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 […]
I am writing this review on a day when my dog is particularly anxious and vexing in her refusal of all efforts to assure her. Gone with the first keyed letter but there when I opened this document to begin, my Word’s new Copilot feature—included in the latest update with no regard for whether or […]
Theory of the Voice and Dream refers to Liliana Ponce’s Teoría de la voz y el sueño, the book of poems translated by Michael Martin Shea in World Poetry’s edition and consists of two Ponce collections: Teoría (2001) and Fudekara (2008). Both of Ponce’s books were published by tsé tsé, an influential Buenos Aires press […]
Forthcoming December 2025 Begin Where You Are: The Colorado Poets Laureate Anthology is a book of firsts. It is the first ever US state poet laureate anthology. It is the first poetry collection featuring all ten Colorado poets laureate (the second oldest state poet laureateship, established in 1919). And it is the first place […]
What this book cares about most: Rodeo embeds the grief over the stillbirth of Wilkinson’s son into a western landscape of pasturelands, canyons, and the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The immeasurable changes wrought by grief shift Wilkinson’s relationships—with her husband and sons, the people she encounters, and her daily chores and habits. Rodeo attempts […]