"Confusion frames the human predicament. In Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke, confusion is, literally, our climate. Writing to and from the California landscape, Peterson sees fog and smoke as literal―one a habitual, natural weather event, the other an increasingly common aftereffect of the West’s drought-caused fires. But they are also metaphysical. Fog and smoke reflect the true conditions (and frustrations) of our ability to perceive and to...

"SK Williams dives back into their past with Before You Know It, a collection of poetry made up of two stories told in tandem, recalling the ages of 18 to 28, when the world laid waiting at their fingertips and the pressure of figuring everything out was never too far away. Featuring four chapters, divided into two parts each--"In the Beginning," "Uncharted Water," "Beneath the Storm," and "At the End"--this collection compares two peoples' life experiences...

"The loneliness that collects in mirrors and faces--at bedside vigils and in city streets--quickens Catherine Barnett's metaphysical poems, which are like speculative prescriptions for this common human experience. Here loneliness is filled with belonging, which is in turn filled with loneliness, each state suffused and emptied by the other. Barnett's fourth collection is part manifesto, part how-to manual, part apologia: a guide to the homeopathic...

"The irony of transformation often is that we mistake it to have occurred long before it does. Tender Headed takes its time in asserting the realization that growth remains ever ahead of you. Examining the themes of Black identity, accountability, and narration, we encounter a series of revealing snapshots into the role language plays in chiseling possibility and its rigid command of depiction. Olatunde Osinaike's startling debut sorts through the...

"In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank,...

"The prose poems in YOU scour the distance between girlhood and motherhood with wit, fraying into ruminations on all that's inherited as a woman surviving gendered violence. Rosa Alcalá choreographs language to understand the body as it "gathers itself over time to become whole," recovering the speaker's intuition while unraveling memory to pinpoint the aches, anxieties, and lessons of feminine survival. YOU ruminates on daughterhood, mothering,...

"With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang’s...

"STRANGER, Emily Hunt's long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection of poems, intimately chronicles the effects of love, labor, and grief on the life and sensibility of an artist. These poems shed a shifting light on the peculiar textures of our era. Hunt treads with concision, vigor, and excitement, addressing directly lived experiences--from the mundane to the profound. Whether it's her curious interactions with dating apps, 19th century...

"This beautiful, slender collection―small and weighted like a coin―is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. “Not the meaning,” Phillips writes, “but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life” powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza...

"In these last prayerful poems by Jean Valentine, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry. Spirits connect. Guides are everywhere as she is "leaving all worlds behind." Love doesn't disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries. A poet of deep tenderness for everything living,...