What this book cares about most: Hejinian’s final collection is a rigorous, playful, and meandering sequence of interwoven ruminations, narratives, and quotations, forming a textual collage that at once tantalizes and evades the reader. Hejinian’s major concerns revolve around the ways in which a hermeneutics that elevates skepticism, indeterminacy, radical subjectivity, and the imagination can […]
Reed Turchi’s debut collection, Dancing with Poets, explores what it means to make—and re-make—oneself amid a swirl of love, loss, and memory. In dive bars and art museums, baseball stadiums and blues clubs, Turchi summons his ghosts and invites them to sing their songs. A Grammy Award–winning musician as well as poet, Turchi is guided by finely honed rhythm and a singular sonic sensibility that coaxes music from poems that are narrative and lyric in turn. As a collection, Dancing with Poets remembers those the author has loved and lost, but avoids nostalgia, asking instead what futures may be built from grief and how love may grow on the other side of devastation. While the poems may swirl, their emotional truth remains crystalline: The characters, moments, and stories in each poem are infinitely recognizable—fantastic and quotidian in equal measure. Within these poems there are chicken tenders and high art, motorcycles and funerals—a familiar boyhood that happened to be spent surrounded by some of the finest American poets of the late twentieth century. In Dancing with Poets, Turchi invites his reader to join him—“to strut and spin” in grief and joy alike.
What this book cares about most: Asian Americans being made to feel invisible against pervasive whiteness. Erasure, reduction, and otherness. Personas, masking, and falsehood. Resisting the urge to become as small and quiet as possible. Internalized racism, assimilation, and disenfranchised grief. Poems that moved me: “The Other Asian Girl” “My First Beet-Colored Pee” “Mail-Order Groom” […]
From the beginning, Corey Van Landingham leaves no question as to what big ideas her book, Reader, I, will treat. She introduces us to the text with, “Reader, I was, according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet-weeping. And aren’t they often weeping?” […]
What this book cares about most: Death of the First Idea is a masterwork in intertextuality—weaving together the personal, spiritual, academic, historical, and cultural into a collection that expands the speaker’s experience as a Black trans woman. Language springs forth from this collection, even as many poems address the trauma and loss of transphobic and […]
By now, a new collection of Heather Christle poems comes with a certain set of expectations. Even after a decade since her last poetry collection, her voice and poetic sensibility feel immediately recognizable. In her previous books, I’ve admired Christle’s inventiveness, playfulness, and dexterity, as well as her thematic treatments of mutability, disconnection, and that […]
Like Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers—/ that perches in the soul” always struck me as a poem that could be understood two ways. Why is hope a bird? It always seems ironic that the bird flies out of reach. It’s ungraspable, a bit too pithy in its sentimentality, […]
What does it mean to tell a life when the life itself resists borders, papers, and prescribed narratives? Esther Lin’s Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, is a book that rejects the neat arc of autobiography and instead pieces together memory, myth, and history in fractured, searching lines. Born in Brazil […]
Twenty-fourth in the Mountain/West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind, Kazim Ali, Dan Beachy-Quick, Camille T. Dungy & Donald Revell Publication: June 2026 Exploring the tension between freedom and fidelity, Faithful Error meditates on life’s most sacred and often difficult loves—romantic, parental, familial, and spiritual—against a backdrop of environmental unease. These poems, rich in natural imagery, trace […]
What this book cares about most: Lost cities; places that change each time we try to return. Vibrant spaces haunted by stark realities—for instance, Charlottesville’s recent white supremecist rallies, Monticello’s past life as a plantation, or the South’s history of forced sterilization of women of color. The nursing homes where we leave our mothers, the […]