A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick’s Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the “emotional core of the self,” and central to the process of memory. In poems endowed with this emotional charge but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick sets out to recreate what was lost by fashioning a dreamlike reality. Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a ...
Wilson writes from the periphery of an open field in this extended investigation into longing and loss, love and doubt.  As the poet muses, «we wonder / what we're not / in the field,» and reading The Hundred Grasses, we are made to wonder as much about what exists within us as how we’re shaped by what we lack. For Wilson, the act of looking can animate what is seemingly static. Stillness becomes not abs ...
His arresting ninth collection of poems, Eric Pankey’s Trace locates itself at a threshold between faith and doubt—between the visible and the invisible, the say-able and the ineffable, the physical and the metaphysical. Also a map of the poet’s journey into a deep depression, these poems confront one man’s struggle to overcome depression’s smothering weight and presence. And with remarkable clari ...
Moving from the mundane to the profound, first through observation of fact and matter, then shifting perspective, engaging a deeper sense of self, these poems re-imagine things great and small, making us care deeply about the world around us. In this cultivated and intricately crafted collection, Sally Keith shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable ...
In poems brilliantly textured and layered, Salgado Maranhão integrates socio-political thought with subjects abstractly metaphysical. Concrete collides with conceptual—butcher shops, sex, and machine guns in conversation with language, absence, and time—resulting in a collection varied as well as unified, an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern. Writing in forms both fixed and free, Maranhão’ ...
In her accomplished second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg writes from the intersection of power and forgiveness. With poems named for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, Vandenberg deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in this extraordinary becoming of self through language. Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, Alphabet Not Unlike the ...
The distilled, haunting, and subtly complex poems in Adam Clay’s A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World often arrive at that moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person suddenly realizes he can barely see the place he set out from however long ago. He now sees he must find his connection back to the present, socially entangled world in which he lives. For Clay, reverie can be a siren’s song, luring him to that s ...
The poems in Black Dog, Black Night highlight an aspect of Vietnamese verse previously unfamiliar to American readers: its remarkable contemporary voices. Celebrating Vietnam’s diverse and thriving literary culture, the poems collected here combine elements of French Romanticism, Russian Expressionism, American Modernism, and native folk stories into a Vietnamese poetic tradition marked by vivid imagery, powerful emotions, and inventiv ...
In her highly anticipated new collection, Deborah Keenan sifts through inanimate objects and forgotten memories in search of personal validation. Her journal-like confessions create an instant bond with the reader, yet these seemingly simple poems daringly redefine common language. Keenan skillfully twists words to suit her ends, creating a colorful, dream-like world filled with lions, paintings, wars, and mummies. Throughout, she constantly reo ...
