A poet who urges us to hold dear to all of our experience: that which was, that which is, and that which, someday, will no longer be.

“I work it,” [Armantrout] writes in the title poem, “until sweetness // rises / of itself.” And we are all made wiser by it.

Agnes Martin isn’t painting any scene. Her grids portion out forms of emptiness. And so she gives to us a picture of our deepest philosophic condition. How do I find meaning in nothingness? I make it.

Of course, the genius of Honest James is that it engages with the trouble of disjointment in content, in form, and in sign and symbol. It knows itself as “an imitation of a tapestry,” as a simulacrum of a simulacrum, and goads itself from this intertextual mise en abyme of poetic and textual reflection, seeking metaphysical the reality of flection itself.

Through a collection of poems quiet in tone but unflinching in conviction, Klink explores the complex relationship between the body and solitude. The energy and drive behind each poem is clear, the result of copious thought and time spent with the world.

At its most basic level, Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio does what Herodotus did: it sets down the world as it can be known in order to preserve desire and experience, and keep it from passing unremembered into non-being.

In his latest book, Surrounded by Friends, Matthew Rohrer goes beyond befriending the dead to converse and collaborate with them.

This isn’t a poet who wishes to scratch the surface but to “scratch into” and “hollow out” his observations….Through their willful disorientation and abnegation of “selfregard,” through their preference for “palsy courage” and staying “out in the ampersand,” Eaton’s poems “acquire the decency of ordinary experience”