Smith Silva navigates the treacherous waters of displacement and survival in the wake of natural disaster in this luminous and innovative debut. Centered on Hurricane María’s devastation of Puerto Rico in 2017, these poems excavate the enduring impacts of colonialism, racism, and environmental catastrophe on marginalized communities. In “The Awakening of Hurricane María,” Smith Silva captures the storm’s disorientation and trauma: “Thunder shutters/ through the treetops, while lightening siphons/ off the breath like fragrant heat.” Elsewhere, she shifts from intimate familial portraits to broader meditations on systemic injustice. Poems such as “Everyday Drowning” and “While Black” confront racial violence and oppression in the United States, while others probe identity and belonging as a Puerto Rican. With a finely tuned ear for rhythm and syntax, Smith Silva unearths unexpected beauty amid devastation, insisting on a resilience that envisions “uncombed/ gardens last where only hurricanes stay.” This noteworthy collection bears unflinching witness to calamity while still kindling hope for renewal. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

In the excellent conclusion to his trilogy on chronic illness, Waldrep (The Earliest Witnesses) probes the nature of pain, art, faith, and the possibility of transcendence with philosophical rigor. The opener, “Watching the Flower-Arrangers in Ripon Cathedral,” includes a recurring image of a woman handing flowers to another woman on a stepladder, in a seemingly infinite sequence, “Always the same woman on the stepladder,/ always the same woman on the ground, handing up flowers./ Green, green, & gold.” The poem ends with the lines “I dream in pain/ & I wake in pain. Pain is a mineral. We store it in our bodies./ I hand mine to the next man, his foot already on the rung.” Many of the entries are set in cathedrals or national parks, spaces for ruminating on the wonder of creation. In “Effigy Mounds National Monument,” he writes, “The verifiable miracle is that I am here./ That, and the honey locust.” Those who have experienced chronic illness or disability will be particularly moved. Waldrep demonstrates in dazzling fashion how life, even amid hardship, is a gift. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Personal and collective memory meet in Malna’s strong bilingual debut collection, which uses fragmented structures to reflect the disjointed nature of memory and history. Sentence diagrams, lists, unpunctuated verses, and words in boxes investigate philosophical and existential questions about language, while the bilingual format sheds light on Malna’s cultural reality. “Sharp Prison” and “Eraser’s Guest” use erasure and destruction, literal and figurative, with recurring metaphors of document shredding and references to historical violence and loss. In the title poem, Owen’s dynamic translations includes phrases such as “my bathroom bathing grammar” and “a tourist erupting in a dictionary,” emphasizing the interplay of ideas about language and identity. In the five-part “There’s No Meaning: A REPEATING POEM,” the text is broken into phrases that mimic the poet’s preoccupations with chaos and order. “I don’t know the difference anymore between/ a caress and bowing in prayer before your sadness,” Malna writes. Owen’s translation blends Indonesian and English, incorporating local cultural references and expressions like “Krakatau,” “betel chalk,” and “Javanese oxygen.” Language and history are innovatively rendered in this lush meditation. (May)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

The energetic sophomore outing from Greathouse (Wound from the Mouth of a Wound) displays an obsession with etymology, bondage, and double-entendres in poems that muse on terms such as cum, swallow, punk, and legal tender as they explore themes of disability, gender, and eroticism. The collection is divided into three sections, with a long poem at the center, “I Want to Write an Honest Poem about Desire,” which addresses the history of sex work: “I can’t untangle lust from labor.” Is there really a difference between sex work and other forms of manual labor, the poem asks? Is using intimate erotic capital to create art a version of sex work? The world of these poems is harsh, vivid, and painful, qualities conveyed through the speaker’s striking attention to language (“the word therapist contains/ The Rapist,” they remark; elsewhere, “Sometimes I pronounce aubade: obeyed”). But the speaker’s voice is also proud and clear, responding to hateful slurs with intellect and humor while taking some swipes at the “CIS woman’s imagination” in which “Scalpel-born dykes” may exist as usurpers of womanhood. It’s an unflinching exploration of the cost of desire. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

The fantastical and strange second collection from Fathi (Great Guns) evokes André Breton’s surrealism and the linguistic playfulness of Gertrude Stein in lines such as “Now each wave curtsies, the bather has anal/ and a suit of medieval holes for the dolphin’s spurs” and the “bride slip ‘n slides on her back to us—then on her head (a ballpoint pen), quicksand in her hair.” Revealing the underlying oddity in the ordinary, Fathi turns the mundane into the mythical. In “Dinnerwise,” long, prosaic lines capture internal rhyme that transgresses narrative, “when I look down, at what I must eat, or read by light, or/ attempt to tweeze the cherry from/ the comma, and the gesture faces completion, while/ breath hypercolors the greeting.” The concluding section, “Anyone’s Don’tanelle,” is a virtuosic take on the villanelle that breaks most of its rules, using repetition and thematic focus to convey a sense of circling or spiraling inward, creating a fluid, chaotic, and less predictable form. Enthusiasts of formal innovation and linguistic play will savor this astonishing volume. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

The powerful debut from Salvatierra turns to the natural world to reimagine the wreckage of familial pain. The ocean, sky, forest, and volcanoes become sites for Salvatierra to excavate a portrait of Mexican American families ravaged by patriarchal religious practices and the systemic erosion of communal life. The loss or disappearance of sons, brothers, and fathers in these communities is a central theme. These figures frequently lose their eyes, a potent metaphor for men who have lost their way or been forcibly displaced, as in a poem in which a mother’s son “crashed until his wings were broken, feathers mangled... until he found his back home where his sight awaited him.” Another entry puts the issues of unjust immigration policies and racist ideologies more bluntly: “A Woman and Mexican Man (illegal)/ have a baby boy (citizen). He goes to school,/ is outcast (illegal)—/ this is American-manufactured at its finest,/ at dispensing misery.” The crisis animating Salvatierra’s poetry builds over the course of the collection in poems layered with symbolism, such as a room placed precariously between two volcanoes. This sense of predicament is balanced by striking, spare language: “I had no choice but to father my sons.” Simultaneously intimate and cosmic in scope, this fires on all cylinders. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

Drake’s excellent debut, winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series Award, enlivens and expands the traditions of Navajo poetry with arresting imagery, pop culture references, and queer touchstones. Drake delivers an intergenerational exploration of identity and heritage, with familial memories of a “childhood home/ that smelled of dryer sheets” and a reservation radio station that played Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash alongside “drumbeats and throaty covers/ of well-loved tunes put on/ by some local boys’ gas station// banjo and hot-rocket guitar.” There are frequent allusions to Navajo beliefs about the cosmos: “Coyote threw/ up a basket of stars to shatter the black/ into brilliance... Do the ghosts, too, feel comforted/ in the haze as you sing me/ the birth of the Milky Way?” In “for mildred bailey, in three parts,” Drake celebrates the incredible talents of the eponymous Native jazz singer, “her wide voice rivering the smoke/ Her lips heartberry-/ red in the lights.” Drake soars with a simultaneously frenetic and restrained energy, demonstrating a polished skill that does nothing to dull her electric delivery. It’s a noteworthy achievement. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

Hollis’s beautiful sophomore volume (after Ground Water) lyrically explores the essence of time, language, and ecology in poems about Britain and Ireland. The book is thoughtfully and effectively divided around the four cardinal points, beginning in the north, “in residue and wrack;/ the tide drawing off the asphalt.” Highlighting Hollis’s superb gift for lyricism and imagery, this section features the glorious “Stones,” which opens with “The sea is a land in waiting./ Each morning, each evening/ it turns out its pockets for the strandline:/ a starfish plaything, an unwrapped cuttle,/ some days a mermaid’s purse.” The next section moves east and contains the equally memorable “A Harnser for James”: “Gillying on Blakeney quay,/ your young hands harrying the line// as another crab gives up its grip/ for the safety of the estuary,/ and your five-year face flares with frustration/ at this world so slow to reward.” Other poems allude to Celtic and Norse myth: “when I saw the turbines// turning out to sea, I thought of Mjölnir/ whirling on its wrist of god,// or some equal engine of the uncurated earth,/ and watched the rain drag its linen over Lincolnshire.” With great sensitivity to language, Hollis reminds readers of the landscape’s ancient and renewing music. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

Ostriker (Waiting for the Light) confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. Her poems address time, ritual, plagues, oracles, and beauty as the speaker takes the broken world as she finds it and courageously steps over the line between the real and the metaphorical: “the lintel through that door./ Write or die.” Reckoning with sacred texts in “The Old Woman Reads Ecclesiastes and The Song Of Songs,” the speaker finds solace and companionship with the feminine half of God, where the body and soul are “broken and we/ alone required to mend it/ Where the angelic feminine, the Shekinanh keeps watch over the life:/ her wings are invisible/ like my wound.” In “Photos of a Young Woman,” the speaker reckons with the desire to merge into the unknown through both the husband and the divine kiss: “and when we were lovers pressing into each other mouth to mouth/ like God and Moses/ didn’t our young bodies press and/ sing very much like that.” This essential collection resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

Schnackenberg’s meditative latest, her first since 2010’s Heavenly Questions, offers a response to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion that reflects on music and the act of listening. “I’m standing/ In the presence/ Of his wild tribulation,” she writes, considering questions of craft through this studied attention and immersion in sound, “As if listening could help.” Schnackenberg is an adept interpreter and participant in Bach’s music (“A sound so charged with care/ It turns its listeners/ Into involuntary witnesses”), meeting it on its own terms and relating to the “secret” behind his genius: “Ceaseless work, analysis, reflection,/ writing much, and endless self-correction,/ that is my secret.” Much like the music this collection is in dialogue with, Schnackenberg’s poems are interested in “intimate compassion.” They pose questions about the sacred (“What is a holy sound? What constitutes/ The sound of holiness?”) as she finds at the core of Bach’s composition qualities of art, holiness, and love, “Without which life is little more/ Than empty errands.” Stately and subtly layered, these poems do justice to the complexity and beauty of Bach’s composition. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink