Poetry Books of Note: “Aurora Cantus: a Poet’s Book of Hours;” “Titanfall;” “A Field Guide to North American Trees”

Multi-talented Silvia Passiflora’s Aurora Cantus: a Poet’s Book of Hours (Scriptaluna Press 2026) is a lyrical and enchanting book filled with vivid imagery, uplifting thoughts, flights of fancy, and moments of wonder. Passiflora, who is also a gifted musician, uses rhyme and rhythm with an acute awareness of both the sounds and the significance in these 54 poems. Read aloud, these poems are a sheer delight. Read silently, the poems are full of grace and meaning.

In her introductory comments, Passiflora says she returned to these writings “trying to keep faith with the day.” She also explains aurora cantus is Latin for “dawn song…the music of first light.” Indeed, many of these poems could be especially enjoyable as inspirational morning readings. As she notes, “books of hours” in the 13th century were private devotional manuscripts with prayers, psalms, calendars and sacred readings arranged around the hours of the day. Her first poem wondrously captures this spirit with images like “The hush before the kettle sings / before the sparrow splits the sky.” Other poems too reflect these sensitivities, including “Morning leaned on my shoulder / like it knew my name” and “At first light, an eagle rises unseen, / her wings reading thermals like scripture.”

Passiflora describes herself as “a Southern Gothic Folk poet-songwriter and Grammy®-considered artist who guides listeners with an ukulele, banjo, and spoken word, offering safe passage past life’s cliffhangers.” Born in the Philippines and then carried to Hawaii’s shores, she now lives in Atlanta, Georgia. A prolific poet, Aurora Cantus is her first published collection. Visit her at: https://www.silviapassiflora.com/

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Noah Soltau’s Titanfall (Madville Publishing 2026) is a collection of revelatory, perceptive poems, rich in imagery and sensations that are sure to catch a reader’s attention and linger there. There is a heft in the poet’s fine works that is bracing and in places all but confrontational—and therein lies much of the undeniable power of the poems in this collection.

The publisher notes:
The book navigates questions of identity, mortality, and politics in places tinged by the mythical and theological. In the “Christ-haunted” tradition of Flannery O’Connor’s South, the speaker of the poems guides the reader on a hero’s journey out of Appalachia and into a metaphysical wildland where choices and personalities have cosmic consequences. Grounded in American and German literary traditions and steeped in popular culture and world events, these poems are by turns harrowing, hopeful, and darkly humorous.

The many modern references—among them hot yoga, Ozempic, fast-food dinners, ring cameras and biased news broadcasts—certainly make this a worthy, thought-provoking collection of contemporary poems in which the intimate and cultural sometimes battle for center stage. Yet, within these contemporary works, there are truths that transcend modern society. While many poems are dark—a world which has a “basement full of spiders” and where “this morning a child shot his teacher,” this is also a world where “a 5th grade class cleaned up a city park.” What rings throughout the poems, as Soltau writes, is a “shriveled hope for something good.” Too, there is often something akin to a playful irony as in these lines: “Kate Moss says nothing / tastes as good as skinny feels / But I love pizza / prosciutto and fresh mozzarella.” Soltau also has quite the talent for the vivid image as in “The sun sets grapefruit and apricot over the valley / Honeysuckle rhododendron mountain laurel /and the tourists’ burning brakes perfume the air.”

Soltau, raised in Chattanooga and educated in the South and Germany, currently lives in east Tennessee with his wife and two children. He is the managing editor of the Red Branch Review and is an associate professor of German and linguistics at Carson Newman University. Titanfall was shortlisted for the Author Smith Prize. Soltau’s work appears in Cutleaf, storySouth, and other literary journals. Visit him at https://noahsoltau.wordpress.com/about/

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A Field Guide to North American Trees (Loblolly Press and Good Printed Things (jointly published) 2025) by Garrett Ashley is a nature-driven chapbook replete with memory-fueled poems about trees—and life. Filled, among other things, with remembrances of his grandparents, Ashley writes of his grandmother: “If asked how I could believe in heaven, / I would say because she is there.” Each of the fifteen poems in the collection is named for a tree and begins with a description of the tree that expands to have much fuller meaning. Most of the trees are native to the southeast United States and common throughout the South.

Within these artfully crafted poems, there is a wistfulness, even a palpable yearning. For example, of the red spruce, Ashley writes: “We live where the rocks hang by a thread. / We long for some form of purity.” He makes the ordinary extraordinary with his fine, precise poetic renderings, and the nostalgia in the works hovers with a clear emotional resonance but never overwhelms. For example, in the poem “American Sycamore,” he writes of his life and his late grandmother:

when I get home, I clean the cat’s litter box. I hold the cat
against my chest until he purrs. I fight bamboo in the yard.
I take a shower, moan existentially as I wash my arms. I crash.
Sometimes I almost call my grandmother.

There is also a sweet dose of gentle wisdom throughout as in: “My grandmother once told me the best / home to find yourself in is the one / close to family. Don’t move.”

All in all, the poems in this chapbook are authentic and descriptive, lush and lovely, and flow with a natural rhythm that makes reading them a pleasure.

As someone who lived most of his life in Mississippi, Ashley earned his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. His work appears in various publications including Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Normal School, Sonora Review, Analog SF&F, DIAGRAM, Reed Magazine, and Sequestrum. His story collection Before the Snakes Came was recently a finalist for the 2022 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. He now lives in Alabama, where he teaches creative writing at Tuskegee University. Visit him at https://garrettashley0.wixsite.com/writer