Petit (Tiger Girl), who is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage, embraces the landscapes of each of her countries of origin in potent brooding poems that explore trauma and transformation. Following the dark paths her memories forge, Petit documents scenes that seethe with life and startling imagery, “the air quivering with scented paths into the perfumed forest.” Many entries focus on the speaker’s mother: “how I can describe my mother to you/ is the task I’ve spent my life attempting.” She likens her mother, who suffered from mental illness, to a spider, “the giant ogress/ who hangs at the dense/ heart of my universe.” Elsewhere, she’s an octopus: “such a mistress of camouflage/ she can vanish inside her own hide/ instantly.” In these poems, the word hide serves both as an action and a camouflage, a “hide” or blind used by those who wish to go undetected as well as a skin or pelt. The meanings blend as the poet writes, “I peer out/ from the hide of my face.” Petit suggests that people are just as strange and dangerous as any tiger, caiman, or moor horse and require just as much caution. It’s a vivid and elegant collection. (June)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Mullen’s striking latest, her first collection since 2013’s Urban Tumbleweed, interrogates an increasingly online world with a keen eye for the eerie. “As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud” opens with the line “Smart machines armed with proprietary algorithms remain attentive to my wishes.” The book inhabits a dystopian landscape in which “a computer-generated tempest agitates the Pacific,” reminding readers of the inextricable relationship between technology and climate disaster. Even against the backdrop of a crumbling planet, the images are dazzling: “On your way to the end of the earth, you cruise the garish boulevard blinged out with glittering rhinestones.” Mullen’s poems are surprising and idiosyncratic; readers encounter robot spouses, billionaires sent to space in capsules, and an AI chatbot. The pandemic casts a shadow as the speaker sifts through a disconnected world in search of community. Ultimately, the collection celebrates human connection and spirit: “you who have been/ a creeping crawling thing,/ awake, take flight.” This wildly imaginative work speaks to the present times with a powerful urgency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

How does one stay vigilant to the horrors of the world when the “wallet’s empty and sink is full”? asks Kolchinsky (40 Weeks) in this reflective work of witness. The poet, who left Ukraine with her family at age six, toggles painfully between watching the war unfold in Ukraine and caring for her daughter and neurodiverse son in the U.S. As in her previous collection, which chronicled her second pregnancy, motherhood is a central theme. Yet this new portrait of motherhood against a backdrop of war is ragged and despairing. Kolchinsky expands the motif to touch on her mother tongue, her motherland, and the obliteration of physical autonomy that comes with motherhood. On the 100th day of the war, she writes, “My tongue/ hurts my mouth... I claw at my scalp to find/ unintended gifts my children/ left behind—lime playdough, floss, an uneaten/ french fry. Their bodies use mine/ as treasure chest & waste bin.” In “Tell me it gets easier,” she does nothing to soften the blow, telling new parents that no, it doesn’t get easier: “The depths/ are endless not because/ they do not end but because/ we’ve never reached the bottom.” And yet, “endurance is a resistance all its own.” Readers will find this a moving and impactful collection. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

The insistent and formally experimental third collection from Vang (Yellow Rain) turns her incisive poetic eye to the critically endangered saola—a bovine native to Laos and Vietnam—to explore themes of colonialism, war, and extinction. “I am a secret that exists,” she writes in “Evolution, Absence,” which draws compelling resonances between the plight of the Hmong people and the threats facing saolas, also known as Asian unicorns for their elusiveness. Moving skillfully between human and animal worlds, the speaker’s voice captures a state of psychic restlessness: “sometimes I want to cut loose/ the animal in my cortex, tear into this ache. There is/ no such thing as new pain,/ only the same pain recycled a/ hundred ways.” Elsewhere, the speaker reflects on her pregnancy, reaching toward the saola in pursuit of connection: “I search my being for grace I share/ with you, extent of my presence/ from feet to head, incision under my belly/ from where my baby emerged.” Vang’s poems are visually stirring, conjuring diagrams and word clouds that, on occasion, feel overextended. Nonetheless, this is an ambitious and impassioned contribution to contemporary poetry. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

This urgent debut from Hourani spotlights Palestine’s struggle for liberation through a book-length poem interwoven with personal history. Hourani grapples with how to find adequate language to confront histories of occupation and genocide: “the more time i spend with words/ the more i realize that they just won’t do.” Amid this seemingly impossible poetic task, formal inventiveness shines; the book borrows from the language of dictionary definitions, multiple choice questions, and instruction manuals, creating an interactive—and haunting—experience. In one section, Hourani posits “questions,” which reverberate unanswered: “13. how to get rid of a body/ a. turn it into something else/ i. by declaring that it isn’t one/ b. delete it.” Elsewhere, Hourani draws from bird migration patterns, reminding readers that the ecological is inextricable from the geopolitical: “it is about the earth. it has always been about the earth.” Ultimately, the reader must face the fragility of the body: “i am in a fleshy/ circle; i shed the fleshy circle; i notice a papery film closing in/ on me; i am being shellpacked again.” Hourani’s impressive and expansive poems strike a chord. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Gafori’s excellent second collection of Rumi translations (after Gold) thrums with the beatific energy of divine and romantic love, as well as a deep yearning for community and peace. In the introduction, Gafori reflects on the mystic poet’s early years fleeing the Mongolian Army, which was “wreaking havoc on village after village.” Rumi imparts ecstatic words of wisdom (“go to the kitchen in Love’s house/ and lick the plates lovers left behind”) while also lamenting the violence in the world around him. In “My heart breaks when I look out,” he declares, “Man, man, man/ what kind of lightning are you, setting farms on fire?/ What kind of cloud are you, raining down stones.” Gafori’s translation is exceptional: contemporary, razor-sharp, and lyrically expansive but still unmistakably Rumi. The poet’s voice is filled with wonder, infectious joy, and humor, asking, “Why did I make brooding my vocation/ when awe was an option?” He is wise, generous, devout, and effortlessly pithy, offering a way forward in dark times: “Don’t mute your drum./ Don’t muffle the beat./ Walk bravely into the field and raise Love’s flag.” The result is an accessible, enjoyable, and essential entry point to Rumi’s work. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

