The penetrating latest from Byas (I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times) addresses the conflict between the observer and the observed. Through poems, essays, and other hybrid forms that engage with photography, painting, film, and television, Byas explores the power of the image to restrict and control Black women. In “Essay on Shuttering,” the speaker describes the gendered dynamics of a photo shoot in eerie, mechanical terms: “He who holds the camera has the say. The photographer says smile and I obey. He motions how he wants me to shift my body and my body follows. Under the bright studio lights of the photo shoot, I begin to sweat—my body’s only rebellion.” Other entries consider the consequences of a society that silently condones the objectification of the Black female body. In “Sculpture Study #1,” a man sexually assaults a woman on her way to the subway, prompting the speaker to ask, “What are we allowed to really be when we hurt in public: human or statue?” An aura of unease permeates these poems as they ruminate on the false fixity of the image: “I still couldn’t become myself.” This astute and ingenious collection shines. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Malech’s moving fifth collection (after Flourish) is a meditation on motherhood and loss in perilous times. Impressive in their attention to language, Malech’s poems interrogate “our moment’s um,” musically considering the complexities of the moment while reflecting on the challenges of writing itself. Rooted in close observation, these poems offer a practice that proves fraught: “wherever I look is looking away,” Malech writes. The collection grapples with the pandemic and a world in which “our list of what is gone goes on.” The speaker is acutely aware of the myriad dangers around them, of how “those mouths of ours that now—still/ now—are even deadly when we sing.” Despite the crises looming in the background, Malech finds room for tenderness and hope. In “For My Friend Who Is Tired of Children in Poems,” she writes: “let’s be sick of the sweetness of this world.” Malech stares into the void with wit and defiance, reminding the reader that “that roar you hear/ is just eternity.” It’s an inventive and gripping work. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bashir (Field Theories) presents a multimedia experience that captures the fractured contemporary moment in dynamic poems of wit, clarity, rage, and sorrow. In her characteristic conversational tone, the poet explores the defiance of creative expression in a ruthlessly capitalist world and the apocalyptic flavor of 21st-century life. Her musings on mortality are especially moving: “I fear I feel/ I fear I’ve sunk too deep deep/ like neck-deep ya know?... I wonder how quickly through death’s door/ one laughs at absurd earthly cares.” The long poem “Letter from Exile” powerfully details Bashir’s experience in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which she traveled between Italy, New York, and Massachusetts. She draws connections between her appointment as the first Black Rome Prize fellow and the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests: “The thing about twenty-first century Negro Firsting(™) is that racism—the/ distraction of it as Morrison warned—is just so boring... Most days America screams to anyone who’ll listen how it hates me so much/ it would rather kill us all than let me live.” The collection’s multimedia elements (including photographs, large block text, sheet music, and etchings) amplify the stakes of the text. This stirring volume deserves a wide audience. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

The joyfully inventive debut by Colgate honors the disabled community. Complete with an access guide and legend denoting options for the reader to interact with the poems on their own terms, Colgate radically reenvisions how a text might support its reader. A poem about the speaker’s partner finding creative ways to convince the speaker to take his antipsychotic medication begins with the universal access symbol for “Access Support Worker”—a figure assisting another figure in a wheelchair—and includes the lines, “he slips the pills into the shredded mango salad,/ pinches a handful into my mouth.” Many entries draw connections between the disabled community and queer conceptions of the body centered on care and friendship, such as “Ode to Pissing,” which reformulates the speaker assisting a disabled friend into a casual acknowledgment of their shared humanity: “The song of piss on porcelain. Lorraine and I talk dreams of bathhouse raves,/ disabled teachers, careers in porn. I ask how she became so comfortable/ with friends wiping her and she shrugs, lifts her shoulders, checks if she’s done.” Colgate’s generous and perceptive poems make an impact. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

This beautiful and meditative compilation of Argentine poet Ponce’s work presents ethereal scenes that seem self-contained in the poetic world (“The body exits and enters./ The horizon awaits the shock of the stones.// And kisses glide on the blood,/ from your lips, kisses”). Ponce, who began publishing in Spanish in the 1970s, writes in a patient, philosophical voice that roams widely between subjects, from a child learning language (“House as Kingdom”) to the tangle of eye, ear, and hand at play in a Chinese calligraphy workshop (“Fudekara”). As Ponce guides the reader through her experiment of “writing as an analogy—and not as expression: to construct another nature without morals, without biomes... at once empty of reference, empty of explications, isolated from ideas,” the mind’s intense presence in the world opens to radical possibilities, even as it ostensibly turns away from the raucous and politically charged Argentine poetry world that translator Shea capably outlines in his introduction. Readers will savor this. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

The marvelous, shape-shifting latest from Ravinthiran (after The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here) features poems of relocation and dislocation, cataloging the struggle to acclimatize while refusing bland truisms. A blending of cultures and landscapes—British, Sri Lankan, North American—creates moments of imagistic fusion in lines full of nuance about the complications of experience: “otherness is something/ they’ll never get their heads around.” These poems are also suffused with the speaker’s self-accusation and refusal to seem more valiant than necessary, even when “Fancying himself/ an action hero walking in slow-motion.” Instead, they seek to capture a life beset by hyper-alertness: “I stayed behind// with my wrongdoing and the exordium/ to this dire this everlasting vigilance.” Ravinthiran writes about his son—“I can’t be still/ the centre of the universe/ how do I make it/ all about him?”—while admitting the geopolitical ruptures and cataclysms he is unwilling to ignore: “between one/ set of murderers and another,/ a shot mother/ dropped her baby/ in the lagoon.” History and the domestic clash within an expansive literary heritage: “from our kitchen the time-travelling smell/ of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.” Allusive, musical, studied yet tender, this is a wonder. (June)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Petit (Tiger Girl), who is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage, embraces the landscapes of each of her countries of origin in potent brooding poems that explore trauma and transformation. Following the dark paths her memories forge, Petit documents scenes that seethe with life and startling imagery, “the air quivering with scented paths into the perfumed forest.” Many entries focus on the speaker’s mother: “how I can describe my mother to you/ is the task I’ve spent my life attempting.” She likens her mother, who suffered from mental illness, to a spider, “the giant ogress/ who hangs at the dense/ heart of my universe.” Elsewhere, she’s an octopus: “such a mistress of camouflage/ she can vanish inside her own hide/ instantly.” In these poems, the word hide serves both as an action and a camouflage, a “hide” or blind used by those who wish to go undetected as well as a skin or pelt. The meanings blend as the poet writes, “I peer out/ from the hide of my face.” Petit suggests that people are just as strange and dangerous as any tiger, caiman, or moor horse and require just as much caution. It’s a vivid and elegant collection. (June)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Mullen’s striking latest, her first collection since 2013’s Urban Tumbleweed, interrogates an increasingly online world with a keen eye for the eerie. “As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud” opens with the line “Smart machines armed with proprietary algorithms remain attentive to my wishes.” The book inhabits a dystopian landscape in which “a computer-generated tempest agitates the Pacific,” reminding readers of the inextricable relationship between technology and climate disaster. Even against the backdrop of a crumbling planet, the images are dazzling: “On your way to the end of the earth, you cruise the garish boulevard blinged out with glittering rhinestones.” Mullen’s poems are surprising and idiosyncratic; readers encounter robot spouses, billionaires sent to space in capsules, and an AI chatbot. The pandemic casts a shadow as the speaker sifts through a disconnected world in search of community. Ultimately, the collection celebrates human connection and spirit: “you who have been/ a creeping crawling thing,/ awake, take flight.” This wildly imaginative work speaks to the present times with a powerful urgency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

How does one stay vigilant to the horrors of the world when the “wallet’s empty and sink is full”? asks Kolchinsky (40 Weeks) in this reflective work of witness. The poet, who left Ukraine with her family at age six, toggles painfully between watching the war unfold in Ukraine and caring for her daughter and neurodiverse son in the U.S. As in her previous collection, which chronicled her second pregnancy, motherhood is a central theme. Yet this new portrait of motherhood against a backdrop of war is ragged and despairing. Kolchinsky expands the motif to touch on her mother tongue, her motherland, and the obliteration of physical autonomy that comes with motherhood. On the 100th day of the war, she writes, “My tongue/ hurts my mouth... I claw at my scalp to find/ unintended gifts my children/ left behind—lime playdough, floss, an uneaten/ french fry. Their bodies use mine/ as treasure chest & waste bin.” In “Tell me it gets easier,” she does nothing to soften the blow, telling new parents that no, it doesn’t get easier: “The depths/ are endless not because/ they do not end but because/ we’ve never reached the bottom.” And yet, “endurance is a resistance all its own.” Readers will find this a moving and impactful collection. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

The insistent and formally experimental third collection from Vang (Yellow Rain) turns her incisive poetic eye to the critically endangered saola—a bovine native to Laos and Vietnam—to explore themes of colonialism, war, and extinction. “I am a secret that exists,” she writes in “Evolution, Absence,” which draws compelling resonances between the plight of the Hmong people and the threats facing saolas, also known as Asian unicorns for their elusiveness. Moving skillfully between human and animal worlds, the speaker’s voice captures a state of psychic restlessness: “sometimes I want to cut loose/ the animal in my cortex, tear into this ache. There is/ no such thing as new pain,/ only the same pain recycled a/ hundred ways.” Elsewhere, the speaker reflects on her pregnancy, reaching toward the saola in pursuit of connection: “I search my being for grace I share/ with you, extent of my presence/ from feet to head, incision under my belly/ from where my baby emerged.” Vang’s poems are visually stirring, conjuring diagrams and word clouds that, on occasion, feel overextended. Nonetheless, this is an ambitious and impassioned contribution to contemporary poetry. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink