"Woke up no light is a Black girl's saunter turned to a woman's defiant strut. These are the hymns of a new generation of poetry. Young, alive, yearning. A mouth swung open and ready to devour. A quest for home in a world that knows only wasteland and wanting. Moving in sections from "girlhood" to "neighborhood" to "falsehood" to, finally, "womanhood," these poems reckon with themes of reparations, restitution, and desire. The collection is sharp...

"Spencer Reece, a poet and an Episcopal priest, suffuses his poetry with tenderness, humanity, and a wonderous alchemy of beauty and sorrow. As the Nobel laureate Louise Glück wrote, "emanating from Spencer Reece's work [is] a sense of immanence that belongs more commonly to religious passion; it is a great thing to have it again in art." Acts, the third book of poetry by Reece, is the product of a decade of work and of a life acutely lived. In it,...

" Nine Horses, Billy Collins’s first book of new poems since Picnic, Lightning in 1998, is the latest curve in the phenomenal trajectory of this poet’s career. Already in his forties when he debuted with a full-length book, The Apple That Astonished Paris, Collins has become the first poet since Robert Frost to combine high critical acclaim with broad popular appeal. And, as if to crown this success, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United...

"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...

"The fact that food, like sex, mediates for us with death provides the guiding metaphor for Gregory Emilio's ingenious book Kitchen Apocrypha, which might equally well be titled Kitchen Epiphany. Kitchen Apocrypha was a finalist in the 2021 Able Muse Book Award"--

"With echoes of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman's journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice. With breathtaking lyricism and a vulnerability that pierces the heart, April Gibson journeys through the emotional abysses, the daily pleasures, the frustrations, and the joys...

"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...

A unique and artful blend of poetry, science, and activism, this picture book shows how city dwellers can intervene so that nature can work her magic. In Oslo, Norway: citizens create a honeybee highway that stretches from one side of the city to the other, offering flowerpots, resting spots, bee boxes, and beehives—even water fountains—every eight hundred feet. In the Bronx, New York: a community rallies to clean their river and cheers at the...

"Diane Seuss's signature voice--audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude--has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and...

Detailed notes accompany a modern English translation of Dante's epic poem about a spiritual pilgrim led by the ghost of Virgil through the circles of hell.