“How do you / keep stones from sinking like that, I wonder? / How do you hold the wild shoots / of spring inside you, instead?” Now is the right season of year to contemplate these questions from the poem “Preparing” by Ellen Stone in her new poetry collection, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them.

The Ann Arbor poet will debut her book and be joined by two other local poets, Monica Rico and Ashwini Bhasi, on Wednesday, April 9, at 6:30 pm at AADL's Downtown branch. The event will include a reading and Q&A. On Saturday, April 26, Stone will be one of the poets in the Celebration of Jewish Poetry from 2 pm to 6 pm at Temple Beth Emeth. One of Stone’s poems is on display at Comet Coffee in the Poet Tree Town project throughout Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti during April.

The appearances of the moon in various forms generate a comforting presence in Stone’s collection as the simile “tidal as the pull toward moon” in “How I want the road to you” illustrates. In the second poem of the book, called “Bright side of the moon,” the poet shares how some things are nevertheless amiss since there is “Scarlet fruit scattered in the garden straw as if / the strawberry moon splintered. I gathered shards.” The poet discovers and picks up such shards for the rest of the book. The poems tell stories of lives unfolding through the natural order of marriages and motherhood as well as the pain of sexual assault and loss.

Poet Tree Town infuses public places with poems in windows around town as well as online. The poems are ephemeral, just up from April 1 to 30, during National Poetry Month.

The third rendition of Poet Tree Town is expanding to Ypsilanti, continuing in Ann Arbor, and launching with a kick-off event on April 1, 6-9 pm, at Dzanc House. The event includes an open mic, book swap, a community-written poem, desserts by local baker Fragola Forno, and a meet-and-greet with your local poets.

“Welcome to all, whether you are a poet yourself or a poetry appreciator!” said Poet Tree Town founder and organizer, Cameron (Cam) Finch, about the event.

The poems, written by community members, number 157 on display at 66 locations for 2025—up from 87 poets/poems at 38 locations in 2024. Ypsi will host 30 of the poems for the first time this year.

“The expansion to Ypsilanti felt like a very natural next step for this project,” Finch told Pulp. “At the same time, it was important for me to maintain the name Poet Tree Town, as a nod to where this project was born, and where it is growing out and up from.”

The lives of sisters Consuelo and Graciela intertwine and unravel, both with each other and separately, and then crisscross the globe in The Volcano Daughters, the debut novel by Gina María Balibrera.

Much of what happens to the sisters is not their choice. They suffer great losses of their mother and loved ones, abuse at the hands of the General in El Salvador, and repeated setbacks in their efforts to regain a home, sustenance, and love.

These two daughters of mother Socorrito begin their lives on a volcano where the women harvest coffee for el patrón of la finca (the boss of the estate). When their lives converge with the rising dictator, who despite despising their Indigenous roots also finds them attractive, the girls find themselves in significant danger, which they only fully comprehend looking back:

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy at an attorneys firm
I cleaned the window and I swept the floor
As I polished up the handle on the big front door
I polished up the handle so carefully
That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Navee
                                                           —W.S. Gilbert

It seems like Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas never grow old.

Whether it’s Sir Joseph Porter bragging that he never went to sea and became the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee in H.M.S. Pinafore or the ambitious Lord High Executioner KoKo making a list of enemies (who never will be missed) in The Mikado, the biting satire still rings as strong as ever, maybe even stronger. Arthur Sullivan’s pliable music still moves gracefully from comic to lushly romantic and W.S. Gilbert’s librettos are as fresh now as they were in the 1870s..

The University of Michigan’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society (UMGASS) is presenting H.M.S. Pinafore at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, April 3-6.

We all need a hero sometimes. To be inspired, to remind us what's important.

For Ann Arbor writer Jeff Kass, the colorful heroes of Marvel Comics shaped his outlook, worldview, and identity as they swung or rocketed through his childhood.

True Believer, named for one of iconic creator Stan Lee's famous phrases, is Kass' latest collection of poetry, arriving from Michigan-based publisher Dzanc Books.

The lyric and narrative poems of True Believer cover a plethora of characters and themes from across the Marvel universe, from the quiet tragedy of the Thing to the bombastic Starlord. Kass also relates the characters and stories to his own life, and recounts significant comics-related events he's experienced, including reading key issues of Daredevil and Black Panther, and the joy, brotherhood, and cacophony of attending a Marvel Comics Convention in the '70s:

The floor buzzed
like a giant wasp, loud and chaotic, a thousand
glistening tables and ten times that many people.

Throughout the collection, Kass uses soaring, heroic language to bring his poetry into the four-color world of Silver Age comics.

