The title of Zwart’s ruminative debut refers to epitaphs carved on gravestones. Fittingly, the impulse for unlikely pairings (“odd” and “sad”) pulses throughout these poems, from “the pocks Christmas lights burn/ into a porch rail’s ruff of snow” to the mylar cemetery balloon described as “a silver pita... bleeding helium molecules.” Even joyful metaphors (“every peach,/ a geode”) give way to the underlying tragedy that runs through the collection: the childhood death of the poet’s younger brother. At the heart of the volume is a single powerful image: “my brother’s baldness,/ adding wattage to his eyes.” It becomes clear, as the book progresses, that calamity is inextricably tied to the oddness of the ordinary: “for forty years I have remembered the first night// of Adam’s sickness more than any other thing:/ the strange sauce on my Grandma’s pasta.” While fear of death is never far from these poems, the struggle against it is somewhat relieved by time, the poet’s clean biopsy results, and her love of her children and their creations: “Is it nexterday?/ one used to ask, meaning tomorrow.” Though a few of Zwart’s imaginative leaps feel strained, readers will find these searching and spiritual poems linguistically textured and appealingly direct. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Intellectually rigorous and emotionally piercing, Villanueva’s sophomore collection (after Reliquaria) threads Greek myth, Christian iconography, and family history into a frank exploration of mortality. The poems address grief and loss from many angles—from the pain of a loved one’s death to solastalgia (distress caused by environmental change), and most vividly, mourning for the loss of safety as fascism descends upon the United States. A wrenching series of sonnets that opens the book addresses the murders of Black men by police and the devastation left behind for their loved ones and communities: “Today they are/ burning the names of the boys they are/ shooting in the street. This because we—// and they—know ashes mean undone leads/ and muzzles loosened, floodlights and flares,/ eyes doused with milk.” Elsewhere, Villanueva provides an emotional counterbalance by depicting Penelope from The Odyssey as a radiant figure, alive “among all-trembling miracles.” Throughout, Villanueva’s imagery is textured and evocative (“From the overlook// you catch fog giving way to Mt./ Baker, the egrets like knuckles/ into the mouth of the after-/ noon”). The result is a dynamic book of witness, resistance, and radical hope. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

By turns darkly funny and achingly tender, Dabrowski’s latest (after Black Square) examines the blessing and curse of memory, and how everyday objects can hold profound significance. Dabrowski specializes in making the ordinary exceptional. In “Crayons,” for instance, a domestic scene of children coloring is elevated to dramatic heights by the poet’s flight of fancy. In “Jam Jars,” the eponymous containers are infused with whimsy as receptacles for memories: “In they pressed through every single skin pore, so/ I shut them up in separate jam jars and took them down/ to the cellar. Sometimes I remove a drop from each one,/ mix them in a glass of water and look to see what would happen.” In “This Is the End,” a former lover’s tampon left behind in the speaker’s bathroom inspires despair, then feigned indifference. Though often sardonic and witty, Dabrowski is at his best in more sincere moments, as when he writes of fatherhood or losing out on love. Clever, deeply felt, and delivered with deceptive simplicity, these poems transform the trivial into something monumental. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

Perennial themes—family, identity, tradition, place—take center stage in Belfiglio’s ruminative if uneven debut. Whether the poems concern Belfiglio’s Italian heritage, her romantic relationships, or the places she’s lived, they point always toward the importance of relationships to one’s identity. “A compelling story can pin/ my attention more than anything,” she writes, an interest evidenced by the many stories relayed here, including her grandfather’s 1912 immigration to the United States. The collection is replete with familial names, domestic trappings like furniture and food, and the mythology of Italian American clans. In a second thread that traces urban life and queer desire, the poems feel somewhat predictable. The brightest moments come in entries like “Basin,” which focuses on specifics that more convincingly evoke urban longing (“Maybe you won’t feel alone/ if you look into every set of eyes/ like a friend’s”) and elicits deeper emotional responses than the volume’s more abstract pieces. “I’d rather live in the what if,” Belfiglio writes, and the best of these poems glimmer with their accounting of a life full of what-ifs. There are moments of sincere reflection to be found here. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

The wry and sprawling final offering from the late, great Hejinian (Fall Creek) comprises a book-length prose poem in which the speaker moves through the motions and emotions of the “every day,” engaging with a cast of local characters. By doing so, Hejinian and her narrator explore a central philosophical concern: What does it mean to be a thinking, perceiving individual in a society of thinking, perceiving individuals? “I am just one of many irritable efficiency-demonstrating pedestrians pushing past,” Hejinian writes with the characteristic mixture of wit and wisdom that define her impressive oeuvre. Through the book’s many leaps and bounds across time, place, and literature, she questions, lauds, and critiques the human capacity for attention, reason, interpretation, memory, and freedom, playing what she calls “the phenomenal world’s ongoing game of hide and seek.” “Often,” Hejinian writes, “the reasoning human is like a squirrel or packrat pitting things in strange or unwarranted or unreceptive places.” A sharp poetic investigation of being, this will appeal to curious readers who want to know themselves, and others, more acutely. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

