This urgent debut from Hourani spotlights Palestine’s struggle for liberation through a book-length poem interwoven with personal history. Hourani grapples with how to find adequate language to confront histories of occupation and genocide: “the more time i spend with words/ the more i realize that they just won’t do.” Amid this seemingly impossible poetic task, formal inventiveness shines; the book borrows from the language of dictionary definitions, multiple choice questions, and instruction manuals, creating an interactive—and haunting—experience. In one section, Hourani posits “questions,” which reverberate unanswered: “13. how to get rid of a body/ a. turn it into something else/ i. by declaring that it isn’t one/ b. delete it.” Elsewhere, Hourani draws from bird migration patterns, reminding readers that the ecological is inextricable from the geopolitical: “it is about the earth. it has always been about the earth.” Ultimately, the reader must face the fragility of the body: “i am in a fleshy/ circle; i shed the fleshy circle; i notice a papery film closing in/ on me; i am being shellpacked again.” Hourani’s impressive and expansive poems strike a chord. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Gafori’s excellent second collection of Rumi translations (after Gold) thrums with the beatific energy of divine and romantic love, as well as a deep yearning for community and peace. In the introduction, Gafori reflects on the mystic poet’s early years fleeing the Mongolian Army, which was “wreaking havoc on village after village.” Rumi imparts ecstatic words of wisdom (“go to the kitchen in Love’s house/ and lick the plates lovers left behind”) while also lamenting the violence in the world around him. In “My heart breaks when I look out,” he declares, “Man, man, man/ what kind of lightning are you, setting farms on fire?/ What kind of cloud are you, raining down stones.” Gafori’s translation is exceptional: contemporary, razor-sharp, and lyrically expansive but still unmistakably Rumi. The poet’s voice is filled with wonder, infectious joy, and humor, asking, “Why did I make brooding my vocation/ when awe was an option?” He is wise, generous, devout, and effortlessly pithy, offering a way forward in dark times: “Don’t mute your drum./ Don’t muffle the beat./ Walk bravely into the field and raise Love’s flag.” The result is an accessible, enjoyable, and essential entry point to Rumi’s work. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

The brilliant and multitalented Wright (Casting Deep Shade) died unexpectedly in 2016, leaving behind a legacy of astonishing breadth. This comprehensive and riveting volume, lovingly selected by the poet’s husband, Forrest Gander, and her longtime friend and editor Michael Wiegers, serves both the ardent fan and the newcomer to her work. Wright’s commitment to wonder and witness runs throughout like an iron wire, revealing a logic made newly legible by this collection: “Something is out there/ goddammit// And I want to hear it,” she writes in midlife. Twenty years later, she refines her aim “to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time.” Readers will observe the poet’s deepening practice of documentary poetics, from early lyric portraits of family, friends, and strangers in and beyond her Arkansas home (“some boys holed up in a derelict house/ after stoning a swan to death”) to book-length poems that combine voices in “a welter of associations.” Attuned especially to the poor and disenfranchised, the victims of racialized violence, and the incarcerated, these poems strive to represent people “as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves.” It’s a thrilling assemblage of Wright’s unforgettable writings. (May)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

The formally inventive debut by Perkins celebrates Black women who strive to keep families together. At the heart of the collection, Perkins explores the connection between a fictionalized version of himself and his single mother, the two of whom “raised each other with cockroach cardboard walls, playing hopscotch homes.” Many poems take unique forms such as pro/con lists, one-act plays, erasures, and collages of language and image. A poem titled “Captions for Pictures Lost in Storage” is a powerful exercise in restraint, featuring blank space where those lost images might have been and captions that movingly illustrate the relationship between mother and son: “Christmas 2009. Mar Mar is seven. Still into Star Wars!! I got him Mace Windu’s lightsaber because I like purple. Didn’t know it made noises though ): Kept me up all night, but my baby is happy!!” A wry, self-aware humor pervades “Verdict,” in which the speaker ponders how race informs his writing: “I came this close to Neo Pastoralism—/ to birds in every line that may or may not/ symbolize cagelessness and virginity./ But the picture box stamped/ ‘Black’ on my tongue and ears.” This evocative collection signals the arrival of a bold new voice. (July)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

This luminous bilingual anthology features eight contemporary women poets from Poland: Anna Adamowicz, Maria Cyranowicz, Hanna Janczak, Natalia Malek, Joanna Oparek, Zofia Skrzypulec, Katarzyna Szaulińska, and Ilona Witkowska. The opening “Cantata” section presents selections from each, displaying their range of styles, from the philosophical experimentation of Skrzypulec to Malek’s concise lyricism. Standout poems include Szaulińska’s “nirvana,” a typographically inventive examination of the relationship between body and technology, and Oparek’s “Berlin Porn,” a wide-ranging reflection on the eponymous city, violence against women, and how “sex and politics are so intimate together.” In the concluding “Octet” section, each contributor writes theoretically and reflectively about the act of writing. Their insights on craft are as varied and rousing as the poems themselves; Adamowicz imagines literary influence as fungus growing on tree stumps, while Cyranowicz reminds readers that “linguistic conditioning... does not proceed without oppression.” It’s a welcome introduction to major new voices on the world stage. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Love, divorce, illness, and grief are at the center of Brimhall’s expansive and moving fifth collection (after Come the Slumberless to the land of Nod). The title poem is among the book’s most evocative, framing love as something that, like the prodigal son, departs, endures hardship, and returns—sometimes changed, sometimes forgiven. At their best, Brimhall’s poems balance humor and grief, as in “Will & Testament”: “Bury me with one of your shirts/ in case I come back as a bloodhound. Save my favorite panties—/ the pink ones—for a sexier immortality or a lonely evening.” Similarly, “Body, Remember,” inspired by Cavafy, meditates on memory’s impermanence: “And over legs you endlessly shaved, grasses will grow like you—eager, wild, surviving every day they can.” Though the collection’s fire motif is persuasive in individual poems, it becomes overextended as the phoenix mythology collides with biblical references, diminishing its effect rather than deepening it. “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Sonnets” strains to braid fragmented lyricism and philosophical asides, sometimes feeling forced rather than revelatory. Despite these excesses, Brimhall remains a master of list-making, anaphora, and imagery. It adds up to a striking, if uneven, collection. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

This singular anthology presents 29 different translations of Tang poet Li Bai’s poem “Seeing Off a Friend.” Beginning with Ezra Pound’s famous (and dubious) 1915 version, which Billings bemoans set expectations for what Chinese poetry in English “should” sound like, he sheds light on the intricacies of Chinese verse through his commentary on each subsequent translation. His highly informative observations take the form of short essays, which are often amusing, as when he critiques a stilted line in Pound’s version: “The tone wavers between authenticity and a bad fortune cookie.” By attending closely to each version, Billings is able to highlight various aspects of the original, such as when he praises Gregory Whinchup’s translation for “how closely it follows the rhythm of the Chinese line. This not only gives it a lovely pacing but also drags the reader closer to the author—and yet so peacefully we hardly notice.” Over the course of the anthology, the reader develops a deeper appreciation for the original poem’s formal beauty and its translators’ ingenuities. The result is a fascinating initiation to the delights of Chinese verse. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

In her tender latest, Duhamel (Second Story) pays homage to her mother’s career as a nurse as well as her death at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when she was living in a nursing home among patients and staff “dress[ed] like astronauts.” These poems are bold, expansive, and prosaic; they do not shy away from the painful realities of end-of-life care, nor from the specific horrors of the early pandemic: “My mom has a bandage/ on her nose from where the ventilator cut her,/ and clear tubes of oxygen in her nostrils.” Elsewhere, the reader learns, “She has been confined to her room for over a year.” Though the collection dwells mostly in the isolated space of the nursing home, the outside world intrudes; Hurricane Elsa, Donald Trump, and the greater social ramifications of historic times haunt these poems, but the book’s intimacy gives it a timelessness that transcends world-changing events. “My mother stopped wearing a bra in Mount St. Rita’s Hospice,” she writes. “I called her a hippie and put a flower in her hair.” As Duhamel reflects on her transformed role—from child to caretaker to eulogizer—readers will appreciate how beautifully she relates the experience of love and loss. It’s a memorable and affecting collection. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hoffman’s beautifully crafted third collection (after When There Was Light) savors the everyday and grasps the ineffable with a tone that easily includes the quotidian alongside the mythological and the historical. Hoffman’s titles are outstanding, and her metaphors are often wry (“The world can be the saddest fish tank,” from the poem “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College”) or devastating (“The apple’s a for-sale sign swaying from the tree,” from “Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World”). In Hoffman’s poems, mythology illuminates the timelessness of female oppression. She excels at providing vivid details that capture the varied experiences and hardships faced by women, from Eurydice’s “boring /underwear” in the poem “The Townspeople Contemplate Eurydice” to a friend in high school “bleeding in the parking lot” in “Rose Ausländer, Jane Roe, & Me”. Throughout, Hoffman grapples eloquently with contemporary tragedy and sadness while pushing past silence. It’s a wise and moving volume. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Lin debuts with an impressive collection that tells the story of an undocumented daughter of parents who flee Communist China and become fundamentalist Christians in America. Drawing on her own experience of living as an undocumented American for 21 years, Lin poetically imagines her parents’ precarious journeys from China to Brazil to the U.S., exploring the profound impact of being undocumented while growing up in a fundamentalist household. In “I See Her Best,” the speaker extrapolates from an old photograph the compromises her mother made to survive: “1974. A young woman clasping the arm/ of a married man, her wrapped hair/ and secret smile, her face, or a version of the face/ I touch in my sleep.” Another poem explores how the speaker is forced to appease an authoritarian family: “My petitioner is interested in sex./... The agent at Homeland Security asks why/ I wanted my petitioner to be my petitioner./ The truth is my father saved three thousand dollars,/ the market rate for men/ who petition for illegal women.” These stunning poems breathe new life into the confessional form. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink