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"Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens considers the way that the absence of touch-in acts of war via the drone, in acts of love via the sext, in aesthetics itself-abstracts the human body, transforming it into a proxy for the real. "What love poem / could be written when men can no longer / look up?" this book asks, always in a state of flux between doubt and belief-in wars, in gods, in fathers, in love. Through epistolary addresses to these figures of power and others, these poems attempt to make bodies concrete and dangerous, immediate and addressable, once again"--

Poems about celestial and mortal bodies. The Radiant explores the psychological, physical, and spiritual challenges of living in a body and the changes and distortions that arise from the experience of the body's limitations and inevitable death. The collection takes its title from the term for the point from which all meteors appear to emanate during a shower, luminous bodies in decay that when traced to their origin seem to converge at a single point. "Perhaps you can remember the time called before, the all-you-can-do-is-see-yourself-in-a-split-second where you recognize that everything you've ever known is going to be different after," writes Goett in the collection's final poem, "The Bookman," recounting radiant points of no return and transformation that, in spite of their challenge, remain luminous.

The conclusion of G. C. Waldrep's trilogy exploring chronic illness. In The Opening Ritual, G. C. Waldrep contends with the failure of the body, the irreducible body, in the light of faith. What can or should "healing" mean when it can't ever mean "wholeness" again? And what kind of architecture is "mercy" when we live inside damage? These are poems that take both the material and the spiritual seriously, that cast their unsparing glances toward "All that is not / & could never be a parable." The collection concludes with a sequence of truly grand meditations on spiritual consciousness--in one the poet notes how, in the stillness of contemplation, the world begins to hum and resound with music. The Opening Ritual attends to and fashions its song from that music.

Poems that radiate with incredible artistic vision and writerly craft. Pain, piercing, and language: with urgent lyricism and lacunae on the page, The Right Hand explores the physical, emotional, and philosophical experiences of chronic pain, bodywork (especially acupuncture), and healing. In the second half of the collection, the poet spends extended time with Bernini's sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy in Rome, finding this famous scene of wounding to be in dialogue with her own experience of pain, as well as her suspension between languages and spiritual isolation. In The Right Hand, the hidden sites of the body speak, and Bernini's centuries-old arrow pierces us with hurting eloquence.

Rosa Lane brings a necessary, gender-fluid, feminist perspective to the Emily Dickinson table of debate. In bold tribute with a title utilizing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, Rosa Lane's Called Back converses with one of our greatest poets in theatrical monologue--decoding secrets amid the blatant. Evoked by epigraphs selected from Dickinson's work, Lane's poems, through her I-speaker, reveal the extraordinary to be found in the ordinary and speak to the struggle of sexual orientation, otherness, and the challenges of living in a Calvinistic socioreligious world of oughts and noughts as evidenced in Dickinson's poems. From sapphic eroticism and subsequent pangs of nonbelonging to tacking next life as a welcome reprieve, poems in Called Back create a de novo dot-connecting lyrical narrative.

Set against the backdrop of a changing urban landscape, the poems in Tender Machines swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting motherhood, desire and an immigrant family's haunted inheritance. Mapping the lives of women and the lives they inhabit, poems such as "Small Essays on Disappearance,"--which channel the aftermath of motherhood and 9-11--collide with aubades describing mornings in a ruined city: "buying food at the bodegas...nectarines and skin-tight plums." The poems in Tender Machines live in the space between the public and the private, braiding an intimate narrative. This is an intersectional portrait of womanhood with all its losses, departures and wonders.

"In Preeti Kaur Rajpal's debut collection, she wonders what it means to be part of the modern world with its many divisions and violences. She writes through the memory of her Sikh family's violent expulsion during Historical India's Partition. She threads this history with her experiences as a Sikh American woman during the post-9/11 era. Formally daring and lyrical, the poems of membery weave memory, Sikh spiritual tradition, family, country, and language acquisition as they forge the author's own language."--

In poems of memory, psychogeography, desire, and self-mythologization, then telling be the antidote is Xiao Yue Shan's assertion against the malignancy of forceful silences. By illuminating what has been left untold, these writings present the vivid landscape of a mind layering itself over the world, thinking and speaking its way through a myriad of places, objects, and visions. From rooms overlooking Tokyo rivers to Shanghai streets in the thrall of nighttime, Shan throws light on a nation's quieted crevices, on the distances between the carnal and the eternal, and most pivotally, on the ability of language to elucidate fact with imagination.

An intelligent and gorgeous collection of poems. At times personal, at others political, slipping back and forth between lyric and narrative and drawing on various languages and geographies, Asterism is a collection of grace and grit, the work of a mind at work-in, and on, a world that is simultaneously expanding and contracting. Both accessible and legitimately experimental, these poems invite and challenge the reader, moving between registers and modes with ease.

In 1953, Yoko Ono wrote a score called "Secret Piece," an open-ended formula for musical performance in a forest at daybreak. Beginning with this invitation to creation, and using essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments, Kazim Ali marks a path through quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, the challenges of literary translation and of climate change, and destruction of a priceless set of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid shards from far-flung histories and geographies he finds the cosmos.

Praising the power of lyric drama, T. S. Eliot described the use of third voice as a means for characters to address and interrogate one another, and second voice as a way for characters to talk to the audience. In this daring new book, the principal narrator presents as a caricature reflecting the tangible experiences of a disembodied "I" posed against absurd selfhood--a voice imbued by sublime otherness. Within a dismantled minstrel show, Ruth Ellen Kocher frames a female voice splintered and re-figured as "self" and "character." The incomprehensible nature of the sublime emerges through a cast of other personages including Eartha Kitt, Geordi LaForge, Immanuel Kant, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X. Third Voice asserts lyric beyond personal expression and drama beyond the stage, using the spectacle of minstrelsy as a deformation of mastery in an audaciously conceptual yet visceral performance.

The Vital System is the first published book by a poet already setting off sparks among readers across the globe. In these poems, the body is always at stake -- vulnerable -- and the poet dares to try and illuminate what she has called "the protective capability of violence." Burroughs's compression of phrasing, subverted syntax, and ability to release a story through cinematically sequenced images allow her to expose particular tensions that are gendered and racial as well as essentially human.

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Godfrey describes how looking at art from the past makes us hunger for a civilization that might no longer be thriving amidst a greater desensitization and insular mass behavior. Furthermore, we are left to meditate on how we may just be on our own in the universe to even a higher degree than before because our attention and enthusiasm seems directed to the unmentioned gadgetry of modern human beings.

Farris warns us, "These are not stories one can hand to another and afterward ask: did your soul move like the peristalsis inside your gut?" Instead of capitalizing on the satisfying and familiar conventions of narrative, she uses the unclassifiable text, the monstrous text, and unruly prose to explore the ways language, as we know it, limits what is possible in our thinking about sexuality. For Farris, genre - with its established conventions, its repertoire of restrictions - and gender are inexorably linked. Indeed, she shows us that our most familiar categories of identity are embedded within the very texture of language itself. She reveals form, genre, and even grammar as the foundation of the social order, that alterity which speaks through us, and at the same time, defines us.

The book begins with deaths: chiefly the poet's mother's, but also those of cherished mentors and friends. Poems explore living beyond those deaths and approaching old age, and then do some traveling. Williamson takes a pilgrimage to Japan and India, inspired by his practice of Zen meditation, and placed under the aegis of a saying from the great Rinzai Zen monastery at Daitoku-ji: "If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?" A theme then becomes enduring the public moment, with all its griefs and opportunities for growth. The reader is then transported with the poet to Italy. In 2000, Williamson began visiting Tuscany regularly, and eventually became a property owner there. The poems set in Italy dwell on an encounter with old culture, and its potential to encourage both resignation and mysticism, with moods that persist from the tutelary geniuses of two great Italian poets: the nihilistic Leopardi and the tentatively mystical Montale. Gathering around those experiences multiple lore from music, philosophy and science, it becomes an extended meditation on mental suffering, glimpses of the ecstatic, and the double nature of our life, "skull / and beatific face," with "the immortal recombinants of fire and water."

"American Massif follows the first stages of one American Mastodon in his attempts to evolve. His life begins to resemble a human life. His mother appears human. His wife and children, human. His own birthplace and childhood. His appetites, sins, faith, cynicism, big plans. All apparently human. At the same time, all of these things are relinquished or increasingly subject to the story of his own extinction. The massif's landscapes are as varied as pinewoods, clay hills and prairie, but grow more abstract. In his naive way, A.M. moves through or ponders the Higgs Field, art, national and family states of emergency. From his own house to an airport, from volcano to museum, he goes foraging for images good enough to eat, for friends, for antidotes to apocalypse"--

Goblets of gin, fans of feathers, war-bombed bricks, loaves of bread, soot, smoke, and paper money-such are the tangible things that touched the lives of women who worked as wage laborers during an era of Europe of cabaret and hyperinflation. The crises of modernity and capital, as well as the human experiences of women and who loved, lost, and fought against the structures of privilege that all the while aided them during a fraught stretch of time between wars, come alive in City Scattered, a chapbook of poems that invite us to experience and examine the conditions of labor that echo those of our current day.'City Scattered invokes the bleak not-so-cabaret-life of an imagined Berlin in four voices. Along with a German woman, there's an ethnographer who plays a Victrola and takes notes ("but you can already/ find all that in novels," answers an informant), an interlocutor critiquing, and a chorus (counted as one voice). The Berlin woman "being self-serving, promiscuous, and unmotherly, was nevertheless the darling of a new consumer culture" negotiates the realm. "The real power of light is presence" writes author Tyler Mills, but the light shed in the series "I / Self / Woman in Berlin" is a power itself "with coal staining the sheets/like ink." Congratulations!'Terese Svoboda'In City Scattered, through gorgeous strands of speech, Tyler Mills perceptively reintegrates our sacred, forgotten past into a portrait of a woman whose self-possession and complexity are palpably rendered. Only a poet with such sensitivities of language can so clearly hear and interpret the immortal silence of history; only a poet attuned to her own incandescent spirit can test the oneiric nature of poetry with such vigor of mind.'Major Jackson'Tyler Mills' The City Scattered is a rich document of the "inner architecture" and social displacements that occur under the "skies / of capital." Its choral structure deftly links the late days of the Weimar Republic to labor in the age of Amazon. Through swift images and attention to the complexity of pleasure, Mills' poems show the independence and alienation of workers, particularly women, for whom the "purse thickens" while unemployment rises and money is "losing value." Her crisp, suggestive case study illuminates the confluence of precarity and prosperity at the heart of our era. "Do not lean out," warns a sign on a window in one poem; but we're already leaning closer to read.'Zach Savich

These fourteen-line poems give voice to the individual and collective experiences of women. They are windows into a stark otherworld, one filled with the raw materials of experience: sex, birth, cloth, pain. Spare and strange beauty marks the lives and worlds of these women, defined by their struggle for survival in the physical and psychological captivity of the domestic realm. The speaker moves between the singular and plural, sounding out the overlapping experiences of women as both subject and object of the domination inherent in settler colonialism.

"...begins by considering philosophical questions arising from the experience of desire and intimacy: What does love reveal about-and make possible within-the individual? Can we ever truyly understand another person's experience of the world around them? To what extent is the other ultimately inaccessible, a world unto herself?"--

In her newest collection, award-winning poet and memoirist Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, poems comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother's role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. This book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello's trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange.

Waldrep's seventh collection begins where his prior collection, feast gently, left off: "This / is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again," according to the opening poem in The Earliest Witnesses. If these are poems of witness, then they are also testators to the craft of seeing: eye-proofs of an epiphenomenal world. "Can you see this," the ophthalmologist in "A Mystic's Guide to Arches" asks over and over again. Sight becomes both the facilitator and impediment of desire, in collusion with language itself. "She said, When you say pear, I see p-e-a-r for a second before I see, in my mind's eye, a pear," Waldrep carefully records in "[West Stow Orchard Poem (II)]." The desire-poems in The Earliest Witnesses want the thing itself, its image of the mind, and the language that transmutes both thing and image into song.

The bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething-they want nothing more than to survive... but illness is one of the masters of this book.... The female bodies of Master Suffering want power; power to control and to correct the suffering they both witness and withstand.

Alan Michael Parker's latest collection, The Age of Discovery, is a work of enduring beauty, filled with his signature tenderness and surprise. Parker's interests range from the Psalms to the Internet, from a woman stepping out her window to die to two men trying to learn how to live as they argue in a row-boat. With an eye on some of the greatest love poets (Amichai, Mistral, Neruda), Parker delivers a collection deep in empathy, rigorously attentive, and formally inventive.

An actress. A thinker. A filmmaker. Built of archives and the imagination, the three fictive women narrating Blood Feather articulate a feminist philosophy of art-making and life-making for our fractured world.

The essays in What Came Before say without saying. Combining and blurring the genres of myth, essay, and poetry, these small works explore subjects as diverse as the death of Moses, the special relationship between gay men and cats, the movie "Titanic," rock collections, and the afterlife.

What happens when a central part of life as we know it does not exist? Noah Falck's latest collection answers this question in a playfully gloomy way that reveals the strange edges of our reality. Anyone who has experienced that rug-pulling sensation of change, of strangeness, will relate to Noah Falk's Exclusions. Each lyric poem "excludes" a common subject, including topics such as fiction, modern technology, answers, government, and romance. By setting these subjects against a backdrop of obscurity and strangeness, Falck skillfully keeps readers invested and off-balance. Exclusions brings readers into a world where "the wind is nothing more than a brilliant collection of sighs" and "the sun flattens into a sort of messy bruise over the lake." Even excluding many of the things we take for granted, Falck's lyric poetry includes so much: death, smoke, shadows, sadness, history. This collection will leave readers with a changed perspective on what is necessary, and how to deal with immense change. A 2020 Believer Book Awards Finalist, Exclusions has been praised for its ability to "[keep readers] off balance, stumbling forward, and absolutely alive with both the inventive possibilities of lyric poetry and that rare experience of watching the genre redefine itself in a pair of this art's most capable hands." This is a genre-defining book of poetry that allows us to look into the past, present, and future to understand "the foundations of sadness beginning with the needs of children."

Delving into dark desire and mystery, Slick Like Dark pierces through the noise of aimless reality. These collected poems are haunting and passionate, honest and vivid, asking who bears the blame as they scatter us about the South. Poet Meg Wade carefully crafts an examination of the Southern body and the experience of a woman living in it. Depicting relationships, personal struggles and religion, lines such as "A wasp/nest, gristled angels/it's strange, how scared/I am-quick write/down" show the complexities of creativity. Wade brings us into the intensity of this strangely relatable life while reflecting on the darker sides of what could be done or what could have been. In her characteristic, poignant style, Wade writes "This could have been a place where I would love him like a woman/who wants to have babies would", leaving open the harsh possibilities of love unredeemed. As thrilling as they are contemplative, these poems bring us to realizations we would have shied from before.