“Sophomore Slump, Leigh Chadwick’s follow-up to her debut poetry collection—the timeless and genre-defining Your Favorite Poet—might come with higher production value and a track list featuring guest verses from some of the most exciting poets writing today, but besides a few bright spots (The Yelp Review of Past Loves EP and cashed-in retreads of Chadwick’s earlier works, such as “Still Your Favorite Poet” and “A Comprehensive List of Places to Hide from a Bullet”), this collection, also published by Malarkey Books, is nothing but a veneer of glossy and clichéd sentimentality, forced and impotent metaphors, and the promise that you will forget you ever considered Leigh Chadwick to be your favorite poet.”

Sam Daly is leading a life of quiet isolation following the death of her husband, Mike. But Sam's self-imposed cocoon is threatened after her eccentric father-in-law Harold stumbles back into her world to announce that he is getting remarried to the mysterious Marcie Porter, who is burdened by her own complex family history. The last thing Sam wants is to get involved with Harold's new endeavor. But after getting wind that Marcie's four children intend to sabotage the wedding, Sam is reluctantly drawn into a new family drama and all that comes with it, whether it be the development of unexpected alliances or butting heads with ruthless enemies. Through these trials and tribulations, Sam is also forced to confront the one question that she had sought to avoid since her husband's passing—whether she is done with the notion of "family" after all.

The poems in this collection are about being alive and wanting to stay alive. They are poems teetering off a cliff. Poems created by the first and last feeling worth feeling. Poems about guns and sex and what follows both: daughters and husbands ducking from bullets. LeighChadwick weeps a collection that is both monstrous and intimate, terrifying and beautiful. With an eye for making the mundane extraordinary, Chadwick uses wit and charm to remind us that everything is bad, but we still have poetry. In this nightmare world, Your Favorite Poet is a dream.

No one knew it at the time, but April 19, 2011, was the most important day in the history of the world.

After his only friend and colleague, John Manta, disappears without a word, Dave Randall further entrenches himself in the humdrum life of an unenthusiastic lawyer. But once he begins to understand what happened, he embarks on a journey to uncover the deeper meanings and implications of John’s fate.

Accompanied by Peaches the cat, Dave uproots his life and reinvents himself in the midst of his search. Along the way, he is haunted by his piecemeal understanding of John’s fate and what it means for his existence. Little does Dave know, his journey of self-discovery will have ramifications that extend far beyond the borders of his own little life.

Pete Davidson decides he wants to teach me how to play Pogs. We sit across from each other on the living room floor, and he hands me what he calls a slammer. I hold it in my open palm. It’s heavy and thick, I tell him.

Wait until it hits, he says.

When fourteen-year-old Penelope Clark accidentally travels through time to 1915 Boston, she must disguise herself first as a pickpocket and then as a newsboy, learning how to thieve, fight, and broadcast headlines to survive in an era before antibiotics and open-heart surgeries. Stuck in the past with no way to get home, Penn makes her first friend ever, and many enemies. But when Penn is robbed, and the pickpockets kidnap the head newsboy, she finds herself stuck in the middle of a dangerous rivalry, questioning her loyalties to either side and to herself. After a violent fistfight with a fellow pickpocket, Penn incurs a life-threatening infection. As her supposed enemy nurses her back to health—discovering she’s a girl and befriending her in the process—Penn realizes that someone else must have betrayed her. Her ensuing investigation reveals not only the truth of her betrayer’s identity but also her own.