The dazzling latest from Forde (Mother Body) draws on the King James Bible to lyrically recount the story of the poet’s grandmother, Alice, a Black woman who journeys from the American South to New York during the Great Migration and overcomes heartbreak and long odds to raise a family along the way. Narrative poems explore Alice’s experience leaving behind the world she knows as she endeavors to make a life for herself and her children: “Alice removes her shoes from her sore feet,/... sees in the well-worn tread a bit of Carolina clay/... pinches its rosy trails between her fingers/—the last remnant of home.” Entries in Alice’s voice showcase a mind questioning patriarchy: “that’s what’s wrong/ with womanin’, we stay spinning yarn/ from the colorful crochet of our minds, but few/ admire it—Dear LORD, why did you make me/ in your image if you wanted me to kneel?” Forde incorporates a variety of forms into the collection, demonstrating her playful sense of craft in poems that take a cue from scripture, such as “Fat Gospel” with its long lines and refrain, “& it came to pass that Alice was fine with her fat.” This life-affirming book celebrates resilient women and their legacies. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This singular poetic collaboration between Komunyakaa (Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth) and McClung (Between Here and Monkey Mountain) chronicles their efforts to cope with the isolation and fear of the Covid-19 pandemic. Begun as an email exchange initiated by Komunyakaa in March 2020, the collection comprises epistolary tercets the poets traded nearly every day for the next two years and culminates in a dreamlike epic poem tracing time and geography. History, in these poems, functions as a fluid medium, allowing the poets to move with ease between the here-and-now and the ancient past, as in these lines from early in the collaboration: “We lament blame plaguing us/ as a fever sweeps over the seven/ continents. Does blood of bull/ or lamb bless the thresholds/ of every doorjamb, where no gold/ or crossbow can rescue us now?” The poets’ exchanges are delineated by an indentation that gives the text polyvocal and contrapuntal qualities, further heightened by the array of figures—from Socrates to Toni Morrison—who enter the text. An underlying sense of unease pervades: “If we went back to digging up pig roots/ with bare hands, or buried our clocks/ in river beds, we’re not innocent, no sir.” Readers will find it a gripping and surreal vision of pandemic times. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Erotically charged and combining classical allusions with frank depictions of kink, the stately third collection from Hofmann (A Hundred Lovers) displays the hushed tones and precision for which he is celebrated. Standouts include “Minotaur” and “Drowning on Crete,” in which he reimagines Greek myth through the lens of queer longing. “Breed Me” confronts the intersections of pleasure, pain, and power with candor: “The way you hurt me (fingers, teeth):/ I grew accustomed to it/ Then I craved it/ Then I got bored/ And other men tried to put death into my mouth.” In “Armour/Amour,” the speaker demands, “Put your camera in my mouth,” collapsing the gaze and the body neatly into one. Hofmann’s voice is confessional while rarely giving much away. He is at his best when capturing true intimacy, as in “Young People”: “The hours we didn’t do anything/ But sit on the floor in silence:/ Nothing more erotic than being in the same room/ Not interacting—/ Reading different articles,/ Our minds elsewhere.” Despite their sexual exhibitionism, the poems are pristine, evoking the white marble of ancient Greek statuary. Some readers might wish for a little more mess, but there are plenty of knockouts to be found in this elegant assemblage. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

The passionate latest collection from Dungy (Trophic Cascade) delivers an unsettled ode to her native country that weaves together places the poet has inhabited and people she has known. “America, have you ever noted how well you stretch/ the imagination?” Dungy asks, drawing from history, memory, and witness. Poems rooted in her experience as a Black woman and mother trace a direct line from the first slave ship to arrive in Jamestown (“what rhymes with ocean—rhymes with empty”) through the Birmingham church bombing (“dear Black girls! sweet babies”) to her own daughter, whom she tries to teach “how it feels to break free.” Power surges from dynamic lines: “I am built of muscle, circumstance & bone. Also blues,/ tin, blown glass, breath & boxing gloves.” Gardens proliferate: “chrysanthemums—sturdy, flamboyant,/ insistent—praise be! oh! see how they thrive!” California landscapes loom large, radiant and perpetually under threat of fire: “the dry grass/ whispering long after the last rains.” Of Drakes Bay, Dungy writes, “this anchorage. Those soft brown/ shoulders. The headlands. Here I am. So much in bloom!/ And me, with you, in all this soft wild buzzing.” For all its grief and pain, this tender volume’s irrefutable watchword is love. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Muldoon’s well-selected anthology of sonnets takes its title from a line in Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,” in which he writes of “the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.” Confinement, Muldoon notes, is one of the aspects that unites the history of the sonnet, that “most persistent but also the most pervasive” of forms, as he writes in his witty and illuminating introduction. He is insightful on the ways African American poets have worked with and expanded the sonnet’s boundaries, noting that poets such as Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes have “evoked the boundedness of the sonnet not so much to assert national or cultural belonging, as to trouble the limitations such concepts imply.” This is borne out by the defiant assertion in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”: “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Muldoon draws out other tropes and traditions that prove to be useful and indicative guides through this democratic anthology, which is arranged alphabetically instead of chronologically to highlight the universality of the form’s possibilities and mix of chaos and control. It’s a welcome primer on an always relevant poetic form. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This brilliant collection of previously unpublished poems from Berryman’s Dream Songs cycle is proof, as Shane McCrae writes in the introduction, that he “understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form.” For McCrae, Henry—Berryman’s alter-ego in the Songs—“is a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled.” It’s extraordinary to reencounter that voice—at once comic, tragic, and heartbreaking—across the span of these poems, many of which achieve the heights of those that established Berryman’s stellar reputation. The entries exhibit the familiar lurch from high to low and disordered and disjointed syntax. Among the finest are elegies for other poets, such as Louis MacNeice and Delmore Schwartz, which affectingly turn toward melancholy, “Over the dark miles I seize in my hand/ his, and with him I hope she slept/ the grimy night gone by,” or woundable romanticism, “where once we risked the rest of it on love/ where once somewhat now we grow bewildered & hardened—but not good enough.” Courtly, profound, and irresistible, this is a gift for readers already tuned into Huffy Henry and those new to Berryman’s essential American songbook. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In a brief introduction to this strong bilingual collection from Follain, who died in 1971, translator Seguin argues that “time is his ultimate subject—how it overlaps and doubles back in memory, how each arriving instant contains past and future, and how sad it is to lose it.” Follain’s poems richly illustrate this attention to time: “Countrysides soak up ancient sun/ although the past/ will never come back the same.” The volume arranges Follain’s tenderly observant and crystalline poems into three sections—two focused on poems from 1933–1953 and 1960–1971, respectively, plus a shorter sequence of prose poems from 1957. Follain’s love for “hear[ing] in the depths of memory/ the creaking of doors in cold rooms/ while poplars rustled on the riverbanks” causes “one’s blood thrill,” a reading experience that is vivid and expansive. Despite the poet’s retrospective gaze and his knowledge that “the next century will be worse,” he provides comfort in moments that recognize that “lovers [still] go by singing.” The result is a lively survey of a writer who feels fresh, even as he speaks to and from history. Devotees of the French pastoral will be especially keen to take a look. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Baker’s graceful latest (after Whale Fall) announces that “the world is in pieces,” but nevertheless eschews despair. In these poems, “the heart lies open to the world,” where past and present meet until “years don’t matter.” There’s a yearning, keening quality to Baker’s writing, an attempt to get across “the flavor of some happiness, when we were happy,” and a sense of dawning understanding. “I would like to leave a good accounting of my life,” he writes, “And leave, when I leave, by a quiet path.” The well-trodden paths of memory announce themselves throughout the volume, asking readers to slow their own stride and take in the scenery—birds, landscapes, and fauna—populating Baker’s work: “You would miss it if you were hurrying.” In a seemingly quiet voice that resounds through the well-crafted musicality of his lines, Baker offsets the drift toward melancholy with an urge to celebrate beauty and what endures of it: “I think we live in many times at once,” he notes in a poem that channels and communes with Anne Bradstreet. Self-aware and bruised but celebratory, this astonishes. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

The title of Zwart’s ruminative debut refers to epitaphs carved on gravestones. Fittingly, the impulse for unlikely pairings (“odd” and “sad”) pulses throughout these poems, from “the pocks Christmas lights burn/ into a porch rail’s ruff of snow” to the mylar cemetery balloon described as “a silver pita... bleeding helium molecules.” Even joyful metaphors (“every peach,/ a geode”) give way to the underlying tragedy that runs through the collection: the childhood death of the poet’s younger brother. At the heart of the volume is a single powerful image: “my brother’s baldness,/ adding wattage to his eyes.” It becomes clear, as the book progresses, that calamity is inextricably tied to the oddness of the ordinary: “for forty years I have remembered the first night// of Adam’s sickness more than any other thing:/ the strange sauce on my Grandma’s pasta.” While fear of death is never far from these poems, the struggle against it is somewhat relieved by time, the poet’s clean biopsy results, and her love of her children and their creations: “Is it nexterday?/ one used to ask, meaning tomorrow.” Though a few of Zwart’s imaginative leaps feel strained, readers will find these searching and spiritual poems linguistically textured and appealingly direct. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Intellectually rigorous and emotionally piercing, Villanueva’s sophomore collection (after Reliquaria) threads Greek myth, Christian iconography, and family history into a frank exploration of mortality. The poems address grief and loss from many angles—from the pain of a loved one’s death to solastalgia (distress caused by environmental change), and most vividly, mourning for the loss of safety as fascism descends upon the United States. A wrenching series of sonnets that opens the book addresses the murders of Black men by police and the devastation left behind for their loved ones and communities: “Today they are/ burning the names of the boys they are/ shooting in the street. This because we—// and they—know ashes mean undone leads/ and muzzles loosened, floodlights and flares,/ eyes doused with milk.” Elsewhere, Villanueva provides an emotional counterbalance by depicting Penelope from The Odyssey as a radiant figure, alive “among all-trembling miracles.” Throughout, Villanueva’s imagery is textured and evocative (“From the overlook// you catch fog giving way to Mt./ Baker, the egrets like knuckles/ into the mouth of the after-/ noon”). The result is a dynamic book of witness, resistance, and radical hope. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink