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

Setting 21 new works alongside poems published between 2003 and 2021, this exceptional collection from Matejka (Somebody Else Sold the World) puts his agile, musical voice, vivid imagery, and talent for cultural critique on full display. The section of new poems opens with “Ordinary as It Gets,” an arresting ode to Midwestern Americana set in Cincinnati’s Kings Island amusement park: “there’s the music of the mind & then/ there’s the music of the maw—tonsils out,/ screams abounding up The Beast’s/ wooden-slatted hill, its rocking set list/ curated for the popcorn-getters & thrill/ seekers above & below.” The nostalgia continues in “Seeing Stars Poetica,” in which the speaker recalls with wry and evocative detail having his photo taken in a K Mart portrait studio: “Nothing’s easy at the ledge// of the women’s section. Each flash costs more/ than we can afford, backdropped by the idea// of Indiana: cartoon pumpkins & paint-flaked/ barns.” Selections from Matejka’s revelatory 2013 collection The Big Smoke, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, explore the life of legendary Black boxer Jack Johnson (1878–1946): “When we rise up// the whole Negro race rises up/ with us. When we get to the top,// it’s just us. No use for Negroes// then, not even ourselves.” The result is a fantastic entry point for readers unfamiliar with Matejka’s work and an essential volume for his fans. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

The capacious and playful latest from Shuttle (Lyonesse) offers twin poles of memory and imagination, taking place in part among the scenes, recollections, and visions of childhood: “My childhood lives on there/ and my parent shadows/ and all my days and nights that will never bear fruit.” She captures the blending of love and loss, of personal grief and environmental anxiety, that comes with growing up: “Hearts are quiet they’re full and deep with secrets/ their lives are strange/ their thoughts are dark and airy/ under the bullfight stars” (“Hearts by Night”). The collection’s first sequence is contemplative, populated by unexpected cameos from kings and queens, “Father Lear the king so shaped his bairns/ with the wand’s upper hand/ the fire’s swanny wing/ smooth tippet of the spider” (“Father Lear”). “I’m afraid/ of my childhood/ of which I’ve little memory,” Shuttle notes, evoking the volume’s haunted mood as she attempts to reenter a lost world from which “light/ still streams out/ from the long ago” and “god polishes/ his best boots/ for the funeral/ of the earth.” Quietly witty and slyly allusive, this dispenses poignant reflections on the poet’s personal history. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

The masterful second collection from Dzukogi (Your Crib, My Qibla) draws on the mythic and poetic traditions of northern Nigeria for a lyrical reimagining of the legend of Bayajidda, a prince whose exile from Baghdad leads to his founding of the Hausa States in what is today Nigeria’s predominantly Islamic north. In Dzukogi’s version, a local spirit “born of death,/ forged by the power of grief” possesses the foreign prince to bring back fertility to the desert: “You are son of conquerors,/ but I have conquered your body/ for this simple purpose.” This reframing of a foundational myth of Hausa tradition sets the stage for later poems that reflect on the Nigerian Civil War and legacies of nationhood: “Signs abound—a gory war is coming./ The spirits have fled the light of the new religion,/ and the badges of the old transpire like seismic murmurs/ in the fringes.” In the more personal and confessional final section, the speaker feels their connection to the past as a mournful impossibility: “I must tell the secrets/ burning in my gullet/ to my ancestors with eyes clogged with the tongue/ of silence.” Dzukogi makes potent and capacious use of myth to distill past and present. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Stone (What Is Otherwise Infinite) announces the chief preoccupation of her ruminative fourth collection in the poem “Civilization and Its Discontents”: “There are two apple trees in my yard/ and I am thinking of what it means to be alive in this world.” She illustrates how this sometimes means alternating between the “black sunflower” of suicidal depression and ecstasy: “There’s always a snowstorm coming/ and I’m always booked at a café/ on the other side of the mountain/ driving in the dark/ and I am insanely happy,/ weaving along the winding cliffs” (“Old Bio in Snow”). In “Thoughts at the Grave,” the poet vividly exhumes the buried body: “In the softening box, your discarded limbs.../ morphing to wild blue phlox scattered above you./ But for some artfully yellowed dentures/ fallen back into the gritty skull.” The volume’s title poem plays on her own last name: “I am considering a stone./ Even alone I feel I am in another performance./ Even the near world is distant.” Stone’s many allusions to writers, films, philosophy, and mythology create a vibrant tapestry. The result is a psychically rich and attentive work. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

The dazzling latest from Forde (Mother Body) draws on the King James Bible to lyrically recount the story of the poet’s grandmother, Alice, a Black woman who journeys from the American South to New York during the Great Migration and overcomes heartbreak and long odds to raise a family along the way. Narrative poems explore Alice’s experience leaving behind the world she knows as she endeavors to make a life for herself and her children: “Alice removes her shoes from her sore feet,/... sees in the well-worn tread a bit of Carolina clay/... pinches its rosy trails between her fingers/—the last remnant of home.” Entries in Alice’s voice showcase a mind questioning patriarchy: “that’s what’s wrong/ with womanin’, we stay spinning yarn/ from the colorful crochet of our minds, but few/ admire it—Dear LORD, why did you make me/ in your image if you wanted me to kneel?” Forde incorporates a variety of forms into the collection, demonstrating her playful sense of craft in poems that take a cue from scripture, such as “Fat Gospel” with its long lines and refrain, “& it came to pass that Alice was fine with her fat.” This life-affirming book celebrates resilient women and their legacies. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This singular poetic collaboration between Komunyakaa (Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth) and McClung (Between Here and Monkey Mountain) chronicles their efforts to cope with the isolation and fear of the Covid-19 pandemic. Begun as an email exchange initiated by Komunyakaa in March 2020, the collection comprises epistolary tercets the poets traded nearly every day for the next two years and culminates in a dreamlike epic poem tracing time and geography. History, in these poems, functions as a fluid medium, allowing the poets to move with ease between the here-and-now and the ancient past, as in these lines from early in the collaboration: “We lament blame plaguing us/ as a fever sweeps over the seven/ continents. Does blood of bull/ or lamb bless the thresholds/ of every doorjamb, where no gold/ or crossbow can rescue us now?” The poets’ exchanges are delineated by an indentation that gives the text polyvocal and contrapuntal qualities, further heightened by the array of figures—from Socrates to Toni Morrison—who enter the text. An underlying sense of unease pervades: “If we went back to digging up pig roots/ with bare hands, or buried our clocks/ in river beds, we’re not innocent, no sir.” Readers will find it a gripping and surreal vision of pandemic times. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink