by Rebecca Endres

Lara Chamoun’s Bleeding Ghosts opens with the image of a scar, and thus begins one of the themes that will haunt the reader for the rest of the book. “It faded to a whisper after your first words squeezed through your throat, slimy and strangled” Chamoun writes.

Slimy and strangled indeed: the collection, written primarily in second person and featuring characters who would feel at home in an Edgar Allen Poe short story, displays again and again the difficulty of voicing things: hurt, elation,

by LIT poetry editors, Rebecca Endres and Richard Berwind

Wherever you look in Georgia San Li’s “Wandering,” you are bound to find people in that restless stage of anticipation, traveling and on the cusp of arriving at their next destination. The voices of her poems are so often “alone and surrounded/waiting, to enter somewhere else.” It’s the yearning, the tightness in the chest before crossing that threshold to somewhere else that makes her poems so powerful.

As the title of the book suggests, “Wandering” tackles movement—between past and present, between different generations of family,