New York. HarperCollins. 2023. 559 pages.
Words are medicine. Medicine is breath.
I cure with language, nothing more.
—María Sabina
Ambitious, audacious, and teeming with talent, Daug…
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Liberty Lake, Washington. Lost Horse Press. 2023. 215 pages. Dmytro Kremin’s A Violin from the Other Riverside arrives in a dual-language edition at a critical time in Ukrainian history and the Ukrain…
London. Seagull Press. 2023. 72 pages. Translators Nancy Naomi Carlson and Esperanza Hope Snyder struggled to find a term that would capture the complexity of Cuban-born Wendy Guerra’…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2023. 136 pages. Thomas Kinsella’s final collection, Last Poems, combines the five pamphlets of Peppercanister poems (that were first presented in 2013 as a…
Kolkata. BookWryter. 2023. 87 pages. Exit Noire is a passionately imaginative collection of verse. The many masks of the poet create a story of lovelorn life, painting it opaquely. Th…
Santa Barbara, California. Gunpowder Press. 2023. 76 pages. Gary Soto’s most recent collection of poems, the fourth in Gunpowder Press’s California Poets series, might be regarded as…
Beijing. Beijing Publishing House. 2023. A versatile genius—a poet, novelist, short-story writer, and scholar—Gu Yan once described what readers might find in her poems: “difficulties…
Boston. Game Over Books. 2023. 72 pages. The sensitive and finely wrought poems of Emily Stoddard’s Divination with a Human Heart Attached investigate the concept of “mystery” as well…
Frankfort, Kentucky. Broadstone Books. 2022. 101 pages. The title of Tim Hunt’s fifth full-length collection of poems—Voice to Voice in the Dark—connotes an image of an intimate, past…
Denver, Colorado. Elixir Press. 2023. 116 pages. It is an immensely personal thing to make a literary debut. Rooja Mohassessy embraces the vulnerability of this journey with a beautif…
Boston. Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. 2023. 288 pages. In September 1941, over the space of two days, Nazis executed 33,771 Kyivan Jews by machine gun at a ravine near Babyn Y…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet Press. 2023. 80 pages. As the title would suggest, Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello is an examination of the poet’s person, rendered alongside—…
Fayetteville, North Carolina. Longleaf Press. 2023. 116 pages. Winner of the Longleaf Press Book Prize, One Sky to the Next ends with the same five words as its title. These identical expressions brac…
Boston. Black Ocean. 2022. 88 pages. Surely Sin Yong-Mok is a humanist, albeit complexly so, his dreamlike free-verse poems both ferociously secular and transcendentally fixated. Love, sorrow, death—F…
Brooklyn. The Song Cave. 2022. 134 pages. In The Maybe-Bird, Jennifer Elise Foerster presents an impressive work that explores the fluidity of language and the ways in which fluidity can inspire emerg…
Medford, Massachusetts. Arrowsmith Press. 2023. 44 pages. Globally, Ukrainian poets are establishing Ukrainian poetry as a decolonization mechanism within a global literature canon traditionally domin…
Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2023. 80 pages. Jesse Lee Kercheval’s poems in I Want to Tell You give rise to the possibility that abjection can apply to grief, as in the impossibility of…
Cincinnati. WordTech Editions. 2022. 93 pages. The front cover of Serbian American poet Biljana D. Obradović’s latest collection features Albrecht Dürer’s 1498 engraving The Four Horsemen of the Apoca…
Houston. Literal Publishing / Hablemos Escritoras. 2022. 167 pages. In titling her collection of essays Arrhythmias, Mexican poet, novelist, and essayist Angelina Muñiz-Huberman signals to the reader…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2022. 96 pages. Michael Longley’s new verse collection, The Slain Birds, is mostly a book of miniatures, some poems not exceeding four, fiv…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 113 pages. “Perhaps it also has to do with the alphabet—that there isn’t really one, that there are lots of them: each produces its own kind of thinking. Lik…
Melbourne. Downingfield Press. 2023. 54 pages. Oisín Breen’s Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín is a book of poetry woven together by threads of various longing. The first and title poem’s titular charac…
Normal, Illinois. Co*Im*Press. 2022. 134 pages. As a work written in a nonhegemonic language, Galician, the set of poems in Claus and the Scorpion is implicitly about constructing a separate identity…
Illus. Inga-Wiktoria Påve. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2022. 100 pages. Underfoot may be the “first Sámi poetry translated into English in the U.S.,” as the publisher states, but I daresay th…
Durham, North Carolina. Duke University Press. 2022. 142 pages. How does one effectively respond to the injustice of state-sponsored violence, especially such violence directed at imprisoned people, n…