Accord writer/performer Clorfeine is an observant traveler, noting the "dizzying circular buzz" of carpenter bees, the scent of French lilacs, and musical names of Dominican hummingbirds. His poems unfold with calligraphic spareness and not one wasted breath: "what I reach for has no name."

Dr. Bronson, who'll appear this fall at the Colony Café in Woodstock, writes with a physician's intimacy about illness and the body. His dense, literary verse references everyone from Vasari to Don Corleone, seeks wizardry in a hostile Manhattan, and offers a sextet of lilac-scented love poems.

Woodstock resident Jack Crawford crafts stanzas full of light and sound, color, and energy, employing all the senses to render his unique viewpoint on such universal themes as family bonds, beauty, nature, and time. Each poem is presented in a different typeface.

This vivid collection encompasses the best poetry from the Cave Canem workshop and retreat for African-American poets. New Paltz resident and teacher Kate Hymes adds her distinctive voice to those of Yusef Komuyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Sonya Sanchez, and dozens more.

"Rumi wants us all to become divine alcoholics," Johnson writes. Among nearly 45,000 "divinely drunken" poetic utterances of the 13th-century Sufi ecstatic were these suppressed, sometimes startling verses on love, heresy, and intoxication, here translated into English for the first time.

SUNY New Paltz professor Andrews and new poetry editors Tim Horvath and Jason Ronstadt oversee a peerlessly heady online journal of "creative and beautiful work that is concerned with ideas," "Darwin-touched," and lives at the visionary interface between art and science. Mind-bending reading.