Reflecting on loss with a poet’s eye for detail and wonder, the core of this piercing outing from Ladin (The Future Is Trying to Tell Us Something) chronicles the loss of her mother to dementia. In moving poems that explore their shifting relationship, Ladin recounts the experience of visiting with her mother: “I felt your love/ as you were dying/ one memory at a time// when you squeezed my hand./ It was love,/ I’m sure of it,// and not just fear or loneliness,/ but I still don’t understand/ what kind of love we shared.” Other poems consider the losses Ladin has sustained in recent years, from illness and disability to a faculty position and apartment: “This bedroom, like my job, immediately starts slipping into the past, but the bed is still here, carrying me like a raft into the bedroom-less waters where I imagined a future.” Ladin turns her attention toward her own white privilege in the last section of the book, critiquing a system that, throughout much of Ladin’s life, hid itself from view: “Even when we were alone,/ whiteness kept us under surveillance.// Eyes disguised as carpet stains/ watched my mother and I rehearse// the whiteness that was to me/ invisible as love.” Tender yet tenacious, these poems transmute loss into potent lyricism. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

Opening with a meditation on the loss of friends, Black’s powerful second collection (after Storm Toward Morning) immerses readers in the gritty New York City of his youth with unflinching honesty: “Each year, another/ far-flung friend falls in a hole// cut like a tunnel/ to the overcrowded underworld.” Blending personal history with broader themes of survival and guilt, these poems range from free verse to more structured compositions, crafting intimate narratives with expansive existential musings. In “Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, Late Spring,” he confronts his brother’s mental illness with raw intensity: “My brother flinches, gone, or gone again/ into a schizophrenic rift.” Throughout, Black transforms memory from historical fact to lived experience, as in “For the Suburban Dead,” which captures the persistence of past trauma: “I have learned to hold/ the loneliness of cities in my teeth/ like old fillings.” His vision turns streetlights into “stars/ buzzing like ghost locusts,” creating a haunting urban landscape. Black offers fresh perspectives on familiar themes of loss and survival (“I would lay myself/ down like a flower on each headstone/ if I could, but I have lost the plot/ numbers”), underscoring the struggle to honor the dead while grappling with the passage of time. Despite their often bleak subjects, these poems shine with a melancholic beauty. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

The expansive and arresting latest from Pulitzer winner Gander (Be With) comprises what he calls a “novel poem,” a book-length single poem that spans time, space, and narrative perspective against stark and arresting desert environments. Roughly broken into page-long scenes, the poem asks, “Is there an emotion of awareness?” Working to transcend the constraints of narrative, the poet decenters himself within the landscapes he explores. “The goal was never knowledge, but attentiveness,” he writes, “those constant bearers of meaning/ bore me.” Gander shifts perspective between first and second person, addressing his beloved companion as both “you” and “she,” and reflects on the multifaceted nature of experience: “As my memories and the present mixed, as my tumultuous inner emotions and the landscape coalesced, I felt my sense of self become kaleidoscopic.” A geologist by training, Gander sketches the natural world in ways that are strange and, at times, startlingly precise. In one poem, he describes “walking along/ into the faintly semen-smell of the middle of the night.” The eye of a just-slaughtered cow is “nicotine Saturn,” and “the spring hills boing green.” Readers will be wowed. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this moving tribute to Yusef Komunyakaa, friends, students, and admirers share their personal connections to the legendary poet and teacher. Contributors include luminaries like Sharon Olds, who provides an extolling acrostic of Komunyakaa’s name (“F for the Freedom of Form... O is for Omigawd, how does he do it?!”), and Terrance Hayes, who reflects on “what it means to be a Black Jazz Poet,” recalling—and charmingly apologizing for—a “mediocre review” he wrote of one of Komunyakaa’s collections in 2000. “The tiny eyes of a young poet,” Hayes writes, reflecting on his inability to fully understand Komunyakaa’s work at the time. “Icarus critiquing the wings of Daedalus.” Elsewhere, Dwayne Betts writes poignantly about discovering Komunyakaa, among other great Black poets, while serving time in prison. In “Yusef Komunyakaa’s Scenes of Vietnam and Louisiana: The Forever Crisis of Racial Terror in Dien Cai Dau (1988),” Hannah Baker Saltmarsh draws connections between Komunyakaa’s experience growing up in the Jim Crow South and the “imperialist, racialized violence in the Vietnam War,” in which he fought and wrote about in the collection Saltmarsh references. This is a well-deserved honor for Komunyakaa and a must-have for his fans. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

Walker’s excellent 12th collection (after Love House) captures the Black experience before and after emancipation in intimate and expansive poems. It opens with an 1841 newspaper clipping from Henderson County, N.C., announcing a $30 reward for a runaway slave. Walker experiments with forms and styles, from free verse to more structured compositions, masterfully blending personal narratives with broader historical themes. In a poem in the voice of Margaret Garner, a formerly enslaved woman who killed her infant daughter rather than allowing her to be forced into slavery, the speaker declares, “Don’t call me Murderer./ Step back from all this./ Stop eyeballing me and the sharp sharp blade./ Take a closer look at the white men... I spared my baby girl not from this life/ but from my life.” Throughout, Walker draws on the emotional and psychological dimensions of poetry to transform slavery from historical fact to lived experience. “Grove” centers on the observations of a Black soldier enlisting in the Civil War alongside other Black men, describing the line of waiting men as “a grove wanting to be a forest,/ ready to see what kind of wood we made from.” These vivid and evocative poems underscore the struggles Black people have faced while offering beautifully crafted, illuminating reflections on those experiences. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 07/12/2024 | Details & Permalink

Drawing its title from a line in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (“Reader, I married him”), the inventive and lyrically precise sophomore outing from Van Landingham (Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens) is organized in five sections, the majority of its poems titled “Reader, I” followed by a bracketed portion: “Reader, I [swore I’d be a casual bride].” This conceit successfully ties the poems together and implicates the reader as it brilliantly challenges some of the stereotypes of marriage through personal reflections and literary motifs. The opening prose poem sets the stakes: “[Reader, I was] according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet weeping. And aren’t they often weeping?” The long poem “The Marriage Plot” features lyric sections that capture some of Van Landingham’s atmospheric writing at its best: “On the Romantic Danube// river cruise my mother booked/ for us a month before/ my wedding, I watched her dance// with a stranger// to a halting ‘Blue Moon’/ broadcast live to our stateroom./ The sunset// having annulled itself// hours before, somewhere between/ Krems and Vienna, it seemed// we were floating in deep, dark space.” This accomplished book is rife with searing and affective musings on love and matrimony. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Cabot Black’s stunning, fable-like fourth collection (after The Exchange) urges readers, “do not expect the known; you were not there.” This unusual and poignant volume is equal parts gothic and pastoral, full of incisively written imagery characterized by sparse stanzas that allow each line to shine: “everyone wants to be near,/ To manage the animal, the range/ of the easily lost.” This sentiment is echoed again in “Almost Aubade” (“who came first/ now lost”), where absence and presence preoccupy the speaker. In the second section, Cabot Black reveals that “To be mistaken/ For another might be to survive.” Yet the poems in this collection run no risk of being mistaken for another poet’s oeuvre. Singular and striking in their movements and tone, they are a testament to delicate beauty. Cabot Black walks the tightrope between the gnomic and the visceral, and sticks the landing with the utmost skill and tenderness. (May)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this self-reflective and candid fourth collection, Wallschlaeger (Waterbaby) explores the Black female experience in formally varied poems (crisp couplets, prose poems, and some that use caesuras and white space) to powerfully parse the layers of past experiences and the injustices of modern life. “How to Write a War Poem” opens the collection, introducing the reader to Wallschlaeger’s satirical, questioning, yet inviting tone: “You must feel helpless—That’s what brought you here? You’ve been watching the news?/ You feel outlaundered? By selfhood, extravagance, and targets?” The next poem, “Freedom on Earth Ain’t Enough for Me,” takes flight from her interest in analogies between the human and natural world, and the ongoing plight of women: “Two male cardinals fight/ over trees for territory,// ancient story orbiting/ into supernova.// ‘Fe-males’ nowhere to/ be seen, particles of a// solar system delayed.” “How to Survive Confusion” advises: “1. Lean on pride. Gas yourself up on a regular basis. Admire your legs. Smile./ 2. Take long walks. Talk consolingly to yourself. Bring a friend who can laugh.” Amid difficult reckonings with race and gender, Wallschlaeger delivers a memorable woek that honors resilience. (May)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Giannisi’s ambitious and often vivid collection, her third in English (after Cicada), features genre-bending poems drawing on three years of field research on the goat-herding customs of the Vlachs, a people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans. The opening poem sets the stage for her experiments in voice and interest in the relationship between humans and animals: “the narrator says:// goatfold of Yannis Mourtos in Kalamaki Larissa./ 750 stock, 700 females. goats.// two winters I went among the fold with Chara/ I saw the animals scream and fuck/ (when the human let them)/ I saw the animals being born/ (with the help of the human)/ I saw the animals graze/ (led by the human).” Combining field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts, Giannisi’s poems feature philosophical and academic reflections that can sometimes drag: “The herd isn’t simply a society of animals... domesticated animals, monitored and controlled and intended for consumption. I’ve just spoken about domestication, about indoctrination, about appropriation... the herd is a group of animals raised with the purpose of being used and consumed by humans.” By contrast, “Darkness Again” offers some of the best of her lyric writing: “for years the dead didn’t bother us/ we tucked them one by one into the earth.” Readers will find this strange and captivating. (July)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Cheyenne poet RedCherries debuts with a potent and immersive narrative work about a Native American woman raised by non-Native parents and her journey back to her birth family. Addressing the systemic oppression of Indigenous populations, the collection opens with references to a child being sent to a residential school, and her mother dying in a mental institution as a result. Elsewhere, a queer woman returns to the reservation to some consternation from residents, until the community drops its bigoted beliefs, at which point she is revered: “A union of two Cheyenne women was understood to/ be sacred because Cheyenne women are sacred.” One of the standout poems, “engine injun,” tells the story of a Cheyenne woman who travels to San Francisco in 1969 to take part in a large powwow and learns about the part-Native heritage of Neil Armstrong, who lands on the moon that very night. Elsewhere, a speaker addresses her mother with awe, “You would wake up, brush your hair, put on your denim jacket and become the 1970s cowboy everyone wanted to be.” The collection celebrates this mother, who was the speaker’s connection to the Cheyenne world and was taken from her at a young age. The result is a confident and arresting account of loss and the search to rebuild community and identity. (July)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink