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lifeinpoetry · 7 years ago

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Fall 2017 Books by Poets of Color

A bit of a dream list for me.

1913 Press

Umbilical Hospital by Vi Khi Nao (November 1)

In this book—a vision of a vision—to see is to become. To count, or be counted, is to transform. Vi Khi Nao promises her readers to "split in half, to spread-eagle, to alter/the delirium of grass." Heady, dreamy, painful and acute, the images in these poems recombine to digest, rather than describe, Leslie Thornton's "Sheep Machine." Certainly, one must look at the body from two very different eyes at once for it to become an umbilical hospital. (Sophia Dahlin)

Action Books

Adrenalin by Ghayath Almadhoun, tr. Catherine Cobham (November 15)

Here is Adrenalin, Syrian-born, Stockholm-based Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun's first collection to be published in English. This sinuous translation comprises poems that span years and continents, that circulate between cities, ideas, lovers, places of refuge, war zones, time zones, histories. Here is a vital, relentless, intertextual voice that refuses arrest by sentimentality, that pursues the poetry coursing underneath the poetry.

Ahsahta Press

What’s Hanging on the Hush by Lauren Russell (August 15)

What’s Hanging on the Hush wrestles with concerns that range from race, gender and sexuality to loneliness, madness and grief, and nothing escapes questioning, least of all the position of the poet herself. With humor and slightly off-kilter introspection, these poems disrupt even their own speaking, frequently singing “I.” Collectively, they demonstrate the underlying restlessness of a subjectivity never quite at ease, like the solitary cats who meander across these pages and disappear only to turn up where they are least expected. Operating in a range of modes, from tight lyrics to sprawling, fragmented texts to language experiments, What’s Hanging on the Hush is a tightly constructed interrogation of construction itself. At its heart is an exploration of solitude and a feminist’s existential reckoning—the struggle of being/making in the world.

Akashic Books

Miami Century Fox by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, tr. Eduardo Aparicio (Bilingual) (November 7)

A bilingual--English and Spanish--collection by the 2017 winner of the Paz Prize for Poetry, Miami Century Fox is a delightful, seductive read. Sonnets? Rhyme and meter? Yes, along with a delicious serving of irony and wit. This is one very smart collection of poems--a loving and sly portrait of Miami and the immigrant experience in the twenty-first century.

Alexander & Brook

concave in a convex heart by lahraeb munir (November 1)

concave in a convex heart is kind of about losing things you never really had, but mostly about loving the things you can never have. these poems make you feel a bit more okay with not being okay, because everyone feels not okay sometimes, so we should all learn how to be okay with that.

Alice James Books

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar (September 12)

A breathtaking addition to the canon of addiction literature, Akbar’s poetry confronts the pain and joy in denying oneself for the sake of oneself…Akbar’s poems offer readers, religious or not, a way to cultivate faith in times of deepest fear. (Publishers Weekly)

Some Say the Lark by Jennifer Chang (October 10)

Jennifer Chang’s Some Say the Lark is a piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination—the familiar world rendered strange. In these poems a dark wisdom is at work reminding us that being in a state of longing is the nature of existential loneliness and that among our desires is a kind of self-destruction: ‘we love loss as we love ourselves,/ secretly. And too much.’ The gift of these poems is in the act of defiance which engendered their creation: while the soul might begin in isolation, through language we can find our necessary adhesion to something larger, communal, full of radiant hope.” (Natasha Trethewey)

We’re On: A June Jordan Reader eds. Christoph Keller & Jan Heller Levi (September 19)

Jordan begs us to trust one another and to tell the truth, to read the world more closely, to learn the wisdom of those who came before, who resisted before, and loved before. She laid a foundation, leaving a revolutionary blueprint for poetry to transform our lives beyond the white gaze and its literary imagination. . . .This book is not just a collection of figurative words; it is a tool for liberation. (Publishers Weekly)

American Poetry Review

River Hymns by Tyree Daye (September 12)

River Hymns is a brilliant debut of black poetry in a tradition that goes from Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes to CS Giscombe, Forrest Hamer, and Sean Hill. Tyree Daye is a blues poet of the first order, giving voice to the people of the rural South...no...the families of the... Actually, Tyree Daye wants to make immortal all of the people of the past who made a way for his existence, and these poems bring them and the land they called home back to life. The vernacular here is one of a man speaking out loud to his own soul. (Jericho Brown)

Anhinga Press

To Whitey and the Crackerjack by Hauntie (September 10)

Alive with ancestral pain and steadfast in its dispossessed ferocity, Hauntie's first collection of poems radiates with a wise rage transferred from generations before. By reattaching vocal chords to the spirit of the Hmong auntie-mother, Hauntie honors the trauma and eternal grieving of the woman who sees and experiences all, from a war littered with its many ghosts, to a land of childhood summers in Fresno. That this powerful work comes to us from a Hmong woman poet attests to the continued springing of literature in the Hmong American community along with its necessity and importance. These words that experiment with form and voice soar in their need to speak back to the self, the other, and the adversary in order to re-scribe its own vengeance. A remarkable debut, each poem howls back like a wolf far from being tethered. (Mai Der Vang)

Arte Público Press

When Love Was Reels by José B. González (September 30)

"My parents crossed when I started losing / teeth. My memory of them is broken, chipped / away." Expressing his longing not to be forgotten like so many abandoned children in his native country, José B. González writes about a young boy's life first in El Salvador under the care of his grandmother and later living with his uncle in New York City in this moving collection of narrative poems that uses iconic Latin American and Latino films as a guiding motif.

Artifact Press

Notes On Losing by Cynthia Cruz (November 7)

The speaker in Cynthia Cruz’s latest collection of poems is a poet and an artist, a photographer, to be exact, seeking answers to the difficult questions about identity and femininity. She explores the angst of agency in self-portraiture and its unsettling struggle for power in the act of making the private public: “I still exist. I am here / even when you do not see me. / I am here because I say that I am.” This arresting chapbook is a taste of what’s to come in 2018: Dregs, Cruz’s fifth book of poems. (Rigoberto González)

Atelos

Yaviza by Roberto Harrison (December 31)

YAVIZA, the title of Roberto Harrison's new book, is also the name of a small Panamanian jungle town with a declining population and a colonized history. YAVIZA marks the end of the Panamerican Highway and hence, perhaps, of U.S. imperialist influence. YAVIZA (the book) takes up a different journey—a vision quest of sorts—an act of liberatory re-enchantment. The poetry emerges out of personal, as well as political, struggle, and the book can be read as an ars poetica. But it is also a demonstration of the transformative power of language, liberated from the prosaic and wild with incantatory imagination, beckoning us into a world of "plural consciousness."

The Atlas Review

Teaches of Peaches by Diane Exavier (November)

"My father did not choose my mother," Diane Exavier writes early on in Teaches of Peaches. "He chose his condition and thought he could take care of both. He was wrong." Exavier's Teaches of Peaches is an elegy wrapped in an anti-elegy. It resists category and traditional form with a formidable nod toward hybrid. But unlike many hybrid collections, which work to show us idea through form and its faceted subversions, Teaches of Peaches presents form through idea and an idea's subversion to fact. We feel the heat of autobiography's grief chasm, but then Exavier encourages us to fall through that grief chasm with her. And grief is a funny thing in this collection. The death of her mother rests in a mausoleum in Haiti. The death of her father years later resides in another Exavier-sealed elsewhere. Grief is not a thing with feathers. It is the chiasmus of youth "masquerading in different vessels." It is in the porn Exavier watches as a girl and it is the girl herself: "Mismatched butterfly clips graced / the end of chubby fat twists / atop my head," Exavier writes. "I wanted to die." Grief is a disavowal. Grief is a cat named Peaches.

Atria/37 INK

Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems by Ntozake Shange (November 14)

With a clear, raw, and affecting voice, Shange draws from her experience as a feminist black woman in American to craft groundbreaking poetry about pain, beauty, and color. In the bestselling tradition of Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey, Wild Beauty is more than a poetry collection; it is an exquisite call to action for a new generation of women, people of color, feminists, and activists to follow in the author’s footsteps in the pursuit of equality and understanding. As The New York Times raves, “Ntozake Shange writes with such exquisite care and beauty that anyone can relate to her message.”

Autumn House Press

The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water by Cameron Barnett (November 7)

Cameron Barnett’s poetry collection, The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water (winner of the 2017 Rising Writer Contest), explores the complexity of race and the body for a black man in today’s America.

Vixen by Cherene Sherrard (September 7)

Cherene Sherrard’s Vixen is one of the most stunning debut collections of recent years. Historically resonant and urgently contemporary, Cherene Sherrard’s work interrogates the raw, shifting, and corrosive narratives of racial identity that her poems unravel in multiple cultural iterations. Her speakers are dazzling and her lines crackle with her powerful and incisive intelligence. Vixen is a book I keep returning to again and again for both its wisdom and its passionate dramatic brilliance. (David St. John)

be about it press

i love you, it looks like rain by June Gehringer (August 24)

"In a world where cruelty seems to be the choice cowardly mode of survival, to believe in the power of beauty, compassion, and love is a radical act, and with her first book, i love you, it looks like rain, June shows us just how radical and necessary that act can be. June's words will make you feel more, laugh more, cry more, and, in the end, love more." (Peyton Burgess)

Beacon Press

For Want of Water by Sasha Pimentel (October 17)

El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States, while across the river, Ciudad Juárez suffers a history of femicides and a horrific drug war. Witnessing this, a Filipina’s life unravels as she tries to love an addict, the murders growing just a city—but the breadth of a country—away. This collection weaves the personal with recent history, the domestic with the tragic, asking how much “a body will hold,” reaching from the border to the poet’s own Philippines. These poems thirst in the desert, want for water, searching the brutal and tender territories between bodies, families, and nations.

BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

Currents by Bojan Lewis (November 1)

Currents is charged and luminous under 'butane flame dawn.' Bojan Louis 'stickframes nightmares' into song — in attempt to heal and jolt awake stories in blistering holler above his homelands of pot- holed desert highways and reservation borders. An electrician by trade, Diné poet Bojan Louis' debut is a multilingual ceremony of electricity, earth and memory, where brokenness is the ground from which our stories continue reaching for Hózhó. (Sherwin Bitsui)

Black Lawrence Press

[ G A T E S ] by Sahar Muradi (October 24)

If you open Sahar Muradi’s [ G A T E S ] and follow each line into the entryways and departures, passed “convention centers and expos / and festivals that begin at sunset,” you will witness the poet’s memories as tiny explosions of intimacies that devastate with their precision and candor. On images of Ferris wheels and “prayer on the side of the road,” the poet “kneels and spreads [her] picnic” of wonder. Sahar Muradi makes sense of the fragments of memory, the broken buildings of Kabul, Mazar, and Panjsher, the innocence of childhood punctured by journey, a father’s illness, losing a language, and the politics of a war uninvited. Muradi beckons you, asks how you “authored poorer nations with the hope of freeing / others. The architects of what’s left.” Indeed the political act of poetry in this fierce collection is a pained beauty that does not look away as it rebuilds the human starting with the heart. (Rajiv Mohabir)

Bloof Books

Ghosts, Models, Visions by Ginger Ko (August 9)

A long-awaited new chapbook in our handmade series! New poems by Ginger Ko.

BOAAT Press

After Jubilee by Brionne Janae (December 30)

“Blessed” is the word that comes to mind after reading Brionne Janae’s After Jubilee, a collection of finely-tuned narratives presenting characters in a precarious balance between love and hate. Many voices collude to answer for both the jubilation and horror that has plagued black people from the beginning, including the black man with the white father, the parents donating their infant son’s organs to save other lives, and those ignored and forgotten in the massacre at Slocum, Texas in 1910. I find myself locating in these poems the “vital things” that make loss bearable. Janae offers one profoundly important truth: this history is as much in front of us as it is behind us; fortunately for our survival, we have not slipped past redemption. This is an excellent read, if for no other reason than the range and lyricism of Janae’s voice. (Amber Flora Thomas)

BOA Editions Ltd.

Sky Country by Christine Kitano (September 12)

Christine Kitano’s second poetry collection elicits a sense of hunger—an intense longing for home and an ache for human connection. Channeling both real and imagined immigration experiences of her own family—her grandmothers, who fled Korea and Japan; and her father, a Japanese American who was incarcerated during WWII—Kitano’s ambitious poetry speaks for those who have been historically silenced and displaced.

Brain Mill Press

Black Genealogy by Kiki Petrosino, illustrated by Lauren Haldeman (November 28)

At a literal crossroads in the South, there are two speakers in these poems — the descendant, who has traveled here to try to find her ancestors in the archives, records, and receipts of their violent and near-unrecorded history, and the ancestors, who are alternately bemused, angry, and tender with their descendant. Petrosino’s poems argue with each other across time and seek to hear each other over the guardians and soldiers of the past who want to keep black genealogy from the descendants who would sing its truth. Interchapters illustrated by artist Lauren Haldeman reimagine the barriers of genealogical research as an enigmatic Confederate soldier with the disquieting habits and obstructive magicks of Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat.

Buckrider Books/Wolsak & Wynn

Voodoo Hypothesis by Canisia Lubrin (October 3)

Voodoo Hypothesis is a subversion of the imperial construct of "blackness" and a rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint black people as inferior, through constant parallel representations of "evil" and "savagery." Pulling from pop culture, science, pseudo-science and contemporary news stories about race, Lubrin asks: What happens if the systems of belief that give science, religion and culture their importance were actually applied to the contemporary "black experience"? With its irreverence toward colonialism, and the related obsession with post-colonialism and anti-colonialism, and her wide-ranging lines, deftly touched with an intermingling of Caribbean Creole, English patois and baroque language, Lubrin has created a book that holds up a torch to the narratives of the ruling class, and shows us the restorative possibilities that exist in language itself.

Button Poetry

Helium by Rudy Francisco (November 3)

Helium is the debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers. Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, race and gender into an unforgettable whole. Ultimately, Rudy's work rises above the chaos to offer a fresh and positive perspective of shared humanity and beauty.

peluda by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (September 26)

The book explores the relationship between femininity and body hair as well as the intersections of family, class, the immigrant experience, Latina identity, and much more, all through Lozada-Oliva's unique lens and striking voice. Peluda is a powerful testimony on body image and the triumph over taboo.

Still Can't Do My Daughter's Hair by William Evans (October 24)

Still Can't Do My Daughter's Hair is the latest book by author William Evans, founder of Black Nerd Problems. Evans is a long-standing voice in the performance poetry scene, who has performed at venues across the country and been featured on numerous final stages, including the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam. Evans's commanding, confident style shines through in these poems, which explore masculinity, fatherhood, and family, and what it means to make a home as a black man in contemporary America.

C&R Press

All My Heroes Are Broke by Ariel Francisco (September 15)

All My Heroes Are Broke is a poetry collection written from the perspective of a first generation American coming to terms with the implicit struggles and disillusionment of the “American Dream.” The first section takes place in New York, both implicitly and explicitly, and serves to introduce the speaker and reveal aspects of his family’s history. The second section takes place in Florida, and continues to further exemplify the speaker’s growing cynicism towards the circumstances of his life, and the peculiar atmosphere of solitude that it creates. All My Heroes Are Broke primarily uses two forms: short, image driven poems inspired by the works of Robert Bly and Po Chu-I; and longer narrative poems that reveal more personal information about the speaker, in the manner of Li-Young Lee and Frank O’Hara, allowing the speaker to project his own life onto the surroundings and the people of those larger communities.