Kass, who teaches at Pioneer High School. and I spoke by Zoom about True Believer, its secret origins, the influence of early hip-hop on his writing, and why hope and heroism are vital at this moment in history.

In 2019, George Mashour aspired to make a psychedelic rock album.

The anesthesiologist and neuroscientist had just turned 50 and wanted to step outside the medical world to pursue a musical project.

“I was reflecting on what I wanted to do in the next phase of my life … and [I’d] been writing all these songs—sometimes just in my head—some of them [were] decades old,” said Mashour, a University of Michigan researcher who studies consciousness and has been dabbling in music over the years.

“For my 50th birthday, my wife got me a gift certificate for studio time at Big Sky [Recording], which was cool, and in retrospect I’m really glad she did that.”

Later that year, he became chair of U-M’s Department of Anesthesiology, and then COVID hit in early 2020.

“I was super busy, and of course, everything was shut down,” Mashour said. “And yet I still had that physical gift certificate for eight hours of studio time … so it was just always on my mind. And then it was 2023 when I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to do this,’ so I got in touch with Geoff [Michael], who’s the owner of Big Sky.” 

The word "cosplay" is a portmanteau of “costume play,” and the activity's participants—cosplayers—wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent specific characters.

For playwright Shavonne Coleman, cosplay is a way to open the doors of creativity to children and put them on the road to being superheroes.

Eastern Michigan University Theatre is presenting the world premiere production of Coleman’s Cause Play on April 3-6, with school matinee performances on April 7-8.

Last year a staged reading of Cause Play was presented in May at EMU in collaboration with Ann Arbor Spinning Dot Theatre as part of the TYA BIPOC Superhero Project. That collaboration continues with the premiere of the fully acted production.

Coleman is an alumna of EMU and an associate professor of theater at the University of Michigan's Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance.

Cause Play centers on three middle school students, Zuvi, Zipper and Aaron, who meet at an after-school cosplay club at the Southwest Academy Magnet Middle School in Detroit. They discover their talents in creating costumes and adopting identities with the goal of attending a Comic Con—as well as developing their secret powers along the way. Coleman said there were changes made following the staged reading in response to the audiences who wanted the students to go to the Comic Con.

Sasha Gusikhin founded NeuroArts Productions in response to a tragedy.

Luke Balstad was Gusikhin’s best friend, and a straight-A student at Harvard, but he also knew that he needed mental help assistance. Balstad was in therapy, was honest and open about his bipolar condition, and was attended to by a supportive network—but it still ended with him dying by suicide in 2022.

Balstad was being treated with medications—he tried at least 10—and therapy in the standardized modern way, but Gusikhin believes that let her friend slip through the cracks.

“No amount of checking in on Luke would have been able to save him," says Gusikhin, a University of Michigan senior double majoring in biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience along with voice performance. "He had all of this care and yet there was all this impression with this one size fits all, this ‘let’s try this, and that, and that.' When we do that we are never attuned to: ‘What if this medication [causes a] toxic reaction to that person’s brain chemistry?’ It’s very dangerous, and it can cause very dangerous situations and even loss of life in this case.”

Gusikhin's NeuroArts Productions organizes multidisciplinary arts events to promote mental health education and reform.

Stories in author and University of Michigan professor Greg Schutz’s new short story collection, Joyriders, demonstrate “how fragile things are.” The characters “share the terror and joy of having learned a life was a thing that could change.”

The short stories in Joyriders track characters who are coping with the course that their lives have taken. The stories take place in both the Midwest, including Wisconsin and Michigan, and rural Appalachia, including North Carolina. They also reveal how the natural world may be its own character in this collection.

For the characters, life sometimes moves very quickly. The story, “To Wound, to Tear, to Pull to Pieces,” brings a young woman who hears about her high school acquaintance’s affair from the distance of an observer. However, she has had her own liaison with an older man, and subsequent heartbreak. She reflects:

In truth, though, it’s not the initial meeting I typically find myself trying to remember as much as the moments that soon followed—sweeping apperceptions of opportunity and risk, and then choices made so suddenly and completely they seemed like they could never be unchosen.

Clarity on what happened requires retrospectively parsing out the events of one’s life.

Not a lot of marriages reach the 50-year mark, and even fewer bands do.

But Ann Arbor-based folk group Mustard’s Retreat has always blazed its own path, weathering changes and challenges across an astonishing five decades.

To celebrate this milestone anniversary, the group has scheduled a handful of concerts— including one at The Ark on March 28—featuring all three original members, who started playing together at the Heidelberg’s Rathskeller in 1975.

David Tamulevich remembers auditioning there as a solo act when he’d only done some open mics previously and was working as a cook at the Brown Jug. Libby Glover, who would later become part of the original trio, was tending bar there when her boss asked what she thought of Tamulevich.