The smoldering debut from Kennedy traces his coming of age as a gay man in the 1990s against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, his tumultuous straight marriage, and the trauma of being raised by an alcoholic mother. Whether he’s outlining his dual life before coming out or the darker moments of abuse at his mother’s hands, Kennedy exhibits a remarkable ability to state his aims clearly and honestly. In “Sheraton by the Airport,” he writes of hooking up with the man who mows his lawn, “But I want him/ to touch my cheek and rip/ my blindfold off, so he can stop/ being everyone/ and no one.” “The Gamble, 1992” is similarly strong: “They wanted/ what I had, which was close/ to being wanted.” These poems comprise searing portraits of the poet, his family, and others. The narrative arc tracing Kennedy’s relationship to his mother—from abuse and molestation to her later mental deterioration and dementia—holds enthralling heat. Lines from the title poem about his mother burning trash feel like an apt summation of how the memories herein haunt and harrow poet and reader alike: “There’s always a piece, she says,/ whacking the side of the barrel./ A goddam piece/ that just won’t burn.” This is an accomplished first effort. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

This monumental volume of Levis’s collected works is a study in the development and deepening of his gifts, from his debut in 1972 to poems published following his death in 1996. Levis’s bruised, engrossing voice suggests the “long, volleying/ Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where/ I spent it all,” and a “solitude the world usually allows/ Only to kings & criminals.” To read the full sweep of his work is to see an increased expression of the inner life, a voice “full of dusk, and jail cells,/ And bird calls.” What stays consistent is the poet’s vision of ordinary failure and his thwarted quest for reparation, whether in poems about the self, or in his character- and voice-driven work. Throughout, a wounded, self-deceiving faith is on display: “I got it all wrong./ I wound up believing in words the way a scientist/ Believes in carbon, after death.” Levis comes across as unfailingly honest in his self-interrogation, even in the most vulnerable, broken moments: “Out here, I can say anything.” He describes a knife used for grape-picking as “silver from so many sharpenings,” a phrase that could apply to his writing. It’s an essential celebration of a poet of tremendous power. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The arresting visual poems in the sophomore collection from Hoffer (Undershore) play on the meaning of slash, a term for forest debris created by wind, logging, or fire. Beyond providing metaphorical kindling, the slash also appears as a punctuation mark arranged in different patterns, with or without text, like line and stanza breaks gone haywire. The poems draw power from the alternate meanings of words, even as their restless trajectories don’t trust the medium: “when I write toward the world, I am pushed out of it.// fingering language’s tether, I ask to be opened.” Of her mother, she writes: “I fear my poems// about her death will replace her/ /.” Fraught with cracks, spaces, separations, repetitions, and erasures, these poems explore the territory where language intersects with “real” life: “to end/ on an image is to avoid a decision yet here I stand/ still, in two streams, water collaring my ankles each/ prickling in its sensuous confusion.” Motifs float tenuously here—a mother’s death, aspects of fire, a sexual relationship that turns marital—and some progressions seem merely associative. Full of leaps and contradictions, this is an inventive and lyrical work. (Feb.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the publisher.

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Skeets (Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers), a Diné poet, traces changes in the landscape of Navajo Nation in these haunting poems. Taking its title from the 2018 discovery of 191 dead horses trapped in the mud of a dry stock pond in the Nation, the collection draws connections between the land and its inhabitants to demonstrate human and nonhuman entanglements. In many poems, Skeets calls attention to a shared experience between the people and the environment, both suffering from the threats of climate change: “there has been no rain and we monster/ hot afternoons in narrow hollows/ metals green and sweep over memories of dew/ and shorelines now rust and golden with sweat.” Skeets employs a first-person plural we throughout, drawing the reader’s attention to a collective perspective of critical resistance to state-sanctioned violence and erasure: “time is an ulcer/ a lie we tell through mouths not our own/ because this mouth belongs to policy/ because time is stolen from us.” In these poems, queer desire also exists alongside the natural world: “I learn to love him/ so erosive it eats/ through the canyon.” This alluring and exacting collection beautifully reflects on the boundaries between people and place. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Drake’s cerebral, polyphonic debut explores the confines of assimilation and her ambivalent patriotism as a second-generation Filipina. Her heritage is first embodied in an untitled prose poem that begins, “In 1981, Tita Nena translates Whitman to make a primer for revolution. My mother has just left Quezon City,” and ends, “This is the part of me I must show everyone first.” The collection is immersed in family and generational inheritance—of trauma, but also of art, passion, joy, and celebration. A series titled “To Someone Who’s Heard I Love You Too Many Times” examines the role language plays in familial and romantic love, and how words might have divergent meanings or interpretations. Elsewhere, she writes about the realities of diasporic experience: “Desire, not curiosity/ charts my migration. I acquired a passport for the lover// because how long can I love anyone my mother has not met?” Drake is particularly excellent when writing about abundance and satiety: “I hear the thrum and wait/ in my hothouse for dinner// to line up petal to petal,/ plant fruit I’ve germinated// in my own mouth. Let the animal in.” These poems reverberate with an infectious joy, celebrating the revolutionary act of enduring day after day. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

In her urgent and harrowing 16th collection, Graham (To 2040) conveys her sense that “we are part of an occupation whose aims/ escape us.” Set in ravaged landscapes—mass graves, “leaf-emptied forests,” and “hollows filled with mercury & ash”—these poems of witness meditate on the limits of recollection: “Once I watch them drag/ the whole cuffed family/ out. I feel for my/ device. I feel the chill again. The frightening away of/ existence.” Pitilessness and compassion alternate: “There must be a record/ of what we’ve lived. Or that/ we lived. I don’t expect you to care.” Elsewhere, she invites surveillance: “Track me. Track my/ proclivities. Harvest me. My gaze is my gift. I give it, I give it to you/ freely.” Scenes of interrogation (“Avoid facial expressions while being assessed. Do not accidentally/ express/ yourself”) are answered by linked arms and raised voices: “We walked in unison. We prepared to sing. Soon/ we wld sing./ The earth was warm beneath our feet.” Rising from the ruins of “this buried world,” plaintive questions linger: “What can still/ be made?”; “is joy// a mistake now”; “is breathing still necessary/ here.” Ultimately, the poet interrogates herself: “What have I done.// Who will I become.” Timely and powerful, this is a masterful addition to Graham’s oeuvre. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The riveting debut from Gutiérrez takes readers on a journey through the many and varied visions of the “American” Southwest. Balancing a wide-ranging historical consciousness with critical indignation, Gutiérrez explores the Southwest as a physical and psychic space still negotiating the legacies of settler colonialism. The collection roughly takes the form of a road trip with emblems of empire coming and going along the roadside before they become defamiliarized relics: “you see the/ Don’t Tread On Me/ A snake hissing on a moth-eaten t-shirt/ waving on a rebar pole poking/ out of a transmuted ocean floor.” Gutiérrez’s poems refuse to fall into easy categories, interrogating the contested terrain of identity with incisive clarity: “My co-signer sabotaged [...] 231 males living in Tubac/ 23 males born outside Mexico, and now there is/ a New Mexico territory with one drop of Spanish blood/ for all of us to share in like ejído.” Throughout, the poet powerfully addresses questions of how individuals occupy space: “I walked through/ the concrete structures./ They didn’t look like/ they came from the land.// Do I look that way?” It’s a muscular and illuminating trek through a fraught landscape. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Kim follows up Autobiography of Death with another strong and prescient meditation on state censorship and violence. The opening poem centers on the real scene of a censor slapping Kim, setting the tone for a collection whose speaker wears “heavy stories like clothes.” Otherworldly imagery and anaphora create a kaleidoscope of eerie moments. Yet for all its images of death, the book glimmers with linguistic play and beautifully grotesque descriptions. As Kim writes, “Anything too beautiful/ is not poetry.” A master of cinematic sweep, Kim shifts from the placid, “If I open the window would morning sky unfold there,” to the brutal, “my head would be shattered I bet.” Additional riches lie in essays from translator Ok (Ward Toward) that provide useful context for Kim’s poetry and commentary on the art of translation: “Whereas writing a poem begins and ends, translating a poem stays in midsts.” Ok’s skillful translation stands as a welcome addition to the growing list of Kim’s memorable poetry available in English. This deserves a wide audience. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Ondaatje (A Year of Last Things) presents a superb and comprehensive collection of selected works, or “condensary of time,” that crystallizes for devotees and new readers alike the poet’s lifelong devotion to place. “From now on I will drink my landscapes,” he writes, “here, pour me a cup of Spain.” Family, friends, and lovers move through the entries, as do canoes on countless rivers, “We move/ over blind mercury, feel the muscle,/ within the river, the blade/ weave in dark water.” Pages teem with flora and fauna, as well as “the aura of dogs/ in trickster skin.” Exquisite attention to sensory details (“The cabin// its tin roof/ a wind-run radio”) lends the poems a philosophical dimension: “We go to the stark places of the earth/ and find moral questions everywhere.” Restless, the poet asks: “Now we are less. How do we become more?” In answer, this book offers a sustained ars poetica: “And that is all this writing should be then./ The beautiful formal things caught at the wrong moment/ so they are shapeless, awkward/ moving to the clear.” Readers will revel in this astonishing volume. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

The watchful and intelligent fourth volume (after Left-Handed) from Galassi, chairman emeritus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, comprises a long-form poem set in a quasi-fictional Long Island village. The tone is by turns appreciative and elegiac as the poet ruminates on place and the changing seasons, lending memorializing and pastoral notes to spare meditations: “(everything gets its two weeks, just like us,/ plus two of anticipation/ and one of grieving): and, yes, forsythia/ apple, wisteria, and bridal wreath,/ iris, peony—the season’s slow parade.” Elsewhere, neighbors now dead are mourned, as is the place itself: “This will all be gone, if not in my own time,/ in yours, or in another hundred years./ But don’t say that it won’t be mourned.” Amidst this awareness of the potential for loss, Galassi notes, “The fact what seems eternal’s/ not eternal makes it/ all the more lovely.” “I’m just another duffer/nattering on about humiliation,” he writes at one point, distilling the work’s winningly self-aware and companionably conversational attitude. This pulses with feeling beneath its placid surface. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink