Nicole Herrero Color All Maps New by Jack Bedell, Mercer University Press, 2021 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer At one point the speaker of the poems in Jack Bedell’s deftly crafted and luminescent poetry collection, Color All Maps New , wonders about leaving his home of Louisiana and holing up in a clean, broken mountain range, as if to escape the primordial swampland. For the purposes of this review, let’s assume the speaker is Jack himself — a dangerous assumption — and that he

by Jack Bedell Nataliya Melnychuk “Only Parts of Us Will Ever Touch the Parts of Others”—Marilyn Monroe I think of my children’s hair, wet with fever, the small of my wife’s back after a bath, my father’s forehead when he’s fallen and cut himself, my mother’s shoulders whenever my head was too heavy to hold up on my own, my brother’s hands work-hard and tan, the forearms of strangers sharing peace at Mass, the chests of friends pressed against my own after a long absence, S