Negro Side Of The Moon, by Earl Braggs (September 15)

In Negro Side of the Moon, Earl Braggs confronts the “problem of the color line” with lyrical ferocity and politically charged wit. Many things don’t get said about what seems to be a multifaceted conspiracy against the physical safety and mental well-being of Black Americas—which ultimately, calls every life into question. In his new book, Braggs means to sing the whole story in a voice both manic and carefully packed with the freight we’re all obliged to carry—whether we know it or not. If, as Dr. King has said, the destiny of white people is inextricably bound to the destiny of Black people Negro Side of the Moon is an invitation to all of us to wake the hell up and take a long look at what ails the American psyche. (Tim Seibles)

Cardboard House Press

As Though the Wound Had Heard by Mara Pastor, tr. María José Giménez (September 14)

Words rarely fail us. Rather, it’s often the other way around. A poem like Mara Pastor’s “Man” reminds me of how much we undercut and burden them with the task of unidirectional sense-making. It lodges in my mind—parasitic, tapeworm-like—for its odd humor, unsettling ambiguity, and refusal to budge. “The Busts of Martí” is a comedic take on polyvocality. María José Giménez’s translations capture the quirks of Pastor’s playful sensibility, and what ensues is buoyancy. (Mónica de la Torre)

Litane by Alejandro Tarrab, tr. Clare Sullivan (August 26)

From the moment I first came into contact with Alejandro’s poetry, it impressed me—something here is taken to its furthest consequences: a certain overlapping of planes of language and planes of reality that, on the one hand, depict a landscape or a physical environment, and on the other hand, sketch out the distinct nervure of mental landscapes that eventually converge into a space, into a Mexico, into a city that is in some sense derealized. (Raúl Zurita)

My Lai by Carmen Berenguer, tr. Liz Henry (September 26)

My Lai is first a document. A testimony to an era that touched us differently depending on our different circumstances. But being a document does not necessarily make it a book of poetry. More than anything, MY LAI is poetry, and in my judgment, first-rate poetry that adopts a conversational 'American' style of a certain density. This can be seen in the book's language and its marvelous structure—the interspersed quotes, the internal movements of each text, the beat which goes dim and then radiates, the agony which doesn't fall into the funereal pomp of rhetoric, the deep disquiet facing a personal, national, and universal era and history—in MY LAI, all of this is recovered in the beautiful progression of the voice of Carmen Berenguer, a fundamental poet in contemporary Spanish-language poetry. From the singular experience that spans from the late 60s to the early 70s, she makes us relive an idealism, an anti-materialism, and an urgent sense of liberty that, more than a utopia, is a real possibility. This is an essential book to enlighten new generations about a living era that has so much to offer.

CavanKerry

Threshold by Joseph O. Legaspi (October 3)

Threshold. A piece of wood, metal, or stone that forms the bottom of a door. You walk over it as you enter a room. A house. Your life. It is a point of beginnings, endings. And changes.

In his stunning new collection of poems, Joseph O. Legaspi explores these liminal spaces, portals that we enter which transform our lives. It is a book that celebrates various courageous outsets across boundaries—bodily, filial, marital, even biblical. Threshold not only offers revelations from both sides of the passageway but tells of human endurance and our longing, our desires.

Chax Press

A Mere Rica by Linh Dinh (October 1)

Getting back to the theme of writing from the outside, I published this in the American Poetry Review in 2004, 'I've come to realize that I much prefer to live on the periphery of the English language, so that I can steer clear of the tyranny of its suffocating center. In this sense, I am a quintessential American. A Unapoet, I like to homestead just beyond the long reach of Washington... Hearing the rapid syllables of a foreign language, a bigot is infuriated because he's reduced to the status of an infant. Poets, on the other hand, should welcome all opportunities to become disoriented. To not know what's happening forces one to become more attentive and to fill in the blanks. Hence, poetry. (Linh Dinh)

Cinco Puntos Press

The Last Cigarette on Earth by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (September 13)

A gay Latino's intimate journey through addiction, human desire and broken love. Winner of the Pen/Faulkner and Lambda Awards for Fiction (2013), this is Saenz' first book of poems in years. Eileen Myles, Poet and Novelist, says of this collection: "Benjamin Alire Saenz’s poems are ballads. They’re stories but they also have a whiff of the life sailing by from the car just passing with the radio on. It’s music in stores selling stuff and suddenly it’s inside your heart too painful to ignore. I love the honesty of this work and the sharp sweet reminder that we pick up art, our own and other people’s (including their tattoos) same way birds hold onto something inside and out to fly forward. His tunes are wild and brave."

City Lights Publishers

Heaven Is All Goodbyes by Tongo Eisen-Martin (September 26)

This striking new work from Tongo Eisen-Martin is a timely reminder of Amiri Baraka's call for poems that are useful, poems that breathe like wrestlers. At every turn, Heaven Is All Goodbyes demands that we engage the systemic violence woven into our daily living right alongside the persistent force that is black social life, the joy that everyday people cultivate against unthinkable odds. And even though Eisen-Martin grounds us, necessarily, in the material constraints of the modern world, he doesn’t leave us there. He calls us elsewhere. He brings us with him into a robust, illuminating vision of the worlds that exist outside and underneath the one that seeks to curtail our liberation, contain our love. This is work that challenges as it lifts. These are the unabashed abolitionist lyrics of a writer who knows that stakes are high and so is the cost of conceding our most radical dreams. In a moment marked by cynicism and disenchantment, Eisen-Martin remains a believer: in the commons, in collective struggle, in our capacity to flourish in the midst of what we were never meant to survive. (Joshua Bennett)

Invocation to Daughters by Barbara Jane Reyes (October 31)

Invocation to Daughters is a book of prayers, psalms, and odes for Filipina girls and women trying to survive and make sense of their own situations. Writing in an English inflected with Tagalog and Spanish, in meditations on the relationship between fathers and daughters and impassioned pleas on behalf of victims of brutality, Barbara Jane Reyes unleashes the colonized tongue in a lyrical feminist broadside written from a place of shared humanity.

Coffee House Press

Beneath the Spanish by Victor Hernández Cruz (October 10)

Beneath the Spanish tracks the way that languages intersect and inform each other, and how language and music shapes experience. Moving across landscapes from Puerto Rico to Manhattan to Morocco, these poems are one man's history and a song that begs to be performed.

Commune Editions

Transnational Battle Field by Heriberto Yépez (September 19)

Tijuana writer Heriberto Yépez writes work that is full of anger, critique, and questions for writers and other citizens of the first worlds. Transnational Battle Field, which collects much of the work that he has written in English over the last fifteen years, is both a wake up call and a call out. He takes no prisoners as he takes on not just NAFTA and the US-Mexico border but also first world luminaries such as Amiri Baraka and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Essential reading for those trying to figure out the role of culture in the revolutions to come.

Copper Canyon Press

Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang (November 14)

This energetic string of linked poems is full of wordplay, humor, and biting social commentary involving the quote-unquote speaker, Barbie Chang, a disillusioned Asian-American suburbanite. By turns woeful and passionate, playful and incisive, these poems reveal a voice insisting that "even silence is not silent."

blud by Rachel McKibbens (October 17)

Chicana poet, activist, and witchy folk hero of the disenfranchised. . . . [McKibbens] creates these spaces of witness with her feral and boundary-pushing poems that speak unflinchingly of topics often swept under the rug: rape, domestic violence, body shaming, mental illness, prejudice. (Ploughshares)

The Silence That Remains: Selected Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan, tr. Fady Joudah (August 8)

As a child, Ghassan Zaqtan lived in a refugee camp near the River Jordan. While that painful experience deeply influenced his poetry, when Zaqtan was awarded the prestigious Griffin International Prize, the judges noted: "His words turn dark into light, hatred into love, death into life. His magic leads us to the clearing where hope becomes possible, where healing begins across individuals, countries, races."

When interviewed by PBS for their special on Palestinian poets, Zaqtan said, "I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration. I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it's the handkerchief or a child's backpack or a purse."

This generous volume represents two decades of incandescent creativity.

Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora (September 5)

Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind.

Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun."

Ecco

Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey (September 12)

The existential magnitude, deep intellect, and playful subversion of St. Thomas-born, Florida-raised poet Nicole Sealey’s work is restless in its empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human.

The ranging scope of inquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast—at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential—is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history, and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.

The Emma Press

Paisley, by Rakhshan Rizwan (September 28)

Rakhshan Rizwan’s debut collection simmers with a poised, driving anger. Drawing on the rich visual and material culture of her home region, Rizwan unpacks and offers critical comment on the vexed issues of class, linguistic and cultural identity – particularly for women – in the context of Pakistan and South Asia.

Eyewear Publishing

My Mind's Dark Parties by Khariis Ubiaro (December 13)

Not afraid to be angry, Ubiaro

lashes out at modern-day racism

and asserts his identity as an artist

and a young man. Unabashedly

political, this debut collection

examines race, religion and fame

with passion and wit, as well as

exploring love, mental health,

and the artist’s obsession with

creation. This is an electrifying

set of poems.

Fence Books/BookTh*g

Kith by Divya Victor (December 12)

A complex and moving array of imagistic arguments-with-history about skin, postcolonialism, travel, exile, fluids, and cultural materialism.

Kith describes postcolonialist relation from the painful psychohistorical perspective of a hybrid, in multiple exiles. Victor reaps the pain, reams the pain, approaches the painful material from striated vantages, using discrete methodologies of extraction. This is not a pretty poetry of nostalgia for bittersweet pungencies, no invitation to savor bemusing exoticisms; this poetry invites disassociation from that which is no longer to be borne.

