An old West Irish response to the knock of an unexpected visitor—“Are ye of the living or of the dead?”—prefaces this collection and might be taken to refer to any number of characters gracing these pages; indeed, we are left wondering if some of them ever existed at all. A fastidious barman called Perfect Ed, […]
Winner of the 2025 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Craig Morgan Teicher “Asha Futterman’s debut, Song of Gray, is a book of devastating insight and clarity, and introduces a vital new poet. America’s inexhaustible racism is one urgent muse: in sharp, staccato lyrics that leap easily back and forth across the lines of logic, […]
Geography has never been so disastrously flexible. The geography of the world, while the literal, physical manifestations of it remain, are in flux as places and objects and structures and borders are in rearrangement. This instability, in the same way as an earthquake’s lingering impact can be seen in the bones of a building like a dry […]
Animal Fiero y Tierno (Fierce and Tender Animal), Ángela María Dávila Malavé’s first solo book of poetry, is twice dedicated. First is to the poet herself and asks: “‘aren’t you the loving one, who slowly seeks among the beasts the source of her lineage?’” (“‘no eres tú la amorosa que busca entre las bestias la […]
Elizabeth Jacobson’s third collection of poems explores the polarities at the very heart of mortal existence—birth and death, beauty and violence, shame and desire—showing how they link us not only to each other but also to the wider living world. Its opening question sets the tone for the collection: “What is the sword so sharp […]
“To find an owl I must follow the crow . . .” so writes Mexican American poet Monica Rico in her debut poetry collection, Pinion. This remarkable book is populated by birds (by my count, a couple of dozen). The avian creatures represent the family members closest to Rico. The poet’s father and grandfather flit […]
In We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025), Patrycja Humienik journeys through memory—personal and communal—reflecting on faith, imperialism, desire, and borders. As a European immigrant to the United States, I was drawn in by the collection’s title for how it highlights multiplicity within a person, and how that fullness is a shared experience by a collective […]
The sensation of reading Sylvia Legris’s The Principle of Rapid Peering is one of catch-what-catch-can, an opportunistic experience like being a spore in an evolving world, where bird consumes moth, wind consumes bird. It is also an exercise in observation as an active pursuit. The title comes from a nineteenth-century treatise that places common birds […]
After World War II, multicultural Poland was forcibly rearranged. German speakers were expulsed from the West. Ukranians were evicted from the East. Ninety percent of the Jewish community—three million people—had already largely disappeared during the war period, subsumed by the Holocaust. When Bronisław Maj was writing his most famous poetry in the 1980s and 1990s, […]
Embedded in place and lush with family, Nathan Xavier Osorio’s collection Querida offers an intimate vision of Southern California that fortifies and fractures people who live on a desert’s edge. Querida is both a book of endearments and an excoriation of the forces that pry resources—human and natural—from a difficult landscape with no thought to […]