Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we begin our exploration of some of the titles that SIU Press is shining the spotlight on for National Poetry Month, all of them from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.

Sara Henning’s Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, [the] death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception.

Civil twilight is the astronomical term for the minutes just before sunrise and just after sunset. If one took a snapshot, it would be impossible to tell whether the light was increasing or diminishing. The poems in Civil Twilight arise in this liminal space. With luminous precision, Cynthia Huntington examines the civil twilight we live in now, unsure of whether the darkness is closing in or whether the light is about to break.

For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, in Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before.

These books and more on this week's Inside The Blanket Fort.