Finishing Line Press

heliophobia by Saba Syed Razvi (December 22)

heliophobia, a collection of poems, opens with a Nereid on the verge of death, closes somewhere between the orgiastic rapture of a rave and an ecstatic experience of midnight meditation, and pivots on conflicting cultural perspectives – one embracing in revelry the tangible darkness of the night and the other racing in fear from beneath its shadow toward the light. The book provides a space in which culture, myth, and archetype can reconfigure their manifestations, allowing Goya, Houdini, Kali, Anais Nin, Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, Freud and the Mad Hatter and others to cast their selves throughout the moving circles in a shadowy cast of characters across time and continents. As the poems make their way through dream images, ideologies, and reinventions, the foremost question becomes that of the center and where it is, whether it can be reached, or if it even is. A resulting whirl propels the reader through goth-rock refrains and mantric prayers, incantations and phantom confessions, into an underground freefall exploring the textures of shadow and the consequences of light.

Four Way Books

Starshine & Clay by Kamilah Aisha Moon (September 5)

“Breath caught in her throat,” Kamilah Aisha Moon writes of a mother waiting for a son to come home, “when your trachea snapped” (“To Jesse Washington”). Starshine & Clay is a history of injustice and oppression in America grounded in the lives, loves, and despair of individual men and women whose spirits fight on earth and dream of the heavens: “I think of / Joy, Théma, Kerry, Anthony, Phebus. Sandra & those / lynched by cops, satellite spirits who didn’t reach this orbit alive” (“Still Life as Rocket: 42”).

Frontenac House

This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt (September 1)

Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut poetry collection, This Wound is a World, is a prayer against breaking. By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song which dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we've been waiting for. (Gwen Benaway)

Frontier Slumber

Sunset Park by Jason Koo (December 20)

Glass Poetry Press

How to Cook a Ghost by Logan February (August 15)

What Logan February has done in How To Cook A Ghost is taken food, a pleasure, and seasoned it with a visceral emotion that rings throughout this ode to love, loss and living through both in equal measure. I walk away from this marvelous work feeling as if I am full, and yet still hungry for whatever might come next. (Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib)

mxd kd mixtape by Malcolm Friend (November 15)

In his debut chapbook mxd kd mix tape, Malcolm Friend offers us a speaker on the fringe of becoming. If he were a superhero this would be his origin story. The musicality & rhythm that is promised in the title more than delivers, but what Friend also delivers on are poems forged within the many rooms of his identity. & these rooms are decorated with poetic craft & a keen knowledge of the songs that have shaped him. This collection, & Friend are a valuable addition to America's poetic landscape. I look forward to many more work from this fresh new voice. (Yesenia Montilla)

Graywolf Press

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (September 5)

These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable. . . . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. . . . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech. (The New Yorker)

Haymarket Books

Commando by E'mon Lauren (October 1)

E’mon Lauren’s poems take artifacts, language, and ephemera from life on Chicago’s Southside and Westside to create a manifesto of survival and growth. These poems from Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate grapple with sexism, racism, love, and class with a style that announces Lauren as a poet to watch.

Commando is an aesthetic stick up, hallelujahs in a handbag with a handgun. The first collection from the city's first youth poet laureate is a manifesto for a solider at war.

Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing (August 21)

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the fantastical, Ewing takes us from the streets of Chicago to an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility.

Les Figues Press

Irradiated Cities by Mariko Nagai (August 1)

The before, the after, and the event that divides. In Irradiated Cities, Mariko Nagai seeks the dividing events of nuclear catastrophe in Japan, exploring the aftermath of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Nagai's lyric textual fragments and stark black and white photographs act as a guide through these spaces of loss, silence, echo, devastation, and memory. And haunting each shard and each page an enduring irradiation, the deadly residue of catastrophe that leaks into our DNA.

Lithic Press

Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater by Sam Roxas-Chua 姚 (December 17)

Sam Roxas-Chua 姚’s poetry is swirling and galactic, vividly sensual, and delightfully stubborn in its refusal to entertain simple answers to queries of blood, faith, and desire. Surreal yet rooted in palpable color and history, this poet’s vision transcends oceans, blends geographies and bleeds a multi-tongued heritage for us to better find ourselves. We need more maps like this in the world, and cartographers of language like Sam Roxas Chua 姚. (Tyehimba Jess)

Litmus Press

Bridge of the World by Roberto Harrison (October 1)

Bridge of the World maps multiple transits between mental, spiritual, and geographic topographies, pivoting on the experience of dislocation from Panama and Latinidad. This is a journey over bridges between inner and outer worlds, between the cosmic and the material, the past and the present, and the immediate and memory. Traversing is bound up in the alienations of migration, economic disparity, the violations of capitalism, and the cosmic betrayals in the struggle to hold onto love in the place of rage. Harrison's is a poetics that explores psychological fragmentation as the natural condition of a life lived suspended in multiple in- betweens. Place is colossal, mundane objects swell with symbolism, time and memory warp, and plague the mind and poetry with visions. These poems are glutted with the revelation and pain that braid themselves through the poet's living—a brave and undulating work that invites us into a love defiant and resolutely alive.

Little A

I Wore My Blackest Hair by Carlina Duan (November 14)

Celebrating Chinese American girlhood in all its confusion, love, and loss.

In I Wore My Blackest Hair, Fulbright grant and Edna Meudt Memorial Award recipient Carlina Duan delivers an electric debut collection of poetry. With defiance and wild joy, Duan’s poems wrestle with and celebrate ancestry and history, racial consciousness, and the growing pains of girlhood. They explore difficult truths with grace and power. I Wore My Blackest Hair is an honest portrait of a woman in-between—identities, places, languages, and desires—and her quest to belong. The speaker is specific in her self-definition, discovering and reinventing what it means to be a bold woman, what it means to be Chinese American, and what it means to grow into adulthood. Duan moves seamlessly from the personal to the imaginative to the universal, heralding a brilliant new voice in contemporary poetry.

Rummage by Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa (August 29)

A journey through girlhood, self-discovery, and the little acts of violence we inflict on one another.

In an astounding debut poetry collection, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Lambda Literary fellow Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa presents a relentless but refined portrait of one young woman’s journey toward self-discovery. Her poems explore the eternal themes of the human condition—nature, origin, shame, identity, desire, mortality—with sensitivity and specificity. They illuminate and interrogate the ways that her characters inflict and experience pain, ultimately revealing how we must all face our shame in order to grow. No voice is blameless; no person is exempt. Divided into four sections, the collection reads as a life cycle of emotional metamorphosis: girlhood and sexuality, trauma, relationships, and grief. Rummage is a wildly courageous and lyrical book full of music, metaphor, and the power of memory.

Liverpool University Press

Fourth Person Singular by Nuar Alsadir (September 1)

Fourth Person Singular continues to blow open the relationship between self and world in a working through of lyric shame, bending poetic form through fragment, lyric essay, aphorisms mined from the unconscious, and pop-up associations, to explore the complexities, congruities, disturbances - as well as the beauty - involved in self-representation in language. As unexpected as it is bold, Alsadir's ambitious tour de force demands we pay new attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric - and human relationships - in the 21st century.

Mariner Books

Silencer by Marcus Wicker (September 5)

Welcome to Marcus Wicker’s Midwest, where the muzzle is always on and where silence and daily microaggressions can chafe away at the faith of a young man grieved by images of gun violence and police brutality in twenty-first-century America. Precisely contradictory, bittersweet, witty, and heartbreaking, Silencer is where the political and the personal collide. Driven by the sounds of hip-hop and reimagined forms and structures, Wicker's explosive second book is composed of poems at war with themselves, verses in which the poet questions his own faith in God, in hope, in the American Dream, and in himself. Pushing our ideas of traditions and expectations, these poems and queries work in concert towards creating a new dialectic.

Math Paper Press

Poems for the Sound of the Sky Before Thunder by Topaz Winters (November 4)

poems for the sound of the sky before thunder is a collection that tiptoes the infinitely blurred lines between hurting, hoping & healing. It speaks of sleepless nights & softened tongues, telling a story of dreaming & bone-bright & out of focus in the rain. These poems are only as much for losing as they are for finding, only as much for despair as they are for the light scattered within it, only as much for leaving as they are for finally coming home.

Metatron

How Do I Look? by Sennah Yee (October 1)

Through a series of flash poetry/non-fiction pieces, Sennah Yee’s debut full-length book How Do I Look? paints a colourful portrait of a woman both raised and repelled by the media. With pithy, razor-sharp prose, Sennah dissects and reassembles pop culture through personal anecdotes, crafting a love-hate letter to the media and the microaggressions that have shaped how she sees herself and the world. How Do I Look? is a raw and vulnerable reflection on identities real and imagined.

Tropico by Marcela Huerta (October 1)

Marcela Huerta's debut collection of poetry tackles grief, memory, and the experiences of a second-generation immigrant. The daughter of political refugees from Chile, Huerta shares memories of her recently departed father, who becomes a symbol for Chilean culture and leftist resistance after his passing. Through the intimate detailing of everyday occurrences, Tropico reveals how intergenerational trauma disrupts childhood and lays bare the lived effects of American imperialism.

Monster House Press

Mount Carmel & The Blood Of Parnassus by Anaïs Duplan (September 1)

Reading Anaïs Duplan's chapbook, you realize you are more than an assemblage of ideologies, a cellular plan, or even an estranged, familial relation possessing the accoutrements of a melancholic nation, but also, too, the glorious product of dense, self-referential layered texts that call to the surface your loneliness and feelings of kinship. Here are poems that revel in post- hybridity and borderless threnodies, and go straight to the stillness of the heart, to performances of language that are fierce and juicier than a papaya, and frankly, that one would only expect from a brilliant, young mind as theirs. (Major Jackson)

New Directions

Across the Vapour Gulf by Will Alexander (August 15)

Composed and collected by slow accretion over the span of thirty years, Across the Vapour Gulf opens with a note by the poet: “When I first laid eyes on the writing of Cioran I was smitten by the form. The aphorism seemed cleansed of detritus―in Cioran's hands, it seemed to spontaneously ignite. Poetry, history, philosophy, the essay, medicinally combined, appearing on the other side of itself as insight. Reading Cioran opened an unexpected neural pathway, opening the way for the composition of the compilation at hand. Each entry was instantaneous. They welled up and appeared with such astonishing alacrity, that they seemed to compose themselves practically fully formed.”

Nightboat Books

Some Beheadings by Aditi Machado (October 3)

Here the “beheaded” poet displaces her mind into the landscape, exploring territories as disparate as India’s Western Ghats and the cinematic Mojave Desert, as absurd as insomnia and dream. Some Beheadings asks three questions: “How does thinking happen?” “What does thinking feel like?” “How do I think about the future?” The second question takes primacy over the others, reflecting on what poets and critics have called “the sensuous intellect,” what needs to be felt in language, the contours of questions touched in sound and syntax.

No, Dear/Small Anchor Press

Caljforkya Voltage Joshua Escobar aka DJ Ashtrae (September)

Joshua Escobar aka DJ Ashtrae makes poetry into a kind of music. He mixes family drama with travelogues, interviews about the HIV epidemic with biographies of Mexican immigrants, the lyrical with the actual, English with Spanish. Caljforkya Voltage records his imaginary journey through a dreamy dystopia known for its heat, far from the ocean and fueled by the shipping industry, a dystopia based off of his beloved hometown, San Bernardino

I Am Made to Leave I Am Made to Return by Marwa Helal (sold out)

Marwa Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest and has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University.

Noemi Press

Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (September 21)

Beast Meridian is a fierce incantation, harnessing the intuition and intelligence of personae navigating a “melancholy galaxy” full of the violences of societies and families, in which the pain of the earth and the pain of the body are not separate. In languages of tenderness and weaponry, landscapes and bodyscapes, insight and foresight, talismanic memories and imaginings, Vanessa Angelica Villareal constructs layered complications to see newly into, or grieve not being able to look beyond. Far from surrender, the poems write toward a communal resilience: “entre todas las mujeres we kneel to push away the final night”—a unity among wounded women, their collective mythology infused with necessary interrogations and radiant intensity, as they (and their words) “spill & spill until we spread / like a flood.” (Khadijah Queen)

These Days of Candy by Manuel Paul López (November 15)

In his latest book, These Days of Candy, Manuel Paul López writes: “I’m a mouth with your laughter trapped in me.” That laughter is streaked with “tears,” “dried fireflies,” “blood,” and “long inspired verses.” Walt Whitman may have contained multitudes, but López brings us “The Warriors” (there are dozens of them, all memorable), “Mouse Pad Becky,” “Radio Mind,” Mr. Signal,” “The Saddened Man,” and “the superhero towel”– determined, defiant, and stunted individuals whose voices (the ones Mr. “White” Whitman ignored) are shrill, sharp, sensuous, and snappy. They bounce us around the expanding universe of warehouses and vacation hideaways, as they burrow into our lives, persistent as worms. “I am disoriented from the daily blood donations extorted from the body via black and white bloodmobiles.” Lopez’s poems are “a walking coagulant,” a “One angel wheelbarrowed inflation,” and a “Global Positioning System.” The only way to release the laughter is to read Lopez’s testimonies, as necessary as the poisonous air that we have to breathe. (John Yau)

Nomadic Press

Cradles by Fisayo Adeyeye (October 27)

Obsessed with hunger and the mythology of safety, the poems in Cradles interrogate violence, desire, and nativity along lines of both the angelic and the everyday.

The Horse Eaters by Ayodele Nzinga (September 23)

This is an origin tale, a reclamation of memory, a movement towards wholeness in thought that helps shape action and inform deed. These poems are an anchor cast out from the graveyard in the Atlantic ocean tethering the beginning of the myth of me in North America to a place.

Northwestern University Press

All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell (December 15)

All Blue So Late is a haunting coming of age; a slow and writhing eruption of womanhood through layers of heat, siren and loss. Laura Swearingen-Steadwell has a plaintive, truthful voice that ripples with blues and never wavers towards solipsism. She reckons with an American landscape of Midwestern fluorescence and coastal grit to render poems fused with blistered song. (Tyehimba Jess)

NOT A CULT

Another Black Girl Miracle by Tonya Ingram (November 16)

Another Black Girl Miracle is a testimony. It is the documentation of healing. It is a tale of womanhood; its awkwardness and its rewards. Filled with themes of depression, sexuality, identity and wonder, this text not only examines what it means to be a young black girl in the world, but what it takes to participate in her own resurrection and rebirth.

Corazón by Yesika Salgado (November 16)

Corazón is a love story. It is about the constant hunger for love. It is about feeding that hunger with another person and finding that sometimes it isn't enough. Salgado creates a world in which the heart can live anywhere; her fat brown body, her parents home country, a lover, a toothbrush, a mango, or a song. It is a celebration of heartache, of how it can ruin us, but most importantly how we always survive it and return to ourselves whole.

Octopus Books

Testify by Simone John (August 15)

Testify, Simone John's first full-length book of poems, experiments with documentary poetics to uplift stories of black people impacted by state-sanctioned violence. The book's first section weaves Rachel Jeantel's testimony in the Trayvon Martin trial with Kendrick Lamar lyrics, fixed form and found poems, and personal artifacts. The second section centers on the audio of the dashboard recording that captured Sandra Bland's fatal police encounter. Excerpts from this exchange are punctuated with elegies for other dead black women, creating a larger commentary about race and gender- based violence. Testify is ultimately a book of witness. It "burdens" its readers "with knowing." Combined, both chapters serve as an unflinching critique of race and gender supremacy in the United States.

Omnidawn

from unincorporated territory [hacha] by Craig Santos Perez (October 3)

from unincorporated territory [hacha] is the first book of native Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing series about his homeland, the Western Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). Perez weaves avant-garde, eco-poetic, indigenous, documentary, multilingual, and abstract expressionist modes to tell the complex story of Guam’s people, culture, history, politics, and ecologies. Since its original publication in 2008, [hacha] has received positive reviews, and it has been taught in universities throughout Asia, the Pacific, the United States, Canada, and Europe. Several scholars have written essays about Perez’s work in American Literary History, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, The Contemporary Pacific, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticsm, Literary Geographies, and The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry. This new and revised edition aims to bring the book to a new generation of readers.

from unincorporated territory [lukao] by Craig Santos Perez (October 3)

from unincorporated territory [lukao] is the fourth book in native Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing series about his homeland, the Western Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), and his current home, Hawaiʻi. He utilizes eco-poetic, decolonial, diasporic, indigenous, documentary, epic, and avant-garde modes to weave stories of creation, birth, migration, food sovereignty, and parenting. This work not only protests the devastating impacts of colonialism, militarism, and environmental injustice across the Pacific, it also expresses a vision of a sustainable and hopeful future.