The complex and skillful third outing from Salerno (Tributary) features intricate poems tracking the devastating effects of endometriosis. Throughout, Salerno draws gorgeous and bracing parallels between the human and nonhuman worlds: “like the lowly orchid leaving the butterflies and bees out of its own replication entirely,/ my understory stripped clean.” Dandelions provide a way to imagine internal processes (“how gorgeous /and sharp within you the tendrils leeching, the radiant and bitter blooms”), tulips evoke the cervix (“their flushed double ruby cups unfurl”), and the patient movingly admits they “could only watch what was happening to me happen to me.” In counterpoint to these corporeal poems, the collection’s prose poems launch the reader into interstellar orbits and astrophysical musings (“a lustral rippling, extraterrestrial”). The overriding theme of the book may be loss—of organs and tissues, female reproductive capacity, autonomy, essence and possibility—but the poems themselves refuse elegy. Energetic language presses forward through long lines, redacted documentary evidence, and sustained images as if traditional lyric forms could neither contain nor adequately express the poet’s rage toward the medical establishment and received ideas about art and beauty: “They’re// all I can see./ Fucking daffodils./ Fucking daffodils.” Readers will find this unflinching and affecting collection tough to shake. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

In her dazzling latest, Kelly (The Renunciations) celebrates the endurance of life, love, and art, examining the porous boundaries between all living things. In a series of poems titled “The Bone Museum,” the speaker considers the ethics of creation, display, and preservation, a subject that reverberates throughout the collection. “In the beginning” channels the rapture of erotic promise in new love, and liberation through queer intimacy: “In the beginning, there was your mouth,/ a sky full of stars, raked or raking, clock-// wise or west, and in the close or mammoth/ matter, my heart’s red muscle knocked and knocked.” Throughout, Kelly also reflects on her family history, in particular the lives of her relatives who lived or live still in the farmlands of Arkansas. These moving poems explore the tradition of storytelling while posing difficult questions about the experience of displacement, especially when the location of one’s childhood home makes visiting unsafe: “For years now,/ I have been an only child: my brother and sister,/ their beautiful children, alive in the South—/ to which I can never return.” With remarkable skill and depth, Kelly poses penetrating questions about memory and memorializing, self-reinvention, and finding liberation in a world that is increasingly hostile to the concept. It’s an unforgettable addition to a fantastic poet’s oeuvre. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

Walker-Figueroa’s expansive sophomore collection (after Philomath) reckons with contemporary life on Earth and beyond. Drawing on an impressive range of voices, from Dante to David Bowie, she channels existential dread into poems that are surprising and innovative. In a section of sonnets, the speaker finds an unlikely kinship with Bowie’s Starman, reimagined here as a dummy seated in a Tesla Roadster traveling through space: “I think you’re like me, lonely passenger.” The question of extinction is at the heart of the collection as the speaker contends with how to live when “my ceasing/ has already begun.” Formally inventive, the poems feature extensive footnotes, which are disrupted by striking confessional moments: “You find your family,/ your whole phyla & future, buried/ in some encyclopedia & glean/ how small the risk of eternity.” No two entries are alike, cycling from classical forms to modern text-speak, from Mars to a restaurant in Brooklyn. Despite the crises looming in the background, Walker-Figueroa writes with wit and defiance: “Why not gallop to our end? Press/ Send & kiss gravity hello?” The result is gripping and idiosyncratic. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

The enchanting latest from Calvocoressi (Rocket Fantastic) examines the dichotomy of the body and soul, and the joys and sorrows each provide, through the lens of aging. The speaker recognizes that there is power in the self-knowledge time brings, and in discarding “the empire of the expertise of others” to do as one pleases. Several poems seem to be written from the perspective of a being who has visited Earth and who draws a distinction between their corporeal form, or “skin sack,” and their “light body,” which refers to something like a soul. One standout is “Homecoming Cistern Alien Vessel,” in which the speaker recalls struggling with the awkward physical and emotional pains of life on Earth: “I was confused all the time. I wanted so much.// My hole felt like a gut with an antler/ rammed through it. So lonely and strange/ and always trying to smile. Coin of the realm.” This poem and several others capture the lived experience of being in a body that defies typical gender expectations, piercingly and powerfully evoking feelings of alienation. Throughout, Calvocoressi mourns the dead and the otherwise absent with quiet longing: “Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while./ Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know/ you.” Survival is revolutionary in this brilliant collection. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

Laurentiis’s visionary sophomore outing (after Boy with Thorn) showcases her incredible lyric range and incisive commentary. At its core, the collection charts a 10-year period from 2015 to 2025 chronicling the speaker’s gender transition; along the way, the poems address the speaker’s political awakening in an era of pandemic, violence, and struggle against pervasive anti-Blackness. Of stereotypical double standards on self-presentation, Laurentiis writes, “Funny/ How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes,/ the way, say, my black/ Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace/ I put in it is not.” A long poem of witness reflects on the speaker’s 2016 visit to Palestine, where her experience radically expands her sense of solidarity with a shared movement for global liberation: “every Checkpoint a cold, ribbed, caged,/ Conduit: Chattel turnstile, guarded by/ artillery fire. This is what I saw.” Moments of joy and pleasure abound, too, especially in the erotic: “I like the specifically wet pink of my lips/ Before a kiss, or after biting them/ Anytime I’m thinking or nearness ends.” This generous and perceptive collection thrills. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink