PULSE cuts open arteries of a troubled world and inspects what makes us bleed, suffer, and perish.

It demonstrates how we overcome difficulties, even when it hurts to breathe. PULSE interrogates the personal, from the loss of friends to cancer, and the Republican party, to hate crimes, and mass shootings, including that of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub. The poems examine the life force that continues to beat relentlessly through a fragmented world. It seeks out the tiny music of our bodies that continues to pulse, breathe, and regenerate, even through grief and loss. From Provincetown beaches and Costa Rican crab shacks, to Midwestern plains, and a Tampa nightclub, the collection rides a carousel of madness, redemption, and love.

Praise for PULSE

Luscious psalms to divine recklessness, the poems in Maria Nazos's PULSE wear their formal brilliance lightly, leaping and pirouetting with raw, gritty grace and a clear-eyed love of our human brokenness, from which they never flinch. A marvel. 

–JOY CASTRO, Author of One Brilliant Flame, Flight Risk, and Island of Bones

Maria Nazos in PULSE has written for the world a seismic, incandescent tribute to life. It is devotional with a ferocious tenderness. Here is a poet who can and has resurrected ghosts in our veins—the parents destined to drown in quiet despair, and the lovers who linger like bruises. This collection doesn’t flinch from darkness or the suffocating weight of grief. Yet Nazos transforms pain into a strange, stubborn grace. From the cliffs of Delphi to the cornfields of Nebraska, she maps a world where history bleeds into the present. Her voice is both elegy and rebellion, hymn and rhyme. To read PULSE is to touch the “dirty human sweetness” of existence itself: flawed, forgiving, and furiously alive.

–SADDIQ DZUGOZI, Author of Your Crib, My Qibla and Bakandamiya: An Elegy

Sometimes poetry trills, tramples, thrupples backward into the time when we didn’t know who we were. These poems are like that. When the vine breathing above our head doesn’t mean to strangle us, and the man looming over us doesn’t doom us to strangulation either, but all the while, our voicebox becomes our own: PULSE refuses to sorrow deep and instead blooms and plunges into wonder up where the air grows thin. Up here, we hear a woman singing. 

–KATE GALE, Author of Under a Neon Sun, Swimming the Milky Way, and The Loneliest Girl

In PULSE, Maria Nazos builds a lyric terrain where myth kisses motel neon, and every love song is underscored by rupture. Nazos moves effortlessly between forms—not as ornament but as necessity, language singing and stinging at once.

In poems like “I Go Back to Mykonos, 1976” and “We Bury a Gecko at Three A.M.,” love and grief arrive in unexpected guises. She writes of a lover “sticky as rock candy after his work,” of empty bottles that “chimed into the recycling bin like a vagrant’s morning anthem,” and of “glittering anemones that light up the bedroom windows” with what we carry and can’t say.

Nazos is a conjurer of contradictions: she can thread tenderness through a battlefield, find divinity in a slumlord, or resurrect the dead with nothing more than a waitress’s bruise or a bar’s closing time. Her speakers wear sequined tops and scar tissue, confess across languages and continents, and refuse to be reduced by trauma or desire.

What Nazos offers isn’t just poetry—it’s company. These poems walk with you, steady and immediate, whispering that even the broken things still pulse with light. This is a book that stays with you, like the scent of salt in your hair after the sea, the cigarette after sex, both lovely and, perhaps, ill-gotten. These poems are the voice in the dark saying: I see you. I’ve been there too. Poems like “Ars Poetica,” “I Go Back to Mykonos, 1976,” and “The Ghost’s Wife Speaks” showcase a voice both unflinching and lush—a poetics of surviving beautifully, not cleanly. 

Like a disco ball above a war zone, PULSE pulses with why poetry matters, with grit and glitter. These poems remember what it’s like to be wild and breakable, to be held and to vanish, to run toward danger just to feel the wind. They don’t flinch—from longing, from the shattered, from desire, from the messy afterglow of all of it, the “gold in the olive oil.”

–DAVID KOEHN, Author of Sur, Scatterplot, and Twine