Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane’s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson was born a few years after Jane’s death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the ...
Beginning where he left off in crawlspace with “the little start I’m given, giving, that May be,” John Pass’s new poems articulate further entanglements with stasis, purpose and hope. He struggles as we all do under the weight of a world imperilled by climate change and environmental degradation. And the poems, characteristically alive with attuned observation and emotional honesty, glimpse unsettling limitations to our consciousness and consc ...
Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You , Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tracking the paradoxical impulses of anguish and joy that underpin daily ...
Belated Bris of the Brainsick traces 1) a belated and in some ways violent revelation about one’s ancestry and one’s past, 2) a resultant mental breakdown and 3) the pursuit of a new life with someone else who lives with mental illness. These events and the styles in which they are told are inflected by queer, transgender and disabled perspectives and aesthetics. If there is a narrative a ...
Michelle Elrick's <i>then/again</i> is a poetic account of finding home, and the meanings and moments that the concept of home can come to embody. The collection tracks the poet through a landscape of intimate places—an ancestral home in Scotland, a mother's birthplace in Salzburg, a childhood home on the West Coast—as well as the memory-warped terrain of the poet's past houses. In brief poetic capsules that co ...
Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the line, Smith recalls a mother who discovers a sex tape, a man who dreams of birthing his own son and ...
Outside, America criss-crosses the Canadian–American border to understand dilemmas that occur across a variety of scales, from global spheres to the most intimate domestic spaces. Sarah de Leeuw digs through grief, loss, aging, technological frustration, environmental degradation, nationalism and confusion to grasp the state of the world. These poems are tethered to everything from climate change and scientific discovery to the death of parent ...
Near Miss considers the relationship between close calls and the tenuous conditions of contemporary life. From actual cataclysms such as meteor collisions and volcanic eruptions to everyday failures and accidents, these inventive poems collide with the perpetual unease created by life’s unpredictability while contemplating mortality, fragility, gratitude and hopefulness. … When the Emergency Broadcast System proclaims this is only a test, yo ...
