What this book cares about most: Conversations with a community that cannot speak back; namely, the Chinese railroad workers whose histories and crucial contributions to the book’s Lake Tahoe region have been largely lost to time and intentional, violent erasure. In a long central poem titled “高 祖 父 : A Correspondence : 太 爺,” […]
Jordanian poet Siwar Masannat’s Cue (University of Georgia Press, 2024) is a finely wrought and complex hybrid work. Its ekphrastic poetry is in conversation with artist Akram Zaatari and his “excavation” of photographer Hashem El Madani’s portraits, taken in Lebanon in the 1940s to the 1970s, which depict heteronormative family, same-sex portraits, and physical affection. […]
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 […]