A memorable debut collection that explores colonial and generational trauma. In this striking debut, DorsÃa Smith Silva explores the devastating effects of Hurricane MarÃa in Puerto Rico, highlighting the natural world, the lasting impact of hurricanes, and the marginalization of Puerto Ricans. These poems also focus on the multiple sites of oppression in the United States, especially the racial, social, and political injustices that occur every day. Smith Silva writes with a powerful, gripping voice, confronting the "drowning" of disenfranchised communities as they are displaced, exploited, and robbed of their identities, but remain resilient. Written with unflinching language and vivid imagery, In Inheritance of Drowning reveals the many facets of the lives of marginalized people.
A stunning poetry collection that offers solace and understanding. Jack Ridl's latest collection, All at Once, is structured as a lyrical collage that looks back at his eighty years of life in a rearview mirror. Nothing eludes this poet's attention, reflection, or unbridled joy. Ridl's poems, written in a direct style and tender voice, bring together mismatched meditations, leading us to experience the reality that neither ourselves nor wherever we are is one-sided. These poems are musings on loss and grief, softly interwoven with devotion, human connection, and love. In the words of his daughter when she was seven years old, "Daddy, 'with' is the most important word in the world because we are always 'with.'" Each person reveals infinite realities of "with." All at Once is for anyone in need of companionship or a gentle smile.
A heartfelt collection that tumbles through a life of love in all its iterations. In this collection of poems, curves in all their forms-a woman's full hips, a rolling mountain, water's soft bend, or the thrum of Irish immigrants living at the hard edges-are the focus. In their music, these poems celebrate queer love, map loss and liberation, and explore lovers' scars and the knot of kinship that remains even when love fades. Tragic and tender, The Curve of Things traces the ecstatic joys and difficulties of loving women, celebrating this sweeping terrain of desire. A hymn of unapologetic intimacy and delicate language, these poems choose love over defeat and celebrate the warmth that humanity is capable of.
Seraphim shares the joyous rhythm that sustains Black womxn. Seraphim, Angelique Zobitz's debut collection, radiates with light and wonder. These poems reveal how Black womxn and girls carve out, create, and pass along that lightness in their daily lives. Zobitz pays homage to an array of Black womxn, including bell hooks, Roberta Flack, and Megan Thee Stallion. If you've ever wondered how Black womxn can glow so incandescent, this collection is the answer. This isn't about pain, despair, or the indomitable strength of Black womxn, but rather a vibrant celebration of the love and joy at the forefront of their lives. Seraphim speaks in many voices-sensual, angry, defiant, soft, vulnerable, and continuously reborn.
A beautiful portrait of how joy is an act of resistance. "My poems brought me to Oxford, Mississippi a.k.a. the velvet ditch: / a place you can fall into, get comfortable among confederate rebels," writes January Gill O'Neil in her stunning new collection, Glitter Road. The poems in this book look back at the end of a marriage, a heartbreaking loss, and a new relationship against the backdrop of a Mississippi season. O'Neil reflects on the history and legacy of Emmett Till, how his story is intertwined with her own, and wades through the incredible grief she feels for herself, her children, and the Black children who won't come home tonight. These poems reclaim the vulnerable, intimate parts of a life in transition and celebrate womanhood through awakenings, landscapes, meanders, and possibilities. She declares, with both self-love and conviction, "I am done telling the kinder story. I am a myth of my own making."
A collection of essays full of startling directness, fearlessness, and surprise. Filled with profound reflections and snapshots from the past, Karen Chase's History is Embarrassing weaves together threads from one single life-a girl suffering from polio, a poet, a Jewish woman, a writer, and a painter. Like Chase, the characters who populate these essays are outsiders-undercover cops, a gay couple in 1500s India, bear poachers, psychiatric patients, and even a president-each a meaningful part of history. Divided into three parts-histories, pleasures, and horrors-History is Embarrassing is an assortment of thought-provoking essays that are sure to resonate with many readers.
