We are living through an unprecedented, revolutionary era. Across the country, people have lost loved ones, livelihoods, homes, and their own lives to Covid-19. In the midst of the pandemic, historic protests erupted in the summer of 2020 over the constant brutality against Black Americans. Galvanizing and lyrical, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, captures and gives voice to all of the roiling sentiments of the moment in an anthology for the ages.

At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, a soundscape, and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their “old appetites as chronic as tides.” Recognized for his “wildly original” poetry and his “uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,” Atsuro Riley gives us a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.

The illuminated medieval manuscripts known as Books of Hours have been used to guide contemplation and prayer for centuries, with their intricate designs and exquisite coloring. Devotional poet and priest Spencer Reece has revived the tradition with a collection of vibrant watercolors inspired by his life journeys and reflections on faith. The evocative images and accompanying texts in All the Beauty Still Left are sure to provoke contemplation and reflection for readers of all faiths.

Taking inspiration from medieval sea charts—portulans—these poems bring a fresh variation to the ancient metaphor of life as a journey. Portulans guided mariners from port to port weaving paths at the threshold of the open sea. Similarly, the course of these poems navigates familiar mysteries and perennial questions through times of unbelief, asking whether consciousness is anchored in the transcendent, and if the universe can be accounted for by physics alone.

In the searing ecological and love poems of his new collection, Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and on the tradition of Sangam literature, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illumines our deep-tangled interrelations. 

Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney's Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. 

In her sixth collection, Kathleen Peirce extends her reach toward the realms of birth and afterlife and finds them liminal places. These are otherworldly poems immersed in earthly intricacies altered by the poet's intimate gaze. To show what it means to create while being created, these poems pull the curtain back, or down. 

Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won't Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape. Through the brambles of the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. 

Where are the faces of yesteryear? Is one face easier to wear than another? These crucial questions are left unanswered in Albert Mobilio's fifth book of poems. Instead, the vexed relationship between the physical world--it's tactility and thereness--and this phantasm we call persona is interrogated. 

Double Trio is a magisterial box set of three new books, structured in part after the last three movements of John Coltrane’s Meditations: “Love,” “Consequence,” and “Serenity.” In these works, Mackey advances the tradition of the long poem, stretching the explorations and improvisations of free jazz into unprecedented poetic territory.