Poiesis Review #1-5 is a collected archive of poems that comprises the first five issues of the print journal from 2008-2012, with poems dating as far back as 1991. The journal contains 119 poems in 164 pages of writing by 73 of the best poets in the independent press, including those at the turn of the new millennium.

Poiesis Review is one of the only literary journals in existence that features a blend of today’s up-and-coming promising rookies alongside the staples and legends of the last few decades in the pre-Internet literary underground. Nowhere else will you find such a smattering of the writers’ spectrum or such a truly accurate cross-section of all walks of the literary world—what five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Wisconsin Regional Writers Association Award winner Charles P. Ries called “young blood running with old blood.”

The Featured Writers in this archive are T. Kilgore Splake, with odes to his great Northern Michigan, and the late Robert Schuler, with his poems of jazz, France, skiing, and love.

Trigger warnings: abortion, AIDS, war, postpartum depression, domestic violence, death (all very mild and poetic).