Tyler Knott Gregson is beloved for his typewriter series of poems scattered meaningfully upon found scraps of paper, makeshift canvases for simple, profound pieces of introspection.  He writes of courage and love and wanderlust, and the picture he paints with his words becomes a representation of a life lived wholly, fearless of the dark places and brilliant in the light.  Wildly into the Dark is his third outing in the publishing world – Gregson regularly shares his work on social media – and within the latest collection he goes on a journey into territory deeper still, sharing poetry and poetic wonderings as well as what the book’s subtitle charmingly calls, “rattlings of a curious mind.”

Pollard's love of dogs is immediately evident in her writing as she spins numerous stories with the wide-eyed wonderment and frazzled nerves of a new dog owner alongside the perpetual adoration with which we view our pets.  Not just a heartwarming biography of a special dog's happy life, Dogged Optimism also finds itself effective as a memoir on personal growth, the kind which dog ownership thrusts upon us unsuspecting, harried, utterly gratified humans.

Billy Collins is a New York-born, California-educated poet, and his work combines the best of both coasts. Distinctly American in their narrative style, Collins’s poems evoke wit, wonder, and whimsy from the simplistic. In his way of lyrically illuminating the magical of the everyday, Collins teaches his reader how to reach back and grasp the open-hearted experience of youth, and how to search for it in small moments of our disillusioned grown-up lives. His fourth collection, Questions About Angels, was first published in 1991, and in the twenty-plus years since it first became available, the collection has lost neither its power of observation, its relevancy, nor its ability to charm a new generation.

In celebration of a decade of inspiration comes Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It, an anthology of forty-seven stories from men and women across the world who have been motivated by Liz’s journey to say yes to their own souls. There are stories of spirituality, loss, hunger, adventure, love, divorce, motherhood, and identity; what connects them is the very indefinable thing that makes Eat Pray Love so special. Each story is the case of a person, feeling lost in some area of their life, finding that their soul is offering them the answer to the question they didn’t know how to ask.

Some of my favorite passages in the book are the author’s stories of what she learned in times when she was in service, whether as a nurse or working in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter. Often she sends the message that when one sets about to be of help, they ultimately find themselves gifted with help they didn’t know they needed. Her availability to others and her openness to learn, to allow new perspectives and insights to touch her, is one of her most admirable qualities. Her gift to her reader is to share some of her incessant wonderment – be it at the world, society, the beautiful sides of love and human nature, or the confounding lucidity of grace.