A portrait of marriage, caretaking, grief, and recovery. Carole Stone's Limited Editions is an end-of-life narrative journey, from her long-term marriage to the illness and death of her husband. Stone's honest, understated, and detailed poems, each packed with narrative, bring us to the heart of her loss. Stone does not flinch in her descriptions of her husband's suffering and dying moments. She dispassionately describes the everyday details of coping with being on her own--from daily household chores to the loneliness of being single as an aging woman. With Stone's crisp observations and raw honesty, Limited Editions challenges the reader to think about death, grief, widowhood, and aging as a natural process in the life cycle.
Italian Blood traces the bloodline of a family from first cuts to open wounds to healing revealing how violence becomes a legacy that can only be broken by speaking truth. Blood is a character in family stories that flows thickly through our lineage.
Family, friendships, the fear of uncertainty and the regret and damage from the choices we make
The death of a youngest child; an alcoholic, distant father; a grief-stricken family; tentative faith: this sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to one another's shared history.
Formally innovative poems that engage with history and the individual. In his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the wide range of subjects and imaginative approaches that his readers have come to expect. Touching on topics such as the Jewish resistance, Godard films, and the National Football League, The History Hotel opens the door to both political and personal histories. This collection also introduces us to unforgettable charactersâ¿we follow alongside speakers as they drive through Kansas, as they memorize Shakespeare sonnets, and as they rehearse a love affair that went south. As Wormserâ¿s collection reminds us, the historical circumstances that touch, strengthen, or shatter a life are also key to understanding it. We all live in the History Hotel, where love, betrayal, hope, and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poemsâ¿poems that are alive to tradition but consistently inventive along the way.
A coming-of-age collection set to the music of the 1980s and 90s. This novel in poetic form tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of growing up mixed-race in 1980s suburbia. In this time of change, both for himself and the world around him, he seeks to "remember / just when I stopped being cute..." Narrating run-ins with the police ("The minute they see me, fear me") and confrontations with himself, the speaker in this collection must learn to navigate a world that sees him as a threat. When Did We Stop Being Cute? reflects on the beauty and horrors of life in the United States, telling a personal story that shows Black lives and how they matter.
Poems that imagine Persian and Iranian American lives. In Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham troubles preconceptions of nationhood and fixed systems of power by bringing the reader into the Iranian American home, offering glimpses of familial love and intimacy. Atefat-Peckham reaches for a network of care--the foundations of which are located in the ability of these poems to evoke the rich landscape of Iranian American lives. Articulating a spirituality that has no spatial or temporal boundaries, one which travels effortlessly between life and death, this collection is a treatise on the empathy we need now more than ever. An up-and-coming poet who died just four years after winning the National Poetry Series Award in 2000, Susan Atefat-Peckham was deeply concerned by the Islamophobic "Axis of Evil" rhetoric deployed after 9/11 and was skeptical of attempts by the United States to "democratize" the Middle East. Representing the lives of immigrants in the United States and Persians in Iran, as well as the distance that separates their experiences and the love that binds them together, Atefat-Peckham brings an important voice to that conflict--one of the family and the home, where glimpses of intimacy and care rival imperial oppression.
Celebrates the courageous journey across boundaries, the intersections between liminal spaces, and the tenacity to endure
This poetry collection explores themes of home, grieving, and kinship. With wonder, empathy, and even rage, Dialect of Distant Harbors summons a shared humanity to examine issues of illness and family. Dipika Mukherjee's poems redefine belonging and migration in a misogynistic and racist world. "A grievous vastness to this world," she writes, "beyond human experience." As the world recovers from a global pandemic and the failure of modern government, these poems are incantations to our connections to the human family--whether in Asia, Europe, or the United States. Dialect of Distant Harbors focuses on what is most resilient in ourselves and our communities.
Poems centered on survival and perseverance in the face of long-term illness. Delivered a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia with a ten percent prognosis for survival, Dr. Dianne Silvestri surrenders her white coat for a hospital gown. Aided by her attentive medical team, family, and friends, she navigates the surreal world of chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and subsequent threats from graft-versus-host disease and serious infections of her compromised immune system. But I Still Have My Fingerprints speaks to the difficulties of "surviving survival." With a clear eye for irony and analogy and a commitment to curiosity and truth, Silvestri writes through her struggles and victories. She gives us poems with unique perspectives, fresh images, and unquenchable optimism, in her perseverance to redefine life beyond what was lost.
