"A memoir of journal notes, early drafts of poems, and short meditations by Marianne Boruch" --
The long-anticipated third collection from the revered Richard Siken delivers his most personal and introspective collection yet.Richard Siken’s long-anticipated third collection, I Do Know Some Things, navigates the ruptured landmarks of family trauma: a mother abandons her son, a husband chooses death over his wife. While excavating these losses, personal history unfolds. We witness Siken experience the death of a boyfriend and a stroke that is neglectfully misdiagnosed as a panic attack. Here, we grapple with a body forgetting itself—“the mind that / didn’t work, the leg that wouldn’t move…”. Meditations on language are woven throughout the collection. Nouns won’t connect and Siken must speak around a meaning: “dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged.” To say “black tree” when one means “night.”Siken asks us to consider what a body can and cannot relearn. “Part insight, part anecdote,” he is meticulous and fearless in his explorations of the stories that build a self. Told in 77 prose poems, I Do Know Some Things teaches us about transformation. We learn to shoulder the dark, to find beauty in “The field [that] had been swept clean of habit.”
Inspired by the nineteenth century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison C. Rollins's Black Bell continues an exploration of cataloging individual experience and collective memory.
"Tyree Daye's a little bump in the earth is an act of invention and remembrance. Through sprawling poems, the town of Youngsville, North Carolina, where Daye's family has lived for the last 200 years, is reclaimed as the 'Ritual House.' Here, 'every cousin aunt uncle ghost' is welcome. Daye invokes real and imagined people, the ancestral dead, land, snakes, and chickens, to create a black town on a hill. Including dreams, letters, revised rental agreements, and 'a little museum in the herein-&-after,' where collaged images appear beside documents from Daye's ancestors--census records, marriage licenses, and WWII Draft Registration cards--the collection asks if the past can be a portal to the future, the present a catalyst for the past. a little bump in the earth explores what it means to love someone, someplace, even as it changes, dies right in front of your eyes. Poem by poem, Daye is honoring the people of Youngsville and 'bringing back the dead.'"
In The Book of Questions, Pablo Neruda refuses to be corralled by the rational mind. Composed entirely of unanswerable couplets, the poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. Whether comic, surreal, or Orphic, Neruda's poignant questions lead the reader beyond reason into realms of sudden intuition and pure imagination.
"We are homesick everywhere," writes Tishani Doshi, "even when we're home." With aching empathy, righteous anger, and rebellious humor, A God at the Door calls on the extraordinary minutiae of nature and humanity to redefine belonging and unveil injustice. In an era of pandemic lockdown and brutal politics, these poems make vital space for what must come next―the return of wonder and free movement, and a profound sense of connection to what matters most. From a microscopic cell to flightless birds, to a sumo wrestler and the tree of life, Doshi interrupts the news cycle to pause in grief or delight, to restore power to language. A God at the Door invites the reader on a pilgrimage―one that leads us back to the sacred temple of ourselves. This is an exquisite, generous collection from a poet at the peak of her powers.
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