The brilliant and multitalented Wright (Casting Deep Shade) died unexpectedly in 2016, leaving behind a legacy of astonishing breadth. This comprehensive and riveting volume, lovingly selected by the poet’s husband, Forrest Gander, and her longtime friend and editor Michael Wiegers, serves both the ardent fan and the newcomer to her work. Wright’s commitment to wonder and witness runs throughout like an iron wire, revealing a logic made newly legible by this collection: “Something is out there/ goddammit// And I want to hear it,” she writes in midlife. Twenty years later, she refines her aim “to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time.” Readers will observe the poet’s deepening practice of documentary poetics, from early lyric portraits of family, friends, and strangers in and beyond her Arkansas home (“some boys holed up in a derelict house/ after stoning a swan to death”) to book-length poems that combine voices in “a welter of associations.” Attuned especially to the poor and disenfranchised, the victims of racialized violence, and the incarcerated, these poems strive to represent people “as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves.” It’s a thrilling assemblage of Wright’s unforgettable writings. (May)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

The formally inventive debut by Perkins celebrates Black women who strive to keep families together. At the heart of the collection, Perkins explores the connection between a fictionalized version of himself and his single mother, the two of whom “raised each other with cockroach cardboard walls, playing hopscotch homes.” Many poems take unique forms such as pro/con lists, one-act plays, erasures, and collages of language and image. A poem titled “Captions for Pictures Lost in Storage” is a powerful exercise in restraint, featuring blank space where those lost images might have been and captions that movingly illustrate the relationship between mother and son: “Christmas 2009. Mar Mar is seven. Still into Star Wars!! I got him Mace Windu’s lightsaber because I like purple. Didn’t know it made noises though ): Kept me up all night, but my baby is happy!!” A wry, self-aware humor pervades “Verdict,” in which the speaker ponders how race informs his writing: “I came this close to Neo Pastoralism—/ to birds in every line that may or may not/ symbolize cagelessness and virginity./ But the picture box stamped/ ‘Black’ on my tongue and ears.” This evocative collection signals the arrival of a bold new voice. (July)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

This luminous bilingual anthology features eight contemporary women poets from Poland: Anna Adamowicz, Maria Cyranowicz, Hanna Janczak, Natalia Malek, Joanna Oparek, Zofia Skrzypulec, Katarzyna Szaulińska, and Ilona Witkowska. The opening “Cantata” section presents selections from each, displaying their range of styles, from the philosophical experimentation of Skrzypulec to Malek’s concise lyricism. Standout poems include Szaulińska’s “nirvana,” a typographically inventive examination of the relationship between body and technology, and Oparek’s “Berlin Porn,” a wide-ranging reflection on the eponymous city, violence against women, and how “sex and politics are so intimate together.” In the concluding “Octet” section, each contributor writes theoretically and reflectively about the act of writing. Their insights on craft are as varied and rousing as the poems themselves; Adamowicz imagines literary influence as fungus growing on tree stumps, while Cyranowicz reminds readers that “linguistic conditioning... does not proceed without oppression.” It’s a welcome introduction to major new voices on the world stage. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Love, divorce, illness, and grief are at the center of Brimhall’s expansive and moving fifth collection (after Come the Slumberless to the land of Nod). The title poem is among the book’s most evocative, framing love as something that, like the prodigal son, departs, endures hardship, and returns—sometimes changed, sometimes forgiven. At their best, Brimhall’s poems balance humor and grief, as in “Will & Testament”: “Bury me with one of your shirts/ in case I come back as a bloodhound. Save my favorite panties—/ the pink ones—for a sexier immortality or a lonely evening.” Similarly, “Body, Remember,” inspired by Cavafy, meditates on memory’s impermanence: “And over legs you endlessly shaved, grasses will grow like you—eager, wild, surviving every day they can.” Though the collection’s fire motif is persuasive in individual poems, it becomes overextended as the phoenix mythology collides with biblical references, diminishing its effect rather than deepening it. “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Sonnets” strains to braid fragmented lyricism and philosophical asides, sometimes feeling forced rather than revelatory. Despite these excesses, Brimhall remains a master of list-making, anaphora, and imagery. It adds up to a striking, if uneven, collection. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink