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

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