PRIASE FOR HONEYMOON SHOES: In Honeymoon Shoes, Valyntina Grenier writes “There is always already a war going on / all our dead / all our little deaths.” These poems rage against capitalism and brutality, while insisting on tenderness. Following the zigzagging, musical logic of sound and play, they remind us “how lucky to live / to hear a donkey bray.” This is a collection and a poet I won’t forget. - Susan Nguyen, author of Dear Diaspora

Valyntina Grenier, a talented visual artist, seems to paint with words in Honeymoon Shoes, using her linguistic brush strokes to urge her readers to look at the world around them more carefully. Poems like “Pressed Against This Smart Glass” and “Deities and the Human Brain” ask us to unpack our conscious and subconscious relationships with the material world, for it is in those relationships we are bound to find the atoms of our violence, our desire for power, our need to be “picked up” and loved. - Sara Sams, author of Atom City

NOW SHOWING: Rainbow Room at Hotel Mc Coy 720 W Silverlake Rd #302, Tucson, AZ 85713.

COVER ART: The image above "Leaning Like Us Between Our Brain and Deities," with the cover designed by C. M. Tollefson, is from my eco art series Radio Ocean. The acrylic painting on pine ply-wood began as a by-product. First layers were applied by pressing excess paint off of larger substrates. It first appeared in landscape format in Not Ghosts But Spirits Vol. 2. Another painting from the series, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, is the cover art for Beyond Words Magazine Issue 36. Both available works on pine ply-wood are wired to be hung in multiple directions, per the collectors desire.

POETRY: Read a poem from Honeymoon Shoes,"An Oh Well Star II", in the May/ June issue of Cathexis. You'll find more of my work in the March - April 2023 issue as well as the archives. My first chapbook Fever Dream/ Take Heart is also available.

You'll find another poem from the collection, Petal, (an erasure from Act 1 Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Hamlet) along with images in Wild Roof Journal, Issue 21.