Divided into four sections, the meditative sophomore volume from Ebeid (You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior) draws from the heritages of her Palestinian father and Cuban mother. In “Ghazal over Waves,” the repeated word wave captures the rhythm and motions of displacement, “North we go. North by fishing boat, by plane, by truck, by hot-air balloon. Look down at the waves./ Blue-violet North of shorter wavelengths, shorter attention spans—call out, call out and wave.” The entries weave memory, voices, places, and languages (Arabic, English, and Spanish) in spare lines that reflect on expression, art, and family history. “She Got Love: A Circle of Spells for Ana Mendieta” evokes the eponymous Cuban American artist in a poem comprised of lines arranged in circles, while “Autochthonous Silueta” begins, “The camera records Ana Mendieta kneeling/ beside her earth-body sculpture, concave dug-/ out of her self, hollow suspicion of a person.” It adds up to a memorable and skillful excavation of identity and inheritance. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Cohen (The Sorrow Apartments) offers spare reflections on grief, memory, inheritance, and spirit in her economical and exacting ninth collection. The title poem, which explores the fallibility of memory, paints a lively portrait of a night out drinking in the 1980s (“you could still/ smoke in bars then you could/ still go home with six cartons/ of smoke in your hair”). The speaker later realizes she wasn’t actually present on this night, and that she only remembered hearing about it secondhand, raising questions about what it really means to remember. In the best entries, every word is essential. Elsewhere, the brevity can be a little overdone (“Breaking News” reads in full: “We were al-/ ready broken”), but those who enjoy haiku and Zen koans will appreciate the frank simplicity. It is hard, for example, not to be charmed by the opening lines of “Wax,” in which Cohen is at her most philosophical and sly: “A ball of wax/ is the whole/ ball of wax,/ no matter/ how small.” Though short, the poems are expansive in the imagery and ideas they evoke, and consistently clever in their execution. It’s a worthy addition to Cohen’s acclaimed body of work. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The ruminative latest from Wang (Pebble Swing) pays tribute to the late Canadian poet Phyllis Webb, whose appearance in the book’s epigraph acts as an invocation: “Give me poets,/ a hand full of dust/ before the skies/ fall down.” Poets are addressed throughout the collection, which is divided into five “Passages” spanning from 2020 to 2024. Many of the poems, which adopt a rectangular form with caesuras and no punctuation, are in direct correspondence with Webb’s writing, and some speak to her directly. Both mortality and extinction haunt the edges—Wang was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, when she was a college student. Her writing appears deliberately elliptical in places (“propositions i could erase/ your and with a soft/ dinosaur eraser and tell you// in return that the two halves/ of what you think are fires/ and floods are just feelings—”), as though attempting to capture the inadequacy of expression. Descriptions of the environment are particularly strong: “the last swordfish in water’s/ nostalgia burns/ evolving into a monster// but survives the rainbow stripes/ of gasoline riding/ the roof of her home.” This cements Wang’s reputation as a rising star in Canadian poetry. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

In her prismatic fourth collection, novelist, memoirist, and poet Alvarez (The Woman I Kept to Myself) spins richly detailed micro-narratives of her childhood in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s, her young adulthood in New York City, and beyond. Vivid scenes include reciting poems for her mother’s guests while wearing “a pink party dress with a flaring crinoline” and attending the American embassy school, where she felt excluded by the teacher: “He seldom called on us natives/ with our caramel skin, unruly hair/ wetted and tightly braided.” Later, in New York, she recalls immersing herself in books when her father would drop her off at the library while he looked for work: “This was the trade-off for coming to America:/ you became as small as the country you came from/ a speck on an ocean I could cover with my thumb.” Alvarez brings her trademark humor to vulnerable scenes, as in “At the Mental Health Clinic Waiting Room,” where the speaker, struggling with “the old bout of self-doubt,” observes the scene around her: “The schizophrenic skims/ her People, the paranoid broods/ over a breast brochure, god bless/ the anorexic feasting on her nails.” The result is a vivid and arresting volume. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Chen’s crystalline debut explores memory, nostalgia, and identity in poems that jump-cut between locations—Barcelona, Berlin, Ithaca, New York City—as well as “a sequence of past selves lined up, each next to a river of identifications” (“Macerations”). “I thought I had failed, in my life, to make my fear understood,” Chen writes, and their poems are an attempt to make their fear—and their identity—understood, even at the risk of fulfilling the book’s opening lines, “unintelligible to the end. To the end,/ unintelligible.” While there is some tonal and syntactical monotony across the collection, the poems do a good job balancing vivid scenes, storytelling, and reflection. In “Self-Portrait at 26,” Chen outlines their hope that “all of life will go here. It will make it whole into the poem,” including, as they explain in “Chryselephantine, Conviction,” life’s inevitable contradictions: “I// don’t know the relationship// between the possible and the impossible but I know they have to come into contact. Commune.” Readers will savor this strong and cerebral study of selfhood. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The formally dazzling latest from Majmudar (What He Did in Solitary) features sonnet crowns, long ghazal sequences, and Juvenalian satire, all paying homage to the women he admires, from his grandmother, mother, wife, and daughter, to Wonder Woman, Hindu goddesses, poet friends, and a nurse in a kill zone. Couplets such as “Time is a circle I can put to use:/ a wheel to roll things back, a crown, a noose,” butt up against the sagacity of his grandmother, whose old-country pronouncements are a highlight: “Sure, the Ganga is holy,/ but who told you to drink from it?” Other memorable remarks include “You know why they call it India/ ink, don’t you? When they burn us alive/ we write poems with the soot,” and “Be a poet, okay,/ But be something else, too.” A central section of erotic love poems (“The woman is the word. I have married into mystery”) is followed by witty takes on modern life (“Litcoin”; “Unnatural Intelligence”) and musings on invisibility (“School of Withcraft and Wizardry”). It’s a tour de force. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The smoldering debut from Kennedy traces his coming of age as a gay man in the 1990s against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, his tumultuous straight marriage, and the trauma of being raised by an alcoholic mother. Whether he’s outlining his dual life before coming out or the darker moments of abuse at his mother’s hands, Kennedy exhibits a remarkable ability to state his aims clearly and honestly. In “Sheraton by the Airport,” he writes of hooking up with the man who mows his lawn, “But I want him/ to touch my cheek and rip/ my blindfold off, so he can stop/ being everyone/ and no one.” “The Gamble, 1992” is similarly strong: “They wanted/ what I had, which was close/ to being wanted.” These poems comprise searing portraits of the poet, his family, and others. The narrative arc tracing Kennedy’s relationship to his mother—from abuse and molestation to her later mental deterioration and dementia—holds enthralling heat. Lines from the title poem about his mother burning trash feel like an apt summation of how the memories herein haunt and harrow poet and reader alike: “There’s always a piece, she says,/ whacking the side of the barrel./ A goddam piece/ that just won’t burn.” This is an accomplished first effort. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

This monumental volume of Levis’s collected works is a study in the development and deepening of his gifts, from his debut in 1972 to poems published following his death in 1996. Levis’s bruised, engrossing voice suggests the “long, volleying/ Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where/ I spent it all,” and a “solitude the world usually allows/ Only to kings & criminals.” To read the full sweep of his work is to see an increased expression of the inner life, a voice “full of dusk, and jail cells,/ And bird calls.” What stays consistent is the poet’s vision of ordinary failure and his thwarted quest for reparation, whether in poems about the self, or in his character- and voice-driven work. Throughout, a wounded, self-deceiving faith is on display: “I got it all wrong./ I wound up believing in words the way a scientist/ Believes in carbon, after death.” Levis comes across as unfailingly honest in his self-interrogation, even in the most vulnerable, broken moments: “Out here, I can say anything.” He describes a knife used for grape-picking as “silver from so many sharpenings,” a phrase that could apply to his writing. It’s an essential celebration of a poet of tremendous power. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The arresting visual poems in the sophomore collection from Hoffer (Undershore) play on the meaning of slash, a term for forest debris created by wind, logging, or fire. Beyond providing metaphorical kindling, the slash also appears as a punctuation mark arranged in different patterns, with or without text, like line and stanza breaks gone haywire. The poems draw power from the alternate meanings of words, even as their restless trajectories don’t trust the medium: “when I write toward the world, I am pushed out of it.// fingering language’s tether, I ask to be opened.” Of her mother, she writes: “I fear my poems// about her death will replace her/ /.” Fraught with cracks, spaces, separations, repetitions, and erasures, these poems explore the territory where language intersects with “real” life: “to end/ on an image is to avoid a decision yet here I stand/ still, in two streams, water collaring my ankles each/ prickling in its sensuous confusion.” Motifs float tenuously here—a mother’s death, aspects of fire, a sexual relationship that turns marital—and some progressions seem merely associative. Full of leaps and contradictions, this is an inventive and lyrical work. (Feb.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the publisher.

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Skeets (Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers), a Diné poet, traces changes in the landscape of Navajo Nation in these haunting poems. Taking its title from the 2018 discovery of 191 dead horses trapped in the mud of a dry stock pond in the Nation, the collection draws connections between the land and its inhabitants to demonstrate human and nonhuman entanglements. In many poems, Skeets calls attention to a shared experience between the people and the environment, both suffering from the threats of climate change: “there has been no rain and we monster/ hot afternoons in narrow hollows/ metals green and sweep over memories of dew/ and shorelines now rust and golden with sweat.” Skeets employs a first-person plural we throughout, drawing the reader’s attention to a collective perspective of critical resistance to state-sanctioned violence and erasure: “time is an ulcer/ a lie we tell through mouths not our own/ because this mouth belongs to policy/ because time is stolen from us.” In these poems, queer desire also exists alongside the natural world: “I learn to love him/ so erosive it eats/ through the canyon.” This alluring and exacting collection beautifully reflects on the boundaries between people and place. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink