D. Nurkse's immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child's dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.
Dana Levin's fifth collection is a brave and perceptive companion, walking with the reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation. Now Do You Know Where You Are investigates how great change calls the soul out of the old lyric, "to be a messenger--to record whatever wanted to stream through."
In this brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award-winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity: climate change, anti-Black racism, familiar and erotic love, ecstasy, and loss. Drawing on a history of poetry that ranges from the Aeneid to Walt Whitman to Drake, Best Barbarian offers moments of joy and intimacy amid catastrophe.
Dark Traffic creates landmarks through language, by which its speakers begin to describe traumas in order to survive and move through them. With fine detail and observation, these poems work in some way like poetic weirs: readers of Kane’s work will see the arctic and subarctic, but also, more broadly, America, and the exigencies of motherhood, indigenous experience, feminism, and climate crises alongside the near-necropastoral of misogyny, violence, and systemic failures. These contexts catch the voice of the poems’ speakers, and we perceive the currents they create.
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America.
Shane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and re-create images of our shared and specific pasts, he writes into and through the wounds that we remember and "strains toward a vision of joy" (Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books).
Ultramarine is the chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum's acclaimed trance poem trilogy, distilling gleanings from four years of his trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories.
An American travelogue that unfolds in a series of darkly comic episodes, with allusions to Dante as a thread throughout. Constantly unsettling the rhetoric of inherited forms, this collection of miniature epics asks if grace can be found amid disarray, and opens strange spaces for us to re-see, lament, and re-sing the stories we tell.
Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined, and honors the transformative power of anger and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.
Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while rising toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.
