and psychic. Indeed, each of her poems is a journey, often a roundabout one, to the reader’s heart. From intimate, sad, never cloying recollections of childhood to poems fierce with latent sensuality, she takes the reader’s hand and leads them, almost always gently, into insight. Her rhythmic verses are often deceptively simple, belying the complexity of what Robert Frost called “the ulterior,” the meaning behind.

–Alec Solomita is a critic, fiction writer, and poet. He’s published fiction in the The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, The Adirondack Review, and The Drum Literary Magazine (audio), among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal, and named a finalist by the Noctua Review.  His poetry chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. He lives in Massachusetts.

Emily Axelrod’s poems are scintillating, occasionally fragmental – pieces of a bigger mosaic. They are sometimes very personal, alternatively – relate to the general condition of the world and nature, but they are always the ones you turn to because of the pleasure they deliver.

–Katia Kapovich is a biligual Russian poet, celebrated in both Russia and the United States. She has won two Russian National Literary Awards and received the US Library of Congress Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship. Her two books in English are Gogol in Rome (2004) and Cossacks and Bandits (2008), both published by Salt Publishing. She also co-edits Fulcrum, an annual of poetry and aesthetics.