Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2018. 143 pages.
It is not easy to select poems from twenty-five robust years of poetic output into one slim volume, especially for the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu. The Wild…
VERSE
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2018. 61 pages. The title of Conor O’Callaghan’s new book, Live Streaming, immediately poses an interpretive question. If “līve,”…
Manchester, United Kingdom. Carcanet Press. 2018. 110 pages. In 1909 anthropologist Arnold van Gennep introduced the concept of the “liminal period of ritual,” a transition located between separation…
New York. Akashic Books. 2018. 350 pages. The New-Generation African Poets book series is an ambitious program to publish together poets who have yet to publish full-length books. The 2018 ed…
Northfield, Massachusetts. Talisman House. 2018. 52 pages. Eileen Myles’s blurb on the back cover of Brane Mozetič’s book maintains that the poems are “tiny novels” and “end like tiny movies.” One can…
Broome, Australia. Magabala Books. 2018. 149 pages. If poets are compelled toward cultivating voice, then, logically enough, to what ends? In his recent monograph, Polysituatedness: A Poetics of D…
Bhubaneshwar, India. Dhauli Books. 2018. 126 pages. Young Indian English poet Aditya Shankar is a man acutely aware of the quantity of material objects that are piled up against human sensations or em…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2018. 104 pages. When I was very young and growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I was sure that the mountains I saw every day were a massive painting on the side of the universe…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2018. 180 pages. There is visceral excitement upon welcoming a new poet into one’s personal canon—it’s like collecting a little bit of immortal light—and Russian p…
Chicago. Swan Isle Press (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2018. 99 pages. Born in Havana, Cuba, but raised in Florida, Ruth Behar explores the poetics of identity, not only as a Cuban living in…
Minneapolis. Milkweed. 2018. 88 pages. The late Max Ritvo was something of a rising star in American poetry before his death, at only twenty-six, in 2016. This volume, edited by Louise Glück, offers s…
New Delhi. Red River. 2017. 74 pages. The word “Sanskarnama” is a curious mixture of Sanskrit and Persian meaning “a chronicle of culture.” Nabina Das, in her collection of searing poems, has used thi…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2018. 140 pages. The Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s Unexpected Development (Unerwarteter Verlauf) appeared this year with White Pine Press, accompanied…
Lafarre, France. Les éditions de la Tortue. 2018. 119 pages. Born in 1944 in Washington, DC, poet and playwright Lance Henson grew up in Calumet, Oklahoma, with his traditional Tsis-tsis-tas (Southern…
Hexham, Northumberland. Bloodaxe Books / Dufour Editions. 2017. 128 pages. Ahren Warner’s third book is, from the start, clearly about the weight of history. “[E]ach city east of Bremen bears the pock…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2018. 96 pages. Our grandparents warned us of the existential dread that the modern world would eventually bring to us, and in her book…
Los Angeles. Rare Bird Books. 2018. 128 pages. Julayne Lee’s debut poetry collection is a tightrope walk between rage and respect. Not My White Savior begins with an introduction that helps r…
Warrensburg, Missouri. Pleiades Press. 2018. 91 pages. Every literary work is a product of its place, but few forms are so susceptible to absorbing their surroundings as poetry. Even the poetic works…
Anderson, South Carolina. Parlor Press. 2017. 121 pages. In the short introduction to Grasshopppers’ Eyes, the book’s translators assert a “Buddhist influence underlying [Ko’s] vision of exis…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2018. 150 pages. When Richard Sieburth published the first translations of Gershom Scholem’s poetry in Bomb magazine in 2002, it was a great revelation to Scholem…
Glen Ellen, California. Copper Coin. 2017. 58 pages. Sophia Naz walks a tightrope between two languages, English and Urdu, and her new collection of poems, Pointillism, is a pointer to that.…
New York. NYQ Books. 2017. 88 pages. Trauma and grief tend to control one’s life once they have interjected themselves, and yet we continue to write about them as strangers—a carousel of sobriety and…
Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. 84 pages. Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance progresses through gradual inoculation. Bit by bit, the reader becomes accustomed to the irony and para…
Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre Dame Press. 2018. 92 pages. In Kevin Hart’s eighth book of poetry, he uses poetry to talk to the absent or, rather, the ambiguously present: his late father, G…
New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 591 pages. At nearly six hundred pages, this beautifully produced book is comprised of eleven sections of poetry (Galway Kinnell’s ten books and a section of…