Two Black Ocean titles have been honored with a listing in Coldfront Magazine's Top 40 Poetry Books for 2013.
Swamp Isthmus by Joshua Marie Wilkinson weighs in at #39:
The book sustains this continuum of private and public in a way that commands our attention again and again and raises the questions of what can or needs to be known. In the book’s front matter, we are informed that Swamp Isthmus is the second book in Wilkinson’s No Volta pentalogy, and this knowledge extends the possibilities of the book beyond the first and last pages. Most importantly, it frees us to let the poetry wash over us, let the poems simply be, and to look around our own lives and determine what matters and why.
and Elisa Gabbert's The Self Unstable is #8:
These poems awaken our curiosities regarding the human life and its possibility for holding any real purpose. They are philosophical yet pragmatic. They don’t expect too much of the truth; they teach us satisfaction with life’s “continual climbing, with no resolution—just an ever-building terror” because, like the self, the truth is unstable.
Check out the list in full here, and be sure to add these books to yours.