New York. Knopf. 2016. 108 pages.
This latest book by Sharon Olds, Odes (a near perfect rhyme), contains sixty-four poems of praise. They are not written in the traditional English form of th…
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Toronto. Mawenzi House. 2016. 78 pages. Innu Assi means “land of the people” in the language of the Pessamit Innu. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s Assi Manifesto grounds itself in Innu lan…
Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2016. 90 pages. According to the back cover of Watch Out, “Many critics count [Raeber] among the more significant writers of the second half of the twentie…
Hexham, UK. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2016. 70 pages. In Net Needle, poet Robert Adamson spans the range of contemporary English prosody with poems that tenderly attest to an…
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Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2016. 80 pages. In a Drunken Boat interview by Rebecca Seiferle, Mexican poet and translator Tedi López Mills states, “I don’t know if it pertains to the more ‘per…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 83 pages. The futility of rage in the face of violence is among the many threads running through Fuchsia, winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2016. 246 pages. It was not until Wisława Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in 1996 that Polish women poets began to achieve national as well as international visibi…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2016. 263 pages. Raised in a progressive, prosperous Cuban family, Dulce María Loynaz (1902–97) gained a reputation for innovative writing. But after refusing to join the…
Munich. Carl Hanser Verlag. 2016. 94 pages. The earthly and the man-made interact with one another in Proben von Stein und Licht, a debut collection of poetry by Anja Kampmann that testifies…
North Adams, Massachusetts. Tupelo Press. 2016. 91 pages. One Hundred Hungers is a book of exile, faith, and acceptance. Of flavor, desire, and violation. Poet Lauren Camp confides in us what…
Paris. Éditions Grèges. 2015. 108 pages. “Poetry, including the poetry I write, is of no use, no help to anyone. It is theodicy without an object, communion without lips. It is a pure parlance of obvi…
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Cissus World Press. 2015. 88 pages. Dike Okoro’s recent collection of poems, In the Company of the Muse, is a work of substance in which the poet deploys versatile techn…
Bucharest. Editura Tracus Arte. 2015. 209 pages. This kind of anthology drops readers with modest or no knowledge of the poetry of a nation into a labyrinth in which directions and destinations are fa…
New York. Knopf. 2016. 104 pages. Poet Amit Majmudar’s one-hundred-page book is frequently eloquent, captivating, and powerful; however, it is also partisan, puerile, and facile. One of the best poem…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2016. 352 pages. Christopher Logue’s recent volume of poetry, War Music, holds Homer’s deft portrait of the Trojan War up to the present’s light. In the…
Gurgaon, India. Hachette India. 2015. 376 pages. Having been part of the resurgence of Indian poetry in English that was very much Bombay-centered, Adil Jussawalla brought out a brilliant debut collec…
Detroit. Wayne State University Press. 2016. 116 pages. If the American critic Stephen Burt’s precepts for reading new poetry—look for a persona and a world, not for an argument or a plot—are to be he…
Grewelthorpe, Ripon, UK. Smokestack Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2015. 200 pages. Steve Ely’s Englaland evokes postindustrial scenes that become more richly meaningful as he connects the…
Brookline, Massachusetts. Zephyr Press. 2015. 144 pages. It’s not uncommon for poets to fill collections with the momento mori of nostalgia, regret, and meditations on the end. Albanian poet…
Durham, North Carolina. Jacar Press. 2015. 68 pages. This masterful collection begins with a foreword in which Gibbons Ruark describes how his association with Ben Kiely awakened his interest in his o…
New York. Akashic Books. 2015. 88 pages. The second title to win the Paz Prize for Poetry—presented by the National Poetry Series and The Center at Miami Dade College to a previously unpublished manus…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Press 53. 2016. 204 pages. Mystical and modern, Yahia Lababidi’s Balancing Acts, a collection of poems spanning across a career of decades, tethers together a…
Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2015. 88 pages. In “Beyond Confession” (2001), Alicia Ostriker insists that a poetry of witness should not only include “history” and “the news” but that it…
Normal, Illinois. co•im•press. 2015. 376 pages. The title rings true. Juan Gelman’s Oxen Rage embodies tremendous tension (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 28). Submission and anger compete withi…
Brooklyn, New York. Akashic Books, 2015. 103 pages. Born in Jamaica to a pharmacist mother and a policeman father, Colin Channer, an award-winning Caribbean diaspora writer in the US, has published a…