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 Available for preorder now, publication date June 1, 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 […]
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 […]
What this book cares about most: Overcoming Being heard Being listened to How to recover yourself (and the world) post-pandemic Folklore, fairytale, and myth as allegory for understanding how goddamn awful we can be to each other and the rage that ensues The responsibilities we have to our partners and our children when the world […]
No Rhododendron (a reference to his country’s national flower) is an intoxicating mix of ancestry, revolution, and familial affection, making for an impressive debut from the Nepalese born poet Samyak Shertok. The poems—some brutal, some beautiful, some unbearably nightmarish—are so full of echoes, allusions, and digressive flourishes they are difficult to categorize; but what is […]
SOFAR is an acronym for the Sound Fixing and Ranging layers of ocean waters, where sounds—like those made by ocean life—bounce and travel for thousands of miles. It is a changeable, roomy channel for communication. Given the depth and mutability of the literal SOFAR channel, it often carries what seem to be simple sounds, like […]
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 […]