Our Books
READING WATER
by Derek JG Williams
READING WATER is Derek JG Williams' first full-length collection of poems, and is the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, awarded in 2024, and chosen by judge Eduardo Corral.
The book considers the elements that make us who we are, and love that’s born then bound by the bonds of family and friends. Its poems undertake a restless search for a self under constant evolution, and are threaded together by images of water’s ephemerality—what happens above and below its surface.
“In this mesmerizing book, the ‘rich vanishing seasons’ of life are rendered beautifully. Each poem about family, each about travel, each poem about love is fluid and precise and memorable. Memory, here, is the ‘strongest / of the senses’ and its strength is amplified by a deft shaping of the line and a startling imagination rippling in the phrasing, in the imagery."
--Eduardo Corral
​
"These poems explore our particular American moment, all of us figuring out what to do with our angers and our loves."
--Jill McDonough
​
​
EVENINGFUL
Eveningful is author Jennifer Whalen's first book of poems, and is the winner of the Lightscater Press Prize, awarded in 2023 and chosen by judge Rick Barot. Interested in thresholds---the sky-smear between night and day, the rift between the speaker’s mind and the outward world---the poems often follow nighttime observations and experiences, navigating two parallel desires: to be seen, but also to see more clearly, exploring the realities complicating vulnerability for young women, and the power of thresholds to regulate and free the self.
"An eager expectancy is a principal mood here, harbored in speakers who have a gorgeous and witty urbanity...Whalen's poems have an aching passion...they keep dazzling me back into an alertness towards my own intimate life." —Rick Barot
"Reading these poems feels a bit like falling in love, in fact, as if the ground has given way and yet everything it had supported still hovers in place, glimmering with strange particulars that permit us—at last!---to perceive them for the first time." —Heather Christie
by Jennifer Whalen
UNDERSHORE
by Kelly Hoffer
UNDERSHORE is the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, awarded in 2022, chosen by Diana Khoi Nguyen. Alive with formal daring, the poems in UNDERSHORE examine the speaker’s ongoing grief following the loss of her mother. The book engages the botanical world, shorelines, desire, intimacy, and grief, all to reveal the unexpected and inevitable way these concerns merge into one another through language’s alchemy.
​
"UNDERSHORE is incandescent, like an electric light housing a filament when a current passes through it...Never will I forget this speaker." ---Diana Khoi Nguyen
​
"This stunning debut collection brims with the physicality of desire and loss as it tracks the complex imprints and entanglements of embodied experience." ---Elizabeth Willis
​
Bewildered by All This Broken Sky
by Anna Scotti
Bewildered by All This Broken Sky is the winner of the inaugural Lightscatter Press Prize, awarded in 2020. The poems in this book help us to see the miraculous in the broken, the everyday, the ordinary, and are suffused with radiant language and deep kindness.
"I grinned all the way through Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, except when I was weeping, but sometimes even while I wept."
—Katharine Coles
“I can only describe Bewildered, Anna Scotti’s debut poetry collection, by saying I fell in love.”
—Ellen Bass