Oxblood, by Kiara Nicole Letcher
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Kiara Nicole Letcher’s Oxblood is an exquisite indulgence, an unfettered plunge into the chaos and beauty of unmitigated desire. These poems are lush, violent, intoxicating, seductive, and — perhaps above all else — honest. This book is as lawless and turbulent as it is lavish and sensual. Upon immersion in Oxblood‘s ardent world of hunger and fervor, even the most austere and self-possessed reader encounters delicious sensations of surrender. This vortex of craving, conflict, and scarlet-stained cogitation spares no one.
Hereverent, by Katie Manning
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The title of Katie Manning’s Hereverent offers readers a first glimpse into the fierce but gentle heart that propels life through this collection. An author-created neologism, the portmanteau of “heretical” and “reverent” describes these poems born out of Manning’s frustration with watching people take language from the Bible and weaponize it against other people. At times barbed and challenging, and at other times playful and joyous, this work is a portal into another universe for any reader who understands that love and kindness are truly sacred.
η ψυχή, η ψυχή μας | the soul, our soul, by Joanna C. Valente
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Penned during a season in Greece, this collection of poetry, photographs, and visual art is a study in different notions of tenderness & connection. How do humans love one another? The Numinous? Flora and fauna? The world at large? What can love heal? And—perhaps more difficult to ask—how does it fail us? The artistry & originality of this book are focused on embracing & exploring the earnestness & sentimentality that many students of poetry have been taught to reflexively dismiss.
Come Along With Me to the Pasture Now, by Arielle Greenberg
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Described by the author as “my dropping-out book,” Arielle Greenberg’s Come Along With Me to the Pasture Now maps her decision to leave city life and an academic career, and relocate with her family to a rural area. These poems return frequently to a concept of community. What relationships do we have with the people and environments that surround us? In what ways are we aware of ourselves, and of others? How does one process one’s place in cultural legacies that have both created and endured harm? These poems are often willingly uncomfortable as they seek to understand—mindful of failures, with the goal of doing and being better.
Strut, by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
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Strut, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s second book of poetry, emerges from an intense engagement with our historical moment. These poems are just as much about injustice, struggle, and survival as they are about transcendence and love. Readers will find themselves immersed in the intersections that connect climate change, capitalism, genocide, racism, misogyny, and mental illness. This work honors the gorgeousness of life, even while bearing witness to the ugliness that accompanies—and often seems to permeate—the human experience. Strut is a celebration of self-acceptance, ancestry, love, sensuality, and resilience. It’s not a book of answers, but a blessed, influenced weaving together of shadow and light.
Girl Torpedo, by Emari DiGiorgio
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The poems in Girl Torpedo address gendered injustice, and the ways in which violence against women is often condoned or ignored. Rife with sass and swagger, these poems are reclamation spells, war cries, elegies for girlhood stolen, and amulets for the unborn. They chart the delights and dreads of mother-love, and wrestle with the responsibility of living in both privilege & marginalization, especially in terms of negotiating power of the body. Invoking a sisterhood of survival with language rendered in velocity and volatility, Girl Torpedo wants to sink the old battleship and resurface whole.
Anaïs Nin: An Unprofessional Study, by Kazim Ali
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Melding scholarship and artistic reflection, Anaïs Nin: An Unprofessional Study guides readers through the movements and architectures of Nin’s writing. This dense, melodic book combines critical essays with prose poems, a film treatment for A Spy in the House of Love, a concept for choreography based on Children of the Albatross, and instructions for a conceptual art installation centered around Nin’s life, energy, and aesthetic. Using his own lyric sensibilities and love of language as a compass, Kazim Ali explores what possibilities Nin’s body of work might hold, and what limitations it might transcend.
Historians of Redundant Moments, by Nandini Dhar
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In Historians of Redundant Moments, two sisters—twins—grow up in post-1977 Kolkata, ruminating on the meaning of home, political dissent, history, and memory. Narrated primarily through prose poems, this collection gazes at the ideologies of middle-class secular-Hindu Bengali domesticity through children’s eyes. In maximalist language that piles one image on another, the poems in this book couch the perspectives of these little girls at its very center. The twins observe horrors that turn adult women into objects, and objects into living beings, as they try to find a space of their own within larger political histories of radical resistance and state violence. Historians of Redundant Moments compels the reader to regard domestic spaces with a sense of the uncanny, to admit horror, and to reflect on the processes through which little girls become political subjects, in hitherto uncharted ways.
In the Crocodile Gardens, by Saba Syed Razvi
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In this first, full-length collection of provocative, lavish verse, the mystical Islamic poet Saba Syed Razvi draws contemporary currents of political concern and cultural identity through the sieve of inherited mythos and ecstatic awareness. The poems of In the Crocodile Gardens blossom out of the liminal moments in which familiar narratives begin to unravel, exploring the nature of transgression in emotionally contractual situations that have not retained their structural integrity. The poetry of In the Crocodile Gardens was nominated for a 2016 Rhysling Award and won the 2016 Best Independent American Poetry Award. In the Crocodile Gardens was also a finalist for the 2017 Elgin Award.
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