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Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems

Richard Blanco. Beacon, $25.95 (202p) ISBN 978-0-8070-1297-0

This beautiful retrospective brings together selections from four of Blanco’s previous books—including his most recent, How to Love a Country—as well as vital new poems. Blanco contemplates identity, belonging, memory, and place as he writes about home, family, and love with a reverent and empathetic eye. In “Splintering,” he unflinchingly enacts the divide between body and soul, describing the moment when a child realizes what being is, as his mother tends to his wound: “I knew nothing of dying. Then she kissed/ the last bead of blood on my finger and said:/ I love you. Meaning what she’d love forever was more than my body, which suddenly split/ from me.” The new offerings powerfully bookend the collection, contextualizing Blanco’s expansive and impressive work. In “Become Me,” a poem written to his husband, the weight of love and death finds transcendence in a place that never dies: “Become my lungs,/ their last gap, nerves firing through/ every scene of our loving. Become the soil/ of my soul. There’s nothing more blessed/ than taking you with me into the ground.” Blanco’s expert command of craft and lyricism is evident in these pages as he offers readers a vision of the quintessential aspects that define humanity, even in the face of despair. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Aednan

Linnea Axelsson, trans. from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. Knopf, , $30 ISBN 978-0-593-53545-5

Sámi Swedish writer Axelsson makes her memorable American debut with a verse novel that spans generations of two Sámi families, addressing themes of migration and colonial suffering through short-lined, atmospheric poems. The epigraphs of these untitled, numbered entries situate the reader. The opener, “Night camp at Lake Gobmejávri, near to where Sweden, Finland, and Norway meet. Early spring 1913,” paints a scenic, ruminative portrait that is characteristic of Axelsson: “A rangeland runs/ from the forest snow to/ the windswept shore// There my herd scrapes/ and leads us/ land to land/ prying me from/ your arms// Alone / among the lichen.” She captures domestic moments with the same eye, providing glimpses into private settings: “In the morning/ we wake early/ drink strong coffee// Hear Uncle Ernst/ treading around in/ the apartment below us// Before he turns/ the key/ tramps into the stairwell// Then he knocks awhile/ on our door// Some article in Flamman/ has probably upset him// and now he needs to/ discuss it// But we don’t/ want to be home// we disappear/ under the covers.” Spanning 100 years, this sensitive, beautiful, quietly rendered epic tells an impactful tale of community and survival. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Watchnight

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson. Nightboat, $17.95 trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-1-64362-194-4

The impressive sophomore collection from Johnson (after the Lambda Award–winning Slingshot) wrestles with history, identity, and belonging in poems that showcase the poet’s formal dexterity and invention. Taking its title from the African American holiday commemorating former slaves’ gathering on New Year’s Eve 1862 to await the official commencement of the Emancipation Proclamation the following day, the volume explores the legacies of an America still struggling to deliver on the promise of liberation. Johnson has a gift for collapsing time through his use of form, as in “Now Let the Weeping Cease,” which is both a sonnet and a duplex (a form invented by poet Jericho Brown) and captures a haunted present: “My death is a shade that hums back at me./ My ghost hums back across time’s night-vast gap.” The bulk of the book is a long, terrifyingly prescient poem in prose blocks that envisions an utterly broken commons: “Each crisis punctuated by a crisis. North Jersey’s factories blank as dead faces. Ports with no dockers. An unshakable aura of shortage and lack. The softest erosions ferried us to this shore. Our we fragmented, atomized, and blown away.” Urgent and wise, these poems look back to envision a precarious future. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Alt-Nature

Saretta Morgan. Coffee House, $17.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-56689-697-9

The thoughtful and powerful debut collection from Morgan vividly depicts the American Southwest, with a focus on the sensory experience of deserts: “Now in coming between one desert/ and another, I recognize the edges, parting and clear.... Only deserts witness the slow and complete life of water.// A story of chassis. And foraged box springs.// The one sound offered wandering night without horizon.// Each exceeds its genre while remaining truly intact” (“Dearth-Light”). Elsewhere, anecdotal moments foreground the collection’s reflections on language, militarism, and the environment: “My dad shared this story.// He arrived, an Army recruiter, to pick up a new enlistee. A Native kid outside Albuquerque. Everyone in the house began to cry. More people arrived, filling the tight space, and they cried too. Before long my dad was crying with them.// I asked him what had he been crying for. And he looked at me like I was a fool.” Morgan skillfully weaves together landscapes, nuanced reflections on Black and queer identity, and social and ecological commentary in these stirring pages. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Ward Toward

Cindy Juyoung Ok. Yale Univ, $20 trade paper (100p) ISBN 978-0-300-27392-2

Winner of the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize, Ok in her refreshing debut uses language to push against the staid edges of the status quo, exposing the tenuous and often contradictory beliefs that seemingly undergird reality. With their capacious perspective, these verses bear witness to the hypocrisies of convention on the personal and global scale. A concrete poem titled “Before DMZ” takes the shape of the Korean peninsula before its split into North and South, formally echoing that geopolitical bifurcation in the piece’s two halves, while also exploring the speaker’s complex family ties and calling into question the forces continuing to ensure such a split: “My/ moth-/er sent/ a photo of/ the federal build-/ ing she was/ being naturalized in,/ writing Boring I/ love you. That winter,/ her father revealed he left/ behind a first wife, two kids, north/ before the war.” Ok regularly makes startling connections that invite readers to reexamine their circumstances: “My country is broken, is estranged, is trying, we write,/ as though there is such a material as a country, as/ though the landlord doesn’t charge rent for life lived/ outside the house.” Ok’s brave and idiosyncratic debut challenges institutionalized reality as it gestures toward the possibility of freedom. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Invisible Mending

C.K. Williams. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25 (272p) ISBN 978-0-374-60839-2

This remarkable volume gathers essential work from Williams (1936–2015; Falling Ill), highlighting his ranging thought and moral intensity as well as his transformations as a poet. In the introduction, Alan Shapiro describes how Williams’s shift to long lines in his later work allowed the poet to expand his ethical concerns into new territory: “In his hands, the long line itself becomes a remarkably flexible instrument, accommodating almost any kind of subject or experience.” Shorter, imagistic lines of early poems—“The twilight rots./ Over the greasy bridges and factories,/ it dissolves/ and the clouds swamp in its rose/ to nothing”—give way to Williams’s characteristic longer lines as he continues to search for answers that don’t easily come, as in this haunting realization from “The Shade”: “If this were the last morning of the world, if time had finally moved inside us and erupted/... I think I’d still be here,/ afraid or not enough afraid, silently howling the names of death over the grass and asphalt.” In “The World,” Williams’s late voice retains his concern for truth but trades anxiety for awe: “reality has put itself so solidly before me/ there’s little need for mystery... Except for us, for how we take the world/ to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.” Sensitive and humane, this dazzles. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Black Bell

Alison C. Rollins. Copper Canyon, $22 trade paper (136p) ISBN 978-1-55659-700-8

The astute second collection from Rollins (Library of Small Catastrophes) delivers an unsettling encounter with American history and its reverberations into the present. Taking its title from the practice of enslavers attaching iron bells on rods to enslaved people to prevent them from escaping, the collection plumbs the relationship between sound, Blackness, and performance as possible avenues for ongoing resistance and liberation. The first entry, “A Bell is a Messenger of Time,” suggests that the unjust entanglements of the past continue to haunt: “Barnacle bells. Irremovable attachments. Even when I ghost you, you still hear me.” Rollins draws on more recent technologies to call to mind current issues surrounding racial bias, as in the poem “Phillis Wheatley Takes a Turing Test,” which includes instructions for one of its two voices to be read “via a computer-generated or synthetic voice,” as though AI gets to determine whether the foundational poet of the African American tradition is, in fact, human. Formally inventive poems incorporate diagrams, such as “Hymn of Inscape,” inspired by Harriet Jacobs’s and Henry “Box” Brown’s unconventional and harrowing escapes from slavery: “A nation is an open secret/ ...To escape is to sing.” It adds up to an unflinching and incisive compilation. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

Edited by Ada Limón. Milkweed, $25 (128p) ISBN 978-1-57131-568-7

Gathered by U.S. poet laureate Limón (The Hurting Kind), this beautifully curated anthology of 50 previously unpublished poems challenges preconceptions about “nature poetry” as it meditates on humanity’s relationship to the planet. As Limón writes in the introduction: “these poems represent the full spectrum of how we human animals connect to the natural world.” The collection opens with Carrie Fountain’s wonderful “You Belong to the World”: “You belong/ to the world, animal. Deal with it. Even as/ the great abstractions come to take you away,/ the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second/ come back to the world to which you belong,/ the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells/ forever, forever going through their changes.” Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “An Inn For the Coven” provides a delightfully occult twist on the magic of life: “All our loves/ are witches too. Or warlocks. All/ our children and all our children./ Welcome. Water running in the/ brook.” In “To Think of Italy While Climbing the Saunders-Monticello Trail,” Kiki Petrosino offers a spare and haunting poem comprising four couplets that build to a devastating finale: “These mountains have given us/ so much & we// will not even give ourselves/ to each other.” This collection stands apart for the strength of its entries and the breadth of its superb meditations on a pressing theme. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Holy Winter

Maria Stepanova, trans. from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale. New Directions, $14.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-8112-3514-3

The moving, polyvocal latest from Stepanova (War of the Beasts and the Animals) is a book-length snowscape sequence that blends voices of fracture and love, evoking Ovid in exile and other historical touchstones, from Baron Munchausen to Hans Christian Andersen. Skillfully rendered by Dugdale, the air in these poems is infused with such dangers as “Airborne particles of frost ash/ Tiny cavalry officers” (noncoincidentally, the book was written during Covid-19 lockdowns). There is a feeling of arrest in these pages (“We, wrapped in snow for safe-keeping/ Like pictures overlaid with glassine,/ Suddenly came to a stop”), but there’s equally a difficult hopefulness, the voices reaching for “that place where misfortune is not known,” however forlorn their searching. It adds up to a finely woven exercise in vocalization that always looks toward redemption, or at least respite, from its shocking precarity: “if time has a pocket then place me in it, gently.” A political undertow—including mentions of “the god of anger” and “one/ Whose power is equal with that of the gods”—adds to the collection’s depth. Bound together by a gently thoughtful steeliness, these poetic utterances are at once plaintive and resolute. (May)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space

Catherine Barnett. Graywolf, $17 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-64445-287-5

The stunning latest from Barnett (Human Hours) blends the witty and the philosophical to offer a study in “restricted fragile materials,” or the bewildering condition of being alive. A sequence on loneliness runs through the collection, capturing the often ignored or unrendered sensations from life’s earliest moments (“The doctors snip the cord. I don’t know if that’s when it starts”) to its last in elegiac notes struck in poems for a father, and others for a friend. This is as much a taxonomy of “the science of love” as it is a thoughtful, literate, and discursive gathering of evidence as to how one might live deliberately, carefully, and honestly (“Flawed solutions are sometimes answered prayers,” the speaker remarks.) The voice is self-aware and open to the world, at times almost self-defeatingly so, like the moth “choosing transcendence/ over other basic needs.” Like their speaker, these poems “wander/ the Museum of Useful Life” making “mortal noise”—an unpacking, with comic timing, of the fact that “The human condition is made of moisture and heat.” Urbane, perceptive, and starkly humane, these are poems of quiet alarm, at once companionable and singular. (May)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

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