Goddess of Democracy: An Occupy Lyric by Henry Wei Leung (October 3)

Written in and of the protest encampments of one of the most sophisticated Occupy movements in recent history, Goddess of Democracy attempts to understand the disobedience and desperation implicated in a love for freedom. Part lyric, part autoethnography, part historical document, these poems orbit around the manifold erasures of the Umbrella protests in Hong Kong in 2014. Leung, who was in those protests while on a Fulbright grant, navigates the ethics of diasporic dis-identity, of outsiderness and passing, of privilege and the pretension of understanding, in these poems which ask: “what is / freedom when divorced from / from?

Shadowboxing by Joseph Ríos (October 3)

Borrowing the poetic language found in boxing lore and in the Rocky films, Shadowboxing pieces together a poetic portrait of Josefo, a Chicano adolescent working and becoming a poet in the farm territories of Central California. Rios confounds the relationship between author, speaker, and subject within various forms and, at times, across genre. He challenges the usefulness of poetry and stands upon oral histories to demystify California’s overlooked labor class. Rios invites the reader to enter Josefo’s world of memory, experience, and talk, of packinghouse mentors, storytelling grandmothers, parable-sharing plumbers, smooth talking truck drivers, and infinitely patient literature professors.

The Operating System

La Comandante Maya by Rita Valdivia tr. Margaret Randall (Bilingual) (October 9)

Who was Rita Valdivia? In October 2017, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Che Guevara's death in Bolivia, occasion for tributes throughout the world. Margaret Randall defies the absence of women's stories in Che's myth, bringing us the brilliant poetry and powerful personal history of this woman who died in combat just after her 23rd birthday. In a pre-feminist era and before she was 17, Rita named and escaped domestic violence. Not yet 20, she wrote poems that continue to astonish. At 22 she assumed a leadership role in Bolivia's Army of National Liberation (ELN), the fighting force that took up the struggle for freedom where Che left off. La Comandante Maya reveals the life and legacy of one of the many women involved in an effort that, up to now, has publicized only a token female presence. Read testimonies of Rita Valdivia's remarkable life by those who knew her best, and be astonished by her unique and lyrical poetry in bilingual format.

Love, Robot by Margaret Rhee (November 7)

. . . . As Rhee writes: "I loved you but/you could not make us beautiful./ I loved you because you could make beautiful things/that I never got to keep." This way of calling out to a beloved, with whom a reciprocal feeling or encounter is never certain, reminded me — not in its form, but in its feeling — of the Mira Bai's bhajans. Has Margaret Rhee written the world's first cyberbhajan? "[S]ay, robot," the book ends: "murmur to me, it is the middle of the night./ . . . . we all deserve a song that is untranslatable". How beautiful, how ultra-real: I found this sentiment, this voltage, this unspeakable song: to be. (Bhanu Kapil)

Pact Press

Crossing the Border by Daniel A. Olivas (November 17)

From acclaimed fiction writer and book critic, Daniel A. Olivas, comes his first collection of poetry, Crossing the Border. These narrative poems delve deeply into the many ways we cross borders of race, culture, language, religion, and privilege. With humor and pathos, Olivas draws from his own life and from the stories of others to serve as a witness to the great variety of experiences that make us human. With grace and eloquence, he invites readers to cross these borders with him on this intense but necessary journey.

Penguin Books

bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward (September 26)

Raw and stark, the poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward's breakthrough collection strip down her reflections on the heart, life, the inner self, coming of age, faith and loss to their essence. They resonate to the core of experience.

Penned in the Margins

Swims by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett (September 12)

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's Swims documents wild swimming in lakes, rivers and seas across the UK, starting and ending in Burnett's home county, Devon. An evocative long poem split into chapters, Swims is interspersed with a sequence about the poet's father. This mesmerising, lyrical debut cuts a path through Britain's waterways, investigating the human impact on the natural world as well as nature's unmistakable effect on us.

Platypus Press

Malak by Jenny Sadre-Orafai (September 28)

Malak is an invocation of past and future. With familial lament and childish wonder, the words lay tribute to the infinite—to the beauty in descent and the heartache that binds us to place. To our smallness in death and the importance of conjuring anew.

Pleiades Press

A Lesser Love by EJ Koh (October 16)

A Lesser Love presents poems of love and departure for romantic partners, family members, and even national citizens. Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh describes her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. The spirit of jeong permeates this collection as each poem draws astonishing connections and illuminates the bonds that hold across time and place.

With evocative lyricism, Koh mixes the languages of science and emotion to compose some poems like chemistry equations that convert light into “reasonable dioxide” and then further transmogrify the formula into a complex understanding of the parent-child relationship. Through this alchemy the poet allows readers to see through the eyes of mothers, fathers, daughters, aunts, friends, and lovers: we see the tragedy of a sinking ferry, the hypocrisies of government agencies, the aftermath of war, and a very wide view through the Hubble space telescope. Demonstrating an ability to elicit profound emotional intensity, Koh crafts a book of poems that challenge, delight, and enrich.

The Poetry Translation Centre / Bloodaxe Books

The Sea-Migrations, by Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf, tr. Clare Pollard, Said Jama Hussein, & Maxamed Xasan ‘Alto’ (November 16)

Although Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf has lived in exile in the UK for 20 years, she is fast emerging as one of the most outstanding Somali poets, as well as a powerful woman poet in a literary tradition still largely dominated by men. She is a master of the major Somali poetic forms, including the prestigious gabay, by which she presents compelling arguments with astonishing feats of alliteration. The key to her international popularity is in her spirit and message: her poems are classical in construction but they are unmistakeably contemporary, and they engage passionately with the themes of war and displacement which have touched the lives of an entire generation of Somalis. The mesmerising poems in this landmark collection are brought to life in English by award-winning Bloodaxe poet Clare Pollard.

Rahila’s Ghost Press

Bad Egg, by Beni Xiao (November)

Beni Xiao is a recent UBC graduate who’s work has been featured by Room Magazine, Sad Magazine, The Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, and Can’t Lit. In their spare time they like to nap and snack. They are very into fruit. They can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @verysmallbear.

Resolving Host

//EVIL TWIN by Stephon Lawrence

Sarabande Books

Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino (December 12)

The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one's given body. They are also concerned with dismantling received ideas about contemporary American womanhood. What does it mean to be a wife or mother who feels ambivalent about motherhood? How are these roles further complicated for women of color in the United States? In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems, and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history's ghosts—the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft—and sings them to life.

Saturnalia Books

The Bosses by Sebastian Agudelo (October 15)

Agudelo’s books have always been concerned with the relationship between worker and consumer, whether in the kitchens or in the neighborhood, but in The Bosses, his spectacular third outing, Agudelo’s sharp focus finally lands on the seen and unseen authority figures who dictate the boundaries of our lives, contemplating power structures from the current managerial culture to a historical exploration of the role that authority plays in our lives.

Self-Published

AMERIKKKANA by jayy dodd (September 29)

a collection of flash poems & custom gifs from my most recent 50+ hour train ride from Detroit to Los Angeles

The Guide To Drowning by Enoch the Poet (September 16)

The Guide to Drowning is a poetic exploration into Black mental health and its relation to the Black condition in America as well as it's relation to Enoch the Poet as an individual.

messy girl by Ariana Brown (November)

messy girl is a chapbook of poems about depression, heartbreak, femininity, & healing--an attempt at unraveling the lies I inherited about womanhood & required suffering. in the spring & summer of 2014, I could barely hold myself together. recovering from a messy break-up & constant financial stress left me ashamed at how "not okay" I felt, all of the time.

I wrote poems as a way to document, because I was afraid of disappearing into my own silence. three years later, I know these poems were written by a girl who alone insisted on her own survival, despite her impossible circumstances. I have excavated, re-purposed, & added new work to these poems in the hopes that you find them healing, too.

Reporting from the Belly of the Night by Sojourner Ahebee (August 15)

Poet Sojourner Ahebee's debut poetry chapbook, Reporting from the Belly of the Night, is a meditation on Black femininity & the ways in which black women are uniquely vulnerable to violence in their homes, schools, public/digital spaces, both locally and transnationally across time and borders. These poems are obsessed with empathy for black women, colorism, desire, black mental health, healing practices, and intersectional identities on the margins of history. This chapbook is also a collaboration with visual artist Kamakshi Duvvuru. Almost every poem in the collection is accompanied with one of her brilliant watercolors, magically blurring the space between word & image. The art featured in the chapbook is from a series that was both a means of and an ode to the transformative process of birthing as a creator.

