Boukaila’s boundary-pushing debut explores truth, reluctance, and an unrestrained mind. Boukaila, a nonspeaking autistic poet, celebrates neurodivergent modes of thinking that trespass norms and linear expectations through associative logic: “Plotting optimizes thinking/ forcing the motioned streams/ to pause.” The poems cohere around aquatic metaphors, such as currents of water, trout navigating streams, and truth as a buried treasure to unearth. Titles such as “Streaming tressed titrating truths shape minds dancing motions” and “(Regurgitating Trialed Catfish)” suggest the fragmentation, wordplay, and irregular spacing on the page the poet uses to convey a sense of thoughts in fluid motion. Boukaila invites readers to embrace mistakes as sources of creativity and possibility by largely eschewing standard grammar and structure. By using concrete imagery and bending grammar to her ends, Boukaila frees “nomadic treasures” of the mind and stakes new territories for neurodivergent expression. This challenging yet rewarding collection expands the concept of what language can do. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

In his tender fifth collection, Clay (To Make Room for the Sea) blends ecological grief, loss, and a deep appreciation for life in the Anthropocene, which is all the more wondrous for its fragility. He presents remarkably evocative scenes that could easily trigger despair, or even horror, but instead engender awe, such as driving past a wildfire with his daughter and locking eyes with cattle in a tractor trailer: “the cows,/ as the traffic crawled, looked/ at us with the wisdom and grief/ of an earlier time. It could flood/ or it could never rain again,/ their eyes remain unchanged.” A few poems pay homage to Clay’s friend and fellow poet, Matthew Henriksen, who died in 2022. “The Bar in Fayetteville Where All the Moms Now Drink” conveys the ambivalence one feels upon encountering an old haunt that has become something new, and the gut-punch of remembering a person and a time that is irretrievable: “Even now, I can see Matt/ shooting pool, looking like a muscle/ of trouble that could never unravel.” These poems are brilliant reminders that it is always better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Sze (The Glass Constellation) provides essential context in the preface of this admirable “mini-anthology,” explaining that previous anthologies of Chinese poetry “tend to focus either on poems written in classical Chinese up to 1919 or on poems written in the vernacular after the start of the May Fourth Movement,” whereas his offers a “slender selection of lyrical poems that starts around 406 CE and moves chronologically into our current time.” He succeeds in capturing the verve and range of Chinese poetry, including selections from Li Bai, Zhang Ji, and Wang Yuyang among classical examples, as well as Yang Mu, Chen Li, Yan Li, and Yang Lian from the vernacular. Tao Qian’s “Drinking Wine III” offers a lively exuberance (“The birds fly to the woods, singing./ I whistle and whistle on the east veranda—/ go ahead, embrace this life!”), while Wang Han’s “Song of Liangzhou” ends with the haunting question, “Since ancient times,/ how many soldiers ever returned?” More recently, Wen Yiduo, who was assassinated by the Kuomintangin 1946, delivers a powerful music in lines like “Water sobs and sobs in the bamboo pipe gutter./ Green tongues of banana leaves lick at the windowpanes.” This is a vital introduction to Chinese poetry. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this innovative fifth collection, Phillips (Embouchure) applies their considerable imaginative powers to questions about gender. As the drabber version of a dimorphic bird known for its complicated mating rituals, the speaker of the title poem asks, “Would you/ brandish/ at the encroaching, sequined/ egos your bright beak/ like a sword—?” In the first section of the book, Eve rewrites the Fall as a feat of lesbian creation: “God made man/ in his own image,/ so they say/ So I made a beloved/ in mine.” Later, Noah, recast as a cruel rapist rather than a savior, beats back the unchosen from the ark’s edge. As the book moves from heterosexual traumas of abusive marriage, rape, and divorce to the newly discovered bliss of femme love, the poems wrestle with negative reactions (“I Told the Man Who Said ‘Don’t You Want to Look like a Lady?’ to Fuck Off”) while celebrating sexual transformation: “If we were lesbian elephants, I would/ grab the eucalyptus with my trunk and swat// your great elephant rump.” Phillips’s skillful revising of ancient myths of self and body inventively widen the meaning and scope of paradise. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Carter-Jones (Three Birds Deep) gathers the shards of devastation and reconstructs the soul in this trenchant and mellifluous collection. She studies the memory of her father’s unwarranted incarceration (part of the “gone-dead” practice of labeling Black men as dangerous only to incarcerate them) and the fortitude and vigilance required of an adolescence spent coping with trauma. Using photographs, erasure, epistolary form, and refrain, Carter-Jones demands witness, reflecting the persistent reoccurrence of hate and silencing: “They came for him./ The man who has the ability to create his/ own image. They came for him. To/ steal his too big voice that gathers./ Demands.” The specter of white supremacist violence is made tangible in a poem harnessing rhyme and coruscating vision: “Good men are gone-dead before the rising sun/ begins its fierce ascent upward to burning noon;/ shine light, shine black on inhumane deeds done.” Her mother’s voice conveys warning: “Do not, my mother said, read/ the world only through eyes of/ the heart./ Do not be kind without/ thinking eyes, my mother said,/ to save me from going blind.” She later evokes the sensation of unburdening oneself “as if stones I’ve carried from the creek are falling out of me.” Illuminating the poorly veiled racism and violence of past and present with masterful storytelling and exquisite resolve, this is a wonder. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Auden’s National Book Award–winning 1956 collection is restored to print for the first time in decades in this essential reissue. Perceptively introduced by Jacobs (Breaking Bread with the Dead) and featuring illuminating notes on historical context and Auden’s biography, as well as the poet’s own comments taken from letters and lectures, this volume is arguably the highlight of Auden’s writing during his years in the U.S. The title poem is no less than an attempt to capture Western civilization in verse, masterfully exploring Christianity, empathy, and human connection by writing of Achilles’s brutal, martial world in which hardships were “axioms to him who’d never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept/ Or one could weep because another wept.” Elsewhere, in chiseled, musical stanzas, Auden’s marriage of form and erudition alight on the love “deep below our violences” with an eye on modernity—conflicted, at times barbarous—and its historical underpinnings. These are hymns of “late man, listening through his latter grief,” epigrammatic and wise, witty and humane (“Small crooks flourish in big towns”; “Romance? Not in this weather”). This exquisite document of its century is irrefutable evidence of Auden’s skill and depth of insight. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this moving debut, Leary meditates on the spaces the dead leave behind, offering an elegiac exploration of sibling bonds through the story of a brother lost too young to an overdose in jail. Leary weaves a double-edged narrative of family pain and redemption: “Another strange derangement of fact: if lucky,/ your life will be worth the sadness of maybe one or two people.” The lost brother in these poems illustrates the conundrum of potential, his “hand in mine each time he says, I don’t care about who/ I could be. I only want more of who I am.” These poems candidly consider the brutality of truth and its attendant beauty: “What happened to you as a child was not all that interesting? Brother, only in a world that takes you hostage,/ are you free.” Reckoning with the deeper frustrations of spiritual life, the speaker remarks, “Soon it occurs to you, only God cannot tell you what you want to hear.” Throughout, Leary skillfully highlights the juxtaposition of life and death: “The day before you died,/ you’d ordered/ a kayak/ online. We’re still waiting/ for it to arrive.” Elegant in their simplicity, these beautiful poems enact the power of capturing grief, transience, and spiritual searching on the page. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

The contemplative latest from Dawes (Nebraska) surveys a series of comings and goings both personal and historical. Taking its title from one of the first free villages founded by formerly enslaved people in Jamaica, the collection explores departures and returns from a postcolonial perspective, reflecting on a lifetime of forging a self through poetry. “I built my own myth/ of departure,” Dawes writes in the title poem as the speaker imagines visiting an abandoned family house in Jamaica that has fallen into ruin. “The Making of a Poet” ends on the lines “Call me a voyeur, call me a kind of slut,/ but I still carry the transgression of indulgent/ watching, spying, in the shelter of the night.” Throughout, storytelling serves as a powerful tool to grapple with the impossibility of return. In a poem about a deceased sister, he again ponders this layered theme: “I live in another country. The place where her bones rest/ is nostalgic for me. For too long, I have not visited/ that sun-beaten patch of earth to stand mute,/ then speak for want of doing something better.” Wise and generous, this illustrates a poetic journey toward self-understanding. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

These candid and skillful poems from Scanlon (Lonesome Gnosis) offer original observations about aging, motherhood, and life as a woman on an increasingly unstable planet. “How is your Anthropocene going?/ How many more days of collapse/ do you have in you?” she asks the reader with matter-of-fact weariness. Scanlon pushes back against mainstream messages seeped with toxic positivity: “It’s insulting to be told not to be sad/ when there’s no recourse,/ to be told everything/ will be ok.” Elsewhere, she asks, “How do we/ unlearn the drive for more?/ We’ve never not loved excess.” Where some are paralyzed by despair, Scanlon seems animated by it. “Our own irritation is blinding, I know,” she admits, but then writes about remembering how she heard roses bloom as a child, an experience she describes as “paper crumpled in reverse.” Other moments are spectacularly alive on the page, as when she likens egg yolks to “five suns in a bowl.” In “A Request,” Scanlon breaks down the painful reality of loving that which dies and wonders whether growing old just means living more defensively. Scanlon’s excellent collection is determined to see to the heart of living and invites readers to do the same. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Ray (Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself) blends maximalist eco-poetry with the personal and elegiac in his luminous latest. His writing is informed by—and in communion with—Whitmanian expansiveness, offering the speaker license to combine the transcendental with the everyday. The collection is shot full of love and attention: “there’s love in quiet, in keeping apart. Love in the/ lonesome heart,” Ray writes. His openhearted diction is also a means of honoring the earth and those who have left it, “I have a whole lifetime’s worth of people—/ friends, lovers, family, foes—who live inside me.” Pets are included among the beloved; his dog Addie is pictured on the book’s cover. These poems are built to aid survival, recovery, and endurance in a life where “everyone sips from his own flask of hurt.” There’s an undeniable enthusiasm to Ray’s diction, “language arrived/ like a puppy in my pen”; “someone pulled/ the string on the lightbulb in my chest.” This full-throated collection beautifully honors and upholds the voiceless. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink