Wandering Aengus Press is delighted to share the cover of Steven Harvey's forthcoming essay collection, The Beloved Republic. Winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award, the collection has already garnered attention. Scott Russell Sanders writes, "In the hands of a skillful writer, the essay allows for the posing and pondering of life’s essential questions without settling for easy answers. Steven Harvey is a consummately skillful writer, as he demonstrates in each of these searching, often wrenching essays, whose subjects range from racial divides to his mother’s suicide, from mountain music to the mystery of consciousness. These pages reveal the truth of his claim that an author’s voice 'can bring the solace of comradery to a reader.' We are not alone, he assures us, in our fear, bewilderment, or wonder."

The talented writer and dancer Renée E. D’Aoust has written a tender and insightful review of Tarn Wilson's In Praise of Inadequate Gifts for Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. D'Aoust and Wilson both spent time as growing up on islands in the Salish Sea off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. D'Aoust draws correlations between both writers' experiences while providing insights into Wilson's narrative as well as the deep compassion in her writing.

D'Aoust's own writing is highly acclaimed. She is the author of the memoir-in-essays Body of a Dancer from Etruscan Press, a Foreword Review Book of the Year Finalist. Six of her essays have been named "Notable Essays" in the Best American Essays series, and she has received many other awards and accolades for her poetry, fiction, journalism, and, of course, book reviews.

Wandering Aengus and Trail to Table each released a book of poetry this spring with poems to remind us what's important and worth protecting in this world. The poet Jane Wong writes of Japanese-American Michael Schmeltzer's book, Empire of Surrender, "Full of visceral lyricism and tender epistolaries, Schmeltzer dives into the intimate depths of war, violence, familial history, empathy, and lineage. This is a book that is not afraid to ask: how and why do we hurt each other? What is lost in such acts of cruelty? And how can we cling to kindness as resistance?"

Alison Hawthorne Deming writes of Andy Gottlieb's Tales of a Distance, "Poetry can speak most resonantly at those times when the distance between our lives and death shrinks, times such as when a parent dies, and we relearn what intimacy in a family context can mean. Such is the beautiful intensity of Andrew Gottlieb's poems in this collection, written with crystalline images and mindful presence. I'm especially captured by how rivers, animals, and landscapes of the American West inhabit the poems as talismans for the inseparability of mind and nature. And for the mystery of how we find beauty while living on the edge of peril."

We're delighted to usher these two important works into the world. Empire of Surrender won the Wandering Aengus Book Award, and Tales of a Distance was our editors' choice for the Trail to Table 2021 open reading period.