Four books. One author. No two alike.

This sampler gathers the published work of Jordan River into a single collection — not because these books belong to the same genre, but because they share a sensibility: writing that takes its forms seriously, earns its endings, and doesn't look away.

Banquet & Ashes is a prophetic descent. Gilded gates, hollow laughter, a feast that devours itself from within. Formal verse in the tradition of Dante and Milton, with historical wreckage in the footnotes. If you've felt the table wasn't meant for you, this names why.

Breaking Ground is a fairy tale for adults who remember being children. Six poems trace what gets paved over — joy measured into labor, trees replaced with metal, mirrors that tell you you're fine. Something is still growing under the concrete. It might be enough.

Where the Weary Soul Sets Sail is an anthology built around a particular kind of beauty — the kind that pulls you toward sleep, toward silence, toward the edge. Keats, de la Mare, and others, curated and contextualized by an editor who admits they came to these works through susceptibility. One original poem. Honest critical prose. A book that knows what it's doing to you.

Not a Rival is a long devotional sequence set inside a monastery, where the sacred and the erotic share the same vocabulary — water, cloth, hands, the hours. This is not a book about sin. It is a book about what it means to love two things at once without letting either one destroy the other.

Four different forms. Four different registers. One through line: writing that asks something of the reader, and offers something real in return.

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