Painting a raw picture of feeling broken "in some fundamental way," Carson's poems sing to how that feeling can be mended
Explores the pushpull of received histories, of forces we can't control no matter how hard we try
"From Kendrick to Kanye, to a Sunday in Oakland with Frank Ocean's falsetto in the foreground, Mausoleum of Flowers is still life set against the backdrop of demise. Daniel Summerhill's sophomore collection grabs fate by the throat and confronts it. What does it mean to continue living when your friends are dying beside you? This collection melds an exploration of spirituality and rebellion with Black tradition. Summerhill's poems invite the reader near in order to self-excavate and explore tones of loss, love, and light"--
A critical look at female queerness through the lens of first-generation culture. Â In Tanto Tanto, a queer daughter of immigrants highlights the struggles she faces in romantic relationships amidst a culture of oppressive, culturally sanctioned heteronormativity. Exploring the consequences of queer love in both contemporary American and Luso-American societies, Tanto Tanto unsettles ideas about the privileged queer body, romantic love, queer motherhood, femininity, gender identity, sex, and more. This collection makes visible and troubling what is often overlooked, misunderstood, and romanticized in âAmericanâ? homosexuality.
A poetry collection centered on the Korean American experience. The term âhalf-lifeâ? is used to describe radioactive decay, pharmaceutical drugs, rocks, the atoms of our human bodies, and even technological products. Using this idea as a starting point, A Half-Life provides a rare glimpse into the Korean American experience. The poems utilize the literal metaphor of the highway as the intersecting point of America, Asia, and the globe, to reflect on the emotional and physical journeys many Asian Americans take. From Chicago to Seattle, from the biographical to the fictional, from current times to the Korean and Vietnam wars, A Half-Life covers the joy and pain, the probable and improbable, the individual and communalâ¿the cultural histories we all share.
Unique poems that bring history to life by weaving narratives of the Salem Witch Trials with stories of contemporary women. Set against the historical backdrop of the Salem Witch Trials, Her Kind is a book about women: women viewed as witches, women making their own choices, women fighting for freedom, women who are innocent, and women who are used or disregarded by their cultures. The lyrical poems in this collection skillfully braid together narratives of the female victims of the Salem Witch Trials with the experiences of contemporary women viewed as witches for their personal histories, their political circumstances, or for speaking out and making their own choices. A blend of lyrical and narrative poems, Her Kind celebrates women refusing the victim role and reclaiming their magic.
These poems address the universal experiences of death and loss, putting the complicated feelings of grief into words. Uncertain Acrobats evokes the feeling of unraveling. The central concern of this narrative is the death of a parent and the fumbling for balance a dying father and his adult daughter share. Rebecca Hart Olander's intimate collection doesn't shy away from darkness, but it also strives for light, which resides in music and open-hearted humanity. These poems arc across the terrain of divorce, family, childhood, coming of age, mortality, and deep, abiding love, always landing with a foothold in the genuine. A manifestation of what endures after grief has unraveled our closest bonds, Uncertain Acrobats reaches beyond the author's personal experience of grief. This collection speaks to all whose lives have been upended by terminal illness or the loss of a beloved person.
What is a person to do upon finding out that his older brother has six months to live? What is a father to tell his young sons about the everyday violence, inequities, and injustices of the world? What is a husband to do when confronted with his domestic foibles and failings? What can poems possibly offer us in the face of unanswerable questions? Deke Dangle Dive explores illness, fatherhood, brotherhood, and masculinity through a variety of lenses, including ice hockey, contemporary culture, and the natural world. This unique collection considers how poems can speak to us and through us when all seems lost.
Kali Lightfoot's kindergarten teacher told her parents that Kali had "a well-developed sense of beauty and can skip with both feet." This proved prophetic for a life that has included a number of careers and passions--Lightfoot has earned a master's degree in physical education, worked as an executive and a teacher, served as a wilderness ranger, managed educational travel, and provided body-oriented psychotherapy. After gaining her sobriety and coming out as queer, Lightfoot returned to poetry at the age of sixty-five, earning her MFA at age seventy. In a debut collection of poems that favor a narrative style but also experiment successfully with poetic forms, Lightfoot writes in a voice that is by turns wistful, comedic, and grave. After a long career, she has come late and happily to a life in poetry.
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