Poetry

Find the beauty. In 2017, writer and educator Rahul Mehta began a writing practice to find solace and beauty—in the natural world, in their family and friends, and in everyday simplicities—during a time of political tensions, environmental disasters, a global pandemic, and personal disappointment. From the vibrant color of a blade of grass, to their dog sleeping quietly in the corner, to delicate petals fallen from a rose, a mindfulness of the beauty in their surroundings helped offset the feelings of fear,...

Amy M. Alvarez explores the cultural, spiritual, and place-based experiences of Afro-Caribbean and African American diasporic peoples in this haunting and emotionally charged collection of poems that meditates on the meaning of home and existence. Born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents, Alvarez draws readers into a journey of self-discovery and identity, connecting the past with the present while highlighting the complexities of navigating life as a multicultural American. The musicality of her...

Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace's confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and...

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It's a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an...

That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Audibility is a primary theme of this collection—what can be heard, what is obstacled, and what remains unheard. Many of the poems included in the collection try to hold spaces open for the slipperiness of the heard and unheard and the not-yet heard and their associated...

Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics seeks to dislodge the often unspoken white universalism that underpins literary production and reception today. In this personal and thoughtful book, award-winning author Wayde Compton explores how we might collectively develop a poetic approach that makes space for diversity by doing away with universalism in both lyric and avant-garde verse. Poignant and contemporary examples reveal how white authors often forget that their whiteness is a racial position. In the...

A chapbook from Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout on climate change Notice is the product of a life-long interest in natural sciences by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout. The collection draws poems from her previous books calling our attention to how language frames and shapes our relationships to climate and kin. The title is a call to take heed of the signs coming to us daily. "Notice" can be read as a noun or a verb. As a noun it might be thought of as a public warning. The author has selected poems that respond...

Joshua "Josh" Gibson (1911–1947) is a baseball legend—one of the greatest power hitters in the Negro Leagues, and in all of baseball history. At the height of his career, this trailblazing athlete suffered grueling physical ailments, lost his young wife who died giving birth to their twins, and endured years of Jim Crow–era segregation and discrimination—all the while breaking records on the ball field. Dorian Hairston's debut poetry collection explores the Black...

Intimate and sweeping poetry that examines race and lineage Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress...

A black poet performs a shamanic soul retrieval of the seven-hundred-year-old diasporic black arts tradition Continuing her search for a neotropical mythos, in this brilliant second collection poet fahima ife articulates various scenes of subduction. Spoken in quiet recognition and grounded in desire, Septet for the Luminous Ones imagines a lush soundscape textured in oblique spiritual fusion of the Taíno and Yoruba. Or, what it sounded like coming together for the first time, and what it sounds like ever...

Incantation and elegy shine through one another in this extraordinary poetic memoir When poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother's tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief's syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the...

The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the...

The fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s ushered in a new tide of European immigrants to the United States. These populations, which hailed primarily from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, were largely adrift in America's cultural melting pot. Laden with their belongings and informed by their experiences, these immigrants became citizens of a new diaspora searching for space to exist in their adopted home. In Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, author Katerina...

In poems at once profound and accessible, Nadia Colburn finds splendor and astonishment in a natural world—and a human world—that is deeply troubled yet still majestically beautiful. Both elegy and celebration, I Say the Sky addresses some of the most challenging aspects of human existence, from childhood trauma to environmental devastation, and discovers, in unexpected and clear-sighted ways, wisdom, wonder, and peace. Colburn's brilliant second book charts a journey to meet the self. From girlhood to parenthood,...

What's the day-to-day, decade-to-decade life of a teacher like? Documenting Patricia Austin's forty-plus years as an educator, Tales from a Teaching Life: Vignettes in Verse invites readers along on a chronological journey through elementary and university classrooms. Austin captures modes, moods, and moments of teaching, from a stumbling entry into the profession to an unexpected dive into the brave new world of online instruction. In verse at turns reflective, surprising, and...

With Numinous Seditions, celebrated poet and essayist Tim Lilburn investigates inner dispositions that might help us bear the new sorrows of the climate crisis. The book draws from the West's almost forgotten contemplative tradition in its Platonic, Islamic, Christian, and Zoharic forms. It also explores ideas from modern philosophers Jan Zwicky, Gillian Rose, Dorothy Day and Simone Weil, and from contemporary poetry by Don Domanski, Philip Kevin Paul, Anne Szumigalski, and Roberto...

This study constitutes the first-ever definitive account of the life and work of Irish modernist poets Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin. Apprenticed to the likes of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, all three writers worked at the center of modernist letters in England, France, and the United States, but did so from a distinctive perspective. All three writers...

New work from one of the most compelling and transformative writers of the contemporary prose poem What is it to feel nostalgia, to be skeptical of it yet cleave intently to the complex truths of feeling and thought? In a series of 64 gorgeous, ramifying, unsettling prose poems addressing late-twentieth- and twenty-first century experience and its discontents, The Ruins of Nostalgia offers a strikingly original exploration of the misunderstood phenomenon of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical...