“When All Else Fails” is the first of three poetry collections slated for release this year by Newport-based author and poetry press founder Lana Hechtman Ayers.

Steadily and faithfully for decades, Lana Hechtman Ayers has nurtured other poets.

As co-founder of the Poetry Postcard Fest, an annual exchange of original poems written on postcards, Ayers is also the force behind three prolific poetry presses: Concrete Wolf, MoonPath and World Enough Writers.

Poetry book clubs, workshops, writers’ conferences — those are in her capacious bag of skills as well.

This week’s book

“When All Else Fails” by Lana Hechtman Ayers

The Poetry Box Publishing — 132 pp — $18

And while she’s had nine collections of poetry published previously, in 2023 the Newport-based poet will be coming out with three more books. The first of these, in bookstores now, is “When All Else Fails,” published by Portland-based press The Poetry Box.

This collection explores challenges that Ayers has contended with over the course of her lifetime.

Coming from a mixed-race background, the daughter of a Black father and white mother, as a child she found herself living in what she describes in one poem as “the dark house of my mother’s anger.”

From a young age, Ayers found it useful to make herself as invisible as possible, “trivial as a moon no one gazes upon.”

Her own mother “… spat racial epithets / the way some folks swat flies,” but Ayers was subjected as well to heckling by her white classmates, who targeted her for being different.

A kind dad and nurturing grandmothers provided some counterbalance to that. But young Lana also found comfort in food. So the taunts hurled at her by other kids included comments about her appearance.Don’t those cruel gibes and jeers of childhood stick with most of us, even long after we’ve grown up?

They certainly did for Ayers, but now she incorporates them into her poetry. In one poem, called “Pointy Ears,” she remembers how she fantasized about growing up to become someone like Mr. Spock from the Starship Enterprise. For he, too, came from mixed parentage, and though always viewed as alien, he succeeded in transcending the bonds of conventional expectation.

Readers will feel the gradual passage of time throughout the book. Childhood hurts give way to the navigation of young adulthood. The prominent adults of Ayers’ youth succumb to infirmity and death.

Eventually, mortality begins to become more of a focus in Ayers’ own view of things, “As if the phone ringing means something apocalyptic,” she muses in a poem called “Biopsy.”

“As if a single word — positive — / could truly negate one’s entire future.” So what’s to be done?

Ayers’ answers, rooted in the natural world, are clarifying. Take it all in: “The sky is its own charity, with blue hues and clouds, horizon and dome.” And put it all out: even something as simple as beads of dew “remind me tender words must be spoken / before good intentions evaporate.”

And of course this longtime champion and purveyor of poetry reminds us always to relish the gifts of poets past and present, “when all else fails.”