In Fat Time and Other Stories, Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with them are characters of Allen’s invention, and the two strands are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once. Here the natural and supernatural, the sacred and the profane, the real and fantastical, destruction and creation are held in delicate and tense balance. 

Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He’d planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his twenty-year Army career. In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the two murders are related. Linda steps into harm’s way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputized again, uncovering evidence of illegal cockfighting, and trying to connect all the crimes.

In this volume of poems and lyric prose, A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. Balancing anger and grief with celebration, Jordan employs an elastic variety of poetic forms, including ekphrastic sestinas inspired by the photography of Malick Sidibé, fictional dialogues, and his signature definition poems that break down the insidious power of words.

Kip, Leslie, and Kira are outliers―even in the metal scene they love. In arch-conservative Gulf Coast Florida in the late 1980s, just listening to metal can get you arrested, but for the three of them the risk is well worth it, because metal is what leads them to one another. Together, they make the pilgrimage from Florida's swamp country to the fabled Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But in time, the delicate equilibrium they've found begins to crumble. Kira finds herself drawn to ever darker and more extreme strains of metal, and on a trip to northern Europe for her twenty-second birthday, vanishes. Two years later, the truth about her disappearance reunites Kip with Leslie, who in order to bring Kira home alive must make greater sacrifices than they could ever have imagined.

Juicy is a queer, Southern college kid, already grappling with some serious questions of identity, when the ghost of his father shows up in their backyard, demanding that Juicy avenge his murder. It feels like a familiar story to Juicy, well-versed in Hamlet’s woes. What’s different is Juicy himself, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man trying to break the cycles of trauma, violence, and toxic masculinity in service of his own liberation. From an uproarious family barbecue emerges a vibrant and compelling examination of love and loss, pain and joy.

Through a series of experimental poems centered on ecology, The Rendering confronts the history of the Dust Bowl and its residual impacts on our current climate crisis, while acknowledging the complicities of capitalism. These poems grapple with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Cody encourages readers to participate in radical acts of refreshing and reimagining the page, poem, collection, and the self, and he invites us to reflect on what lies ahead should our climate continue on its current trajectory toward destruction.

In the island paradise of Prospera, lucky citizens enjoy long, fulfilling lives until the monitors embedded in their forearms, meant to measure their health, fall below 10 percent. Then they retire themselves, embarking on a ferry ride to the island known as the Nursery, where their failing bodies are renewed, their memories are wiped clean, and they are readied to restart life afresh. Proctor Ben has a satisfying career as a ferryman, gently shepherding people through the retirement process. But when the ordinary men and women who provide the labor to keep Prospera running begin to question their place in the social order, unrest builds, and Proctor finds himself questioning everything he once believed.

A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. A prison guard and member of the strap down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he’s killed. An organ donor’s body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. A love song in three movements, As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body.

Blood of the Air creates a new mythology, repurposing spectacle, stereotype, and song. Inspired by the fictions and frictions of the past, each poem in this collection complicates the next. Lush lyrical moments give way to fracture, vulnerability, and reinvention. The title poem—one of several found poems—calls attention to stories told in the wake of sexual violence. In "She Said," the collection's longest piece, language culled from the transcript of a seventeenth-century rape trial feels eerily familiar. Formally dexterous and refreshingly bold, the poems in Blood of the Air are urgent, moving, and fiercely imagined.