In the advanced blurbs for Canese Jarboe’s SISSY, renowned poet CA Conrad ended their blurb calling Canese’s debut collection, “a field for liberation.” From out the gate, Jarboe’s balanced blend of language, from the delicate to the visceral, demonstrates the struggle of what it means to be Queer in the working-class outskirts of Missouri. It […]
In the disturbance we call America, we must navigate the tension between job and home, between what we love and what we must do, to find balance if we can. And we call on our poets—who spend copious time alone—to find a footing, or more properly, a stance from which to explore, to reach into […]
The Museum of Unnatural Histories by Annie Wenstrup is a dazzling, disorienting, and reorienting engagement with history, performance, and Indigenous identity. It is at once a display of mastery and a critique of mastery’s inherent and historical violence. Personas proliferate, as do forms. It is a concept book, opening like the doors to a museum. […]
In her debut poetry collection, Asterism, Ae Hee Lee writes, “The Napa cabbages inside are as wide / as my childish hips—rare in Trujillo, rare like Korean pepper flakes / my mother has been saving by mixing them with aji panca.” Her mother intuitively mixes and matches food and flavors from Peru and Korea. Lee—born […]
Mothersalt, Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s second collection, stretches the limits of genre just as the speaker’s pregnancies and young children stretch her body, the hours of her waking, and her modes of thinking across these pages. Mothersalt memorializes and reimagines pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Throughout the book, Malhotra seeks to reform the time and space our […]
“I choose right. I choose what’s right. / I choose left. I choose what’s left. I am the one / who soils my sheets and the one who cleans them,” Isabelle Baafi writes in “Exit Interview,” a poem that exemplifies the strength and perspicaciousness of her clever debut collection, Chaotic Good. Throughout the collection, Baafi […]
CD Eskilson’s debut, Scream / Queen, is full of slashes. The punctuation mark divides the book’s title and each of its sections: “Found/Footage,” “Body / Horror,” “Jump / Scare, “Para / Normal,” and “Super / Natural.” A slash typically indicates a binary, whether between opposites or synonyms: either/or; sir/madam; mind/body. It joins pronouns (they/them) and […]
In the twenty-four years since the publication of Veil: New and Selected Poems in 2001, Rae Armantrout has published a voluminous amount of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, including the Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection Versed in 2010, which was also a Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Go Figure is Armantrout’s twelfth collection with Wesleyan, and […]
What this book cares about most: A Real Man Would Have a Gun interrogates gender, sexuality, and parenthood through lyric poetry focusing on the speaker’s childhood growing up butch and intersex and their own journey of parenthood as both a mother/father figure. Waite puts a spotlight on current anti-trans laws and responds to them directly. […]
With just a few exceptions, Esteban Rodríguez uses one-word titles for the poems in The Lost Nostalgias: “Hitchhiker,” “Requiem,” “Shed,” “Cure.” It’s a move that reveals something about the speaker, who favors restraint and plainspokenness. But it’s also a way of being generous with the reader. Rodríguez sends us into each poem with a hint—a […]