Why Storms are Named After People and Bullets Remain Nameless by Tanaya Winder (October 9)

In Why Storms are named after People but Bullets Remain Nameless, we find Tanaya Winder in the thick of a beautiful burn, where "pain demands to be felt," where joy or maybe something more decolonial than it bubbles up from the black hole of the past. Winder aims a sociological eye at the gun, the bullet, and the throttle so that we might together constellate differently. "like any good indian woman" is one of my favourite poems to date! (Billy-Ray Belcourt)

semiperfect press

Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares by Christine Stoddard (November 25)

A collection of powerful poems from Christine Stoddard dealing with trauma and mythology through a familial lens.

Shirt Pocket Press

So This Is Story, by Kenning JP Garcia

"the cover-up is applied in the name of Story"

Kaleidoscopic. Observational. Philosophical. Circumnavigational. Let's face it, if you've clicked this far, you already have a sense of what you're getting into, and you do, you want to get into this.

Sibling Rivalry Press

Death by Sex Machine by Franny Choi (September 7)

To be clear, Franny Choi’s poetry has the extraordinary ability to solder with tender focus one moment, then rage like electrical fire in the next. In Death by Sex Machine, where fem-surrogate cyborgs of film and manga are impetus for understanding personal suppression of language, Choi gives us poems that are exquisitely uncomfortable with what is said and what is not said. As in the uncanny valley, where we are spooked by machines being a bit too human, but not perfect replica, this tightly controlled chapbook probes the uncomfortable terrain of the familiar but not quite safe. Still, below that troubling surface, the ghost in these machines has more to do with parallel language—absconded language, verbal attack, stutter. It’s as if only she understands their spoken code, and the rest of us need translation. These lyric, blunt, and beautifully sheroic poems serve as cyborg rosetta. (francine j. harris)

Prayers for My 17th Chromosome by Amir Rabiyah (November 14)

Amir Rabiyah is a magician who has tasted salt of the creation story's sea. The cleaving of human to spirit found in Prayers for My 17th Chromosome is a blood tangle that will kiss your cells till you sweat / constellations. Rabiyah reminds their reader that to exist in between boxes of national belongings, migrations, queer kinships, and disability is not to swallow war. Rather, in these verses, complications find respite in one another, [becoming] the endless, / the source, / the horizon / awakening. (Rajiv Mohabir)

Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation ed. H. Melt (November 16)

Subject to Change is an anthology celebrating the work of five poets who are unapologetically trans: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, beyza ozer, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Kay Ulanday Barrett. Featuring poetry and interviews, this collection is a testament to the power of trans poets speaking to one another—about family, race, class, disability, religion, and the body. This anthology includes a range of trans experiences and poetics, expanding the possibilities of what it means to be both trans and a writer in the twenty-first century.

Slapering Hol Press

Dovetail by Kimiko Hahn & Tamiko Beyer (September 21)

A Conversation Chapbook

Southern Indiana Review Press

Set to Music a Wildfire by Ruth Awad (October 17)

In Lebanon during the civil war, a teenage boy and his family witness leveled cities, displaced civilians, the aftermath of massacres. Resources are scarce and uncertainty is everywhere. What does it mean to survive? To leave behind a home torn apart by war? To carry the burden of what you've seen across an ocean? These poems follow a man in search of security as he leaves his country for America, falls in love, and becomes a single father to three daughters. Through the perspective of one man, his family, and even his country, Set to Music a Wildfire explores the violence of living, the guilt of surviving, the loneliness of faith, and the impossible task of belonging.

Stalking Horse Press

Scar on / Scar Off by Jennifer Maritza McCauley (October 9)

Jennifer Maritza McCauley's Scar On/Scar Off runs the borderlands of mestiza consciousness, by turns neon-lit and beating, defiant and clashing, searching and struggling, in fistfuls of recognition, in constant pursuit of intersections and dualities. Drawing on Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and the inspirations of her late friend Monica A. Hand, through polyglossia and hybrid text, McCauley evokes vividly the relationships between psyche and city, identity and language. In the rhythm and snap of these poems and fragmentary stories, we find echoes of Sarah Webster Fabio, Beyonce, flamenco, Nikki Giovanni, street slang, danger and hope. This is a profound collection, a rebel language.

Sundress Publications

Hands That Break and Scar by Sarah A. Chavez (August 15)

In language that is both achingly honest and meticulously poetic, Chavez chronicles the passage from childhood to young womanhood in California's Central Valley, negotiating culture, language, identity, sexuality, love, and meaning. It is not that these poems reveal the secret profound nature of things—in Chavez' world, the lines blur between violence and love, joy and struggle, memory and transcendence, the sacred and the mundane. One thing flows into another and back again. Hands That Break & Scar will leave an indelible mark on your heart, reminding you that poetry, beauty, and life are everywhere--within and without. (ire'ne lara silva)

Talonbooks

full-metal indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead (November 28)

Using binary code and texts from classics of the English language such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Joshua Whitehead unravels the coded "I" to trace the formation of a colonized self and reclaim representations of Indigenous texts.

Tia Chucha Press

Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems by the Girls of Our Little Roses, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, ed. Spencer Reece (October 15)

Over twenty-five years ago two Americans, Dr. Diana Frade and her husband, Episcopalian Bishop Leo Frade, founded Our Little Roses Home for Girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Until then abandoned girls were often given to prisoners since no such homes existed. Now Our Little Roses has some 60 rescued or orphaned girls in a city once considered the “murder capital of the world.” Poverty and violence—especially in the past 25 years attributed to deported Los Angeles–based gangs—has affected the lives of all in the poorest Spanish-speaking country of the hemisphere. Unaccompanied youth from Honduras were among the 100,000 refugees, which also included children and youth from El Salvador and Guatemala, arriving to the United States between 2013 and 2015. American poet and Episcopalian priest Spencer Reece spent two years at Our Little Roses teaching poetry to girls who have lost family due to poverty, violence, and disasters like Hurricane Mitch that struck Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala in 1998, resulting in 22,000 people dead or missing, 2.7 million homeless, and $6 billion in damages.

This book has essays by Reece and Luis J. Rodríguez as a backdrop to the girls’ voices, and a foreword and afterword by poets Marie Howe and Richard Blanco. Luis and his wife Trini, a poet, teacher, and indigenous healer, also helped teach at Our Little Roses and the Holy Family Bilingual School inside a walled compound in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Here poetry and stories transcend the pain of loss that often goes unexpressed. Here poetry serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration in the shadows. Here poetry can save lives.

Timeless, Infinite Light

Like Solid to a Shadow by Janice Lobo Sapigao (November 10)

Like Solid to a Shadow is a documentary poetry collection about grieving, fatherlessness, and the limitations of language. Sapigao finds her deceased father's love 'letters' to her mother: cassette tapes recorded in Illokano, a language of which she has imperfect knowledge. The book moves through Sapigao's process of translating and transcribing the tapes; playing with, learning, and unlearning the Ilokano and English languages. This book then launches from the tapes to ask "what can we really know?" when it comes to family lineages and personal histories. Through family trees, photos, and mapping, Sapigao articulates, distorts, and heals her knowledge of the man who is is her deceased father.

TriQuarterly

Salvage by Cynthia Dewi Oka (December 15)

How do we transform the wreckage of our identities? Cynthia Dewi Oka’s evocative collection answers this question by brimming with what we salvage from our most deep-seated battles. Reflecting the many dimensions of the poet’s life, Salvage manifests an intermixture of aesthetic forms that encompasses multiple social, political, and cultural contexts—leading readers to Bali, Indonesia, to the Pacific Northwest, and to South Jersey and Philadelphia.

Throughout it insistently interrogates what it means to reach for our humanity through the guises of nation, race, and gender. Oka’s language transports us through the many bodies of fluid poetics that inhabit our migrating senses and permeate across generations into a personal diaspora. Salvage invites us to be without borders.

