The strong latest from Matthews (Unearth [The Flowers]) recounts her childhood in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, a place estranged from its natives and haunted by echoes of past suffering. These poems explore human resilience and survival in its many forms; as Matthews writes in an author’s note, “The ‘eye’ or ‘I’ of the poem shifts and morphs, yet regardless of the poem, the speaker is an extension of the self, a prism angle of the human conscience.” The opening entry delivers the collection’s musical charge: “Teeth-marked fluorescent lamps laminate corneas./ Cosmopolitans mingle with crack./ Abandoned churches hold abandoned crosses.” Later poems employ caesuras mid-line, capturing the sense of fragmentation the collection circles: “Gentrified apartment complexes/ dissolve,/ disintegrate,/ crumble into dust,/ everything goes black” (“Dez”). Moments of introspective awareness are woven throughout—“Sharon Olds dares me/ to write a poem about joy,/ and I lie to her, saying, I can’t”—complementing Matthews’s leaps in form, which include “A Ghazal Through Erotic City”: “I want to fly higher, surpass your light,/ like Icarus, my wings melt in erotic city.” Throughout, she excels at conjuring vivid images: “My head is a gallon/ of bile in a hot air balloon.” The result is a memorable and elegiac ode to family and place. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

This life-affirming posthumous collection from Giovanni (Make Me Rain) features her recent poems as well as letters, lists, excerpts from interviews, and other prose pieces which run the gamut from mini-essays to diaristic writing. Throughout, Giovanni sifts through culture to identify flash points that illuminate deeper truths. “We are born/ We will die// Sometimes/ That’s a good/ Idea/ To Understand,” she writes in the poem “Yes,” which showcases her knack for getting to the heart of shared human experience. Elsewhere, she remarks with her trademark wisdom and clarity, “Hatred is a bad idea. Which is why it’s cheap and available anywhere you look.” Other pieces eulogize and celebrate her contemporaries; in a remembrance of Toni Morrison, Giovanni recounts how she turned to Morrison in the aftermath of two deaths in her family: “One afternoon I was sitting at my desk just sort of being dismayed when I decided to call Toni. I probably talked more than ever and she was kind enough to listen. She finally said Nikki, Write. That’s all you can do. Write.” Full of Giovanni’s righteous vision and serene belief in the power of words, this is a gift. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

In a retrospective spanning two decades, former U.S. poet laureate Limón (The Hurting Kind) captures the mind and soul with exquisite linguistic mastery and vision that will compel readers to earmark every other sentence. Limón raises the standards for elegy, needling the heart with surgical, diaphanous, and cathartic reverie. She exemplifies the fortitude and compassion of her grandfather, who “carried that snake to the cactus,/ where all sharp things could stay safe” and delights in the casual morbidity of her grandmother, who tells her “of all the traffic accidents/ as if she was reading a menu to me out loud.” The poet harnesses perseverance through perspective (“A friend says the best way to love the world is to think of leaving”), as well as transcendentalism (“She thinks she can almost hear it,/ the snow falling, deliberate proof/ that even the sky wants to return and return/ to this shattering world”). Limón’s voice is humble despite its nearly omniscient acuity, weaving her experience into the greater human condition. With its devastating wit, magnetic power, and arresting ingenuity, this volume is one of a kind. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

This difficult yet vibrant work from poet and radiologist Majmudar (What He Did in Solitary) weaves Muslim, Hindu, Old and New Testament, historical, and literary narratives into a three-part multicultural epic. It begins with the fallen angel Azizal, a version of Satan, who preys upon Adam and Eve–like beings until they acquire knowledge and human suffering. The middle section is a Greek-influenced “screenpoem” (“Creon/Pilate”), while the third segment, “Metamorphoses,” is a collection of Ovid-influenced stories featuring Brahma, Vishnu, lovers Shakti and Shiva, and Charles Darwin, among others, as well as the poet trash-talking himself: “More bedtime stories? Damn it, Amit, all/ that superstition’s superseded./ Another Book of dreck? Which of your thirty-/ three/ thousand gods has time to read it?/ It’s colorful and all, I grant you, but you’re/ a radiologist.” Imbuing myth with echoes of Milton, Shakespeare, Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the Beatles, Majmudar teases the reader with comic-book action, witty asides, and erotic coupling, but it is the verse section that triumphs: “Do not fear, he gestures. Choppers locust/ over the Hindu Kush./ This is the city, haloed like a smear/ of penicillin in a petri dish,/ killing itself a radius of clear.” Readers who are up for the challenge will find this a worthy collection. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

The introspective latest from Awkward-Rich (Dispatch) explores Black trans life in an era when possibilities that were so recently accessible appear increasingly tenuous. Many poems give shape to interior landscapes of thought and feeling: “Each morning,/ these days, I walk/ the path winding/ through the woods/ behind my chest, knowing/ what I’ll find but not/ what finding it again/ will change.” Elsewhere, the speaker reflects on Odo, the shape-shifting character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, to describe the experience of being made to fit a mold: “we become what we/ are made to become, approximate/ the forms of those doctors,/ those mothers, those lonesome/ men, brute children who call us/ unmentionable names, who tell/ us, not always without kindness,/ what we are.” A long poem is addressed to Pauli Murray, the 20th-century civil rights activist and poet who suffered living at a time without the language or means to express her possible transgender identity: “we can sense... in your poems, your photographs, your strained sentences, your trans life preserved in the aesthetic, your still-latent futures given form.” These sensitive and expansive poems chart the journey toward ecstatic self-actualization. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Poet and essayist Christle’s observant latest (after The Crying Book) offers a microcosm of interiority, cocooning inside the mind until something takes flight: “I like it/ when it feels like my brain/ is being licked by the rough/ tongue of a stray cat.” Staring through a picture window into “complicated green,” Christle wanders through etymological associations (“About the hexagon there is/ I think something French. Thoughts such as these would/ each get rearranged. Or I could be conveyed briefly out/ of my life via pneumatic tube”), distractions (“Somehow/ I own like six nail clippers/ and I honestly can’t/ remember ever buying/ even one”), and the place where real and dream lives intersect (“a Venn diagram I will never draw: the circle/ of physical lovers and its slim overlap/ with the circle of lovers in dreams”). Motherhood is a central yet vaguely isolating subject for the speaker: “I wish that I knew more about/ Papua New Guinea or total grief.” Candid and attentive, these poems humorously and painstakingly chronicle the inner life of thought. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

In her blistering debut, DeSendi turns an unflinching eye on the experience of surviving sexual assault, as well as the patriarchal and nativist systemic violence that victimizes women and members of racialized communities in the United States. DeSendi’s speaker has been harmed and is “the goddess Kali—all sex & death/ in her garland of skulls.” Elsewhere, she invokes Herodias and her infamous revenge on John the Baptist: “Herodias, teach me not to feel/ regret, to like the sound a neck makes// when it breaks, the blade cleaving/ clean through bone.” With piercing clarity, DeSendi explores the psychological underpinnings of an eating disorder as a means of controlling the body for one who has been disembodied by sexual assault. The memory of the assault is inseparable from the speaker’s dehumanization by the state as a first-generation immigrant from Cuba. This parallel is established in the opening poem, in which the speaker recalls watching her grandmother cut a rooster’s throat, and being told to “be fearless & god-fearing/ as any white man.” The result is a monumental work of investigating and archiving the body and its will to survive and thrive in a hostile environment. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

A member of the Red River Métis tribe, Vermette (North End Love Songs) probes her family’s past and future in this ruminative if uneven outing. In the opening section, “Biindigen,” Vermette explores the relationship between writer, reader, and the broader world as it manifests in the space of the poem (“before/ anything else/ my spirit/ light/ greets yours”). The section’s last poem, “procession” (“you are only here/ to learn from those who came before/ and make space/ for those who come after”), serves as a bridge to the second section, “carry memory,” an extended meditation on photography as a social and family practice. Later sections offer narrative poems organized around childhood memories (“you can still feel this/ in your chest/ all these years later”) and lyric examinations of death, dreams, and the women in the speaker’s life (“my mother/ grandmother/ all their sisters/ openly talked about their dreams/ how in their dreams they would see/ the future”). A plainspoken voice yields gems of beauty and brilliance (“our mothers are/ our first mirrors”) alongside clichés (“twinkle-eyed and cocksure/ Uncle was a man/ who had the world by the balls” and self-help catchphrases (“live life/ as if/ you’ve chosen it”). It adds up to a tender yet somewhat haphazard offering. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Smith (Unshuttered) delivers a formidable volume of selected and previously uncollected poems. Performing the work of “desperate remembering,” Smith revels in Black joy even as she records the violence committed against Black bodies in the name of white supremacy: “We are the disappeared, desolate, and misplaced,/ dark magicians stronger than any root or conjure.” The poet’s uncanny ear and powerfully empathic imagination bring to life Black figures, from those who go unnamed in 19th-century photographs to Little Richard and the victims of Hurricane Katrina (“every woman begins as weather”). A bereaved child asks the poet to “undead” her mother, “Replacing the voice./ Stitching on the lost flesh.” An undertaker repairs the mutilated corpses of young Black men for the sake of their grieving families: “I have smoothed the angry edges/ of bullet holes. I have touched him in places/ no mother knows, and I have birthed his new face.” A pressing question throbs throughout the collection: “can poems save us?” At one point, Smith describes poems as being “only ways to layer music over hurting. Ways to say the quiet things out loud.” Elsewhere, she admits, “I really thought the words would grow to gospel in my hands.” Readers will find themselves forever changed by Smith’s spirited voice. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Women and the natural world take center stage in these precise and visionary poems by Parks (O’Nights). The collection interrogates interiority, motherhood, and the choices of famous female figures (among them, Persephone, Demeter, and Ann Bradstreet) alongside musings on matters closer to home, including the stranger who cuts the stray branch of bougainvillea poking out from the slats of Parks’s fence (a woman who takes something beautiful and cuts “it all down like a man/ in a poem about reaping written by a man”). Elsewhere, the poet carefully questions the symbols used to describe the metamorphosis of a woman who becomes a mother: “Which image of motherhood would she choose?/ Motherhood as water or/ bed, motherhood as the event/ or the shape it left?” A series of short and stunning rhyming poems not only have the cadence of nursery or hopscotch songs, but are grounded in the distracted and messy domestic space that motherhood inhabits: “Laurel, anthill, train horn blare,/ pecan shell shards on the stair.” “The Bat” opens with echoes of Goodnight Moon: “Goodbye oaks, dogwoods, ashes and elms./ Goodbye, caves. Goodbye, mines and the coal/ that lit up the night. Goodbye, night that the bats fly by.” As it progresses, the poem shifts toward calamity, with the bats left “indexing the distance between hawthorn and extinction.” Parks memorably evokes the textures and intricacies of life on earth. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink