Whenever I hold one of the Song Cave chapbooks in my hand, I reflexively think “classic.” Right now they’re offering a six-month subscription for $40 (which is a steal when you consider the authors they plan to publish in their next six issues). If I were sitting next to you now, I would say something like, “You will not regret this, bro,” or “Welcome to the cutting-edge of literature,” or something like that.

Micah Ballard, one of my favorite poets, has just released his second book, Waifs and Strays, on City Lights’s Spotlight Series. Micah’s poems are intimate shadows or like little machines that pump ghosts into the empty rooms in the brain.

Poet Sommer Browning is guest-editing this month on Everyday Genius, the web publication branch of Publishing Genius. New poems go up Monday through Friday. In case it isn’t already clear, every poem is written by a genius.

I mentioned Mark Leidner’s new book, Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, in a previous roundup, but I’m going to mention it again now and probably next week. It’s like if I found a bánh mì place that had the perfect bánh mì and I told someone about it and they were like “That sounds good” and then they never went until I bugged them again and they went and they were really grateful that I had told them about the place. That’s what this is like, right now (read a review of Mark’s book by Andrew Gorin at The Faster Times).

If you want to know what’s good, you should subscribe to LIT Magazine. Editors Jeff T. Johnson and Christian Ochoa are pros. They will not let you down.