Two Sylvias Press

Killing Marías by Claudia Castro Luna (October 11)

In Killing Marias, each poem is a rosary bead named after a woman’s life in Ciudad Juarez. Each bead reveals a crack of light through which we can peak into the hurt so many women experience from birth to death. Castro Luna’s piercing voice states “exploitation has no limits,” and that “man’s hypocrisy even less.” She dares us to stop being mediocre humans, especially men, and let the “feminine thrive.” (Javier Zamora)

Ugly Duckling Presse

I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio, tr. Jeannine Marie Pitas (August 1)

I Remember Nightfall, the first comprehensive collection of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio’s work to be published in English translation, is made up of her first four book-length poems: The History of Violets(1965); Magnolia (1968); The War of the Orchards (1971); and The Native Garden is in Flames (1975). Di Giorgio’s writing transforms everything it touches—a lily, a head, a hare, a ghost, a porcelain cup. All becomes beautifully and violently intertwined, dead and alive. Boundaries are blurred: an eagle drinks tea with a mother, a flower puts on the longest pearl necklace or kills you. Di Giorgio’s obsessive, magical gardens serve as a stage for the ongoing encounter of nature and the supernatural. These serial prose poems explore memory, family relationships, erotic desire, and war, animating a world that is always on the verge of explosion.

University of Arizona Press

Of Cartography by Esther G. Belin (September 26)

In this long-anticipated collection, Belin daringly maps the poetics of womanhood, the body, institution, family, and love. Depicting the personal and the political, Of Cartography is an exploration of identity through language. With poems ranging from prose to typographic and linguistic illustrations, this distinctive collection pushes the boundaries of traditional poetic form.

Marking territory and position according to the Diné cardinal points, Of Cartography demands much from the reader, gives meaning to abstraction, and demonstrates the challenges of identity politics.

Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut by Vickie Vértiz (September 26)

Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut uses both humor and sincerity to capture moments in time with a sense of compassion for the hard choices we must make to survive. Vértiz’s poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don’t just refer to big events or movements; they play out in our everyday lives, in the intimate spaces of family, sex, and neighborhood. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all cities like it—as they have always been: an America of code-switching and reinvention, of lyric and fight.

University of Arkansas Press

the magic my body becomes by Jess Rizkallah (October 1)

In the magic my body becomes, Jess Rizkallah seeks a vernacular for the inescapable middle ground of being Arab American—a space that she finds, at times, to be too Arab for America and too American for her Lebanese elders.

The voice here freely asserts gender, sexuality, and religious beliefs, while at the same time it respects a generational divide: the younger’s privilege gained by the sacrifice of the older, the impossibility of separating what is wholly hers from what is hers second-hand.

In exploring family history, civil war, trauma, and Lebanon itself, Rizkallah draws from the spirits of canonical Arab and Middle Eastern poets, and the reader feels these spirits exorcising the grief of those who are still alive. Throughout, there is the body, a reclamation and pushback against cultures that simultaneously sexualize and shame women. And there is a softness as inherent as rage, a resisting of stereotypes that too often speak louder than the complexities of a colonized, yet resilient, cultural identity.

Paraíso: Poems by Jacob Shores-Argüello (December 1)

Paraíso, the first book in the new CantoMundo Poetry Series, which celebrates the work of Latino/a poets writing in English, is a pilgrimage against sorrow. Erupting from a mother’s death, the poems follow the speaker as he tries to survive his grief. Catholicism, family, good rum . . . these help, but the real medicine happens when the speaker pushes into the cloud forest alone.

In a Costa Rica far away from touristy beaches, we encounter bus trips over the cold mountains of the dead, drug dealers with beautiful dogs, and witches with cell phones. Science fuses with religion, witchcraft is joined with technology, and eventually grief transforms into belief.

Throughout, Paraíso defies categorization, mixing its beautiful sonnets with playful games and magic cures for the reader. In the process, moments of pure life mingle with the aftermath of a death.

University of Georgia Press

Begin with a Failed Body by Natalie J. Graham (September 15)

This collection of poems begins rooted in the landscape of the U.S. South as it voices singular lives carved out of immediate and historical trauma. While these poems dwell in the body, often meditating on its frailty and desire, they also question the weight that literary, historical, and religious icons are expected to bear. Within the vast scope of this volume, the poems arc from a pig farmer’s funeral to Georges de la Tour’s paintings and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. With an ear tuned to the lift and lilt of speech, they wring song from sorrow and plant in every dirge a seed of jubilation. Rich in clarity and decisive in her attention to image, Natalie J. Graham writes resonant, lush poetry.

Vagabond Press

Captive and Temporal, by Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng (August 15)

Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng is a Melbourne-based poet, translator and poetry editor. His poems appeared in the Saturday Age, HEAT, Cordite, Peril, Black Inc Publishing anthologies of Best Australian Poems, Poetry International website and Contemporary Asian-Australian Poets anthology [Puncher & Wattmann, 2013]. With Vagabond Press he has published Years, Elegy - a chapbook in the Rare Objects series and edited the fourth volume in the Asia Pacific Poetry series. Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng under the pen name Thường Quán over thirty has published a wide range of essays, poems and short stories on major Vietnamese literary journals inside and outside Vietnam including Van, Van Hoc, Hop Luu, tienve, damau; a collection of poems Ngoai Giac Ngu (Beyond Sleeps) by Van Nghe Publishing, California; and Watermarks on talawas. He was poetry editor of Hop Luu (Confluence) and is currently on the editorial panel of damau.org. Born in 1956 in Danang, Vietnam. Arrived in Australia in 1974 under the Colombo Plan scholarship. Worked as broadcaster for Radio Australia and an Information Technology business system analyst in Telstra and IBM.

W. W. Norton & Company

Inheriting The War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees ed. Laren McClung (November 7)

Descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees confront the aftermath of war and, in verse and prose, deliver another kind of war story.

Fifty years after the Vietnam War, this anthology by descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees—American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Diaspora, Hmong, Australian, and others—confronts war and its aftermath. What emerges is an affecting portrait of the effects of war and family—an intercultural, generational dialogue on silence, memory, landscape, imagination, Agent Orange, displacement, postwar trauma, and the severe realities that are carried home. Including such acclaimed voices as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karen Russell, Terrance Hayes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Nick Flynn, and Ocean Vuong, Inheriting the War enriches the discourse of the Vietnam War and provides a collective conversation that attempts to transcend the recursion of history.

Wave Books

Royals by Cedar Sigo (September 5)

Cedar Sigo's fourth collection restlessly enacts the pleasures of writing. With a mix of condensed, syllabic poems and longer serial pieces, and with many poems addressed to other poets, Sigo explores the romance of being a poet while also drawing on the color and symmetries of the visual arts of his Native American identity.

Wesleyan

semiautomatic by Evie Shockley (October 3)

Art can’t shield our bodies or stabilize the earth’s climate, but Evie Shockley’s semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century’s inescapable evidence of the terms of black life—not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.

William Morrow

A Good Cry: What We Learn From Tears and Laughter by Nikki Giovanni (October 24)

As energetic and relevant as ever, Nikki now offers us an intimate, affecting, and illuminating look at her personal history and the mysteries of her own heart. In A Good Cry, she takes us into her confidence, describing the joy and peril of aging and recalling the violence that permeated her parents’ marriage and her early life. She pays homage to the people who have given her life meaning and joy: her grandparents, who took her in and saved her life; the poets and thinkers who have influenced her; and the students who have surrounded her. Nikki also celebrates her good friend, Maya Angelou, and the many years of friendship, poetry, and kitchen-table laughter they shared before Angelou’s death in 2014.

Willow Books

Apsara in New York by Sokunthary Svay (September 25)

Sokunthary Svay’s Apsara in New York is truly like no other poetry collection I’ve read. Transnational and pan-ethnic in scope, the book begins in a refugee camp in Thailand, settles in the Bronx and, driven by memory and desire, returns to the Cambodian cities of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and Takeo. The poet is both fierce and tender, street-smart and thoughtful, maternal and filial, political and haunted. With No Others, Svay emerges as a powerful new voice in Cambodian-American poetry. (Bunkong Tuon)

Write Bloody Publishing

Favorite Daughter by Nancy Huang (September 15)

Favorite Daughter is a poetry collection trying to uproot America from inside the body, and find where China is buried underneath. Divided into four parts, Daughter explores ideas like navigating hybridity, localism, and harmony in ways that disturb commonly-held notions about broad terms like "belonging" and "cultural struggle." A compilation of immigration stories, Chinese radio segments, Google translate entries, and dictionary remixes, Huang immerses herself in everything she is uncertain of.

YesYes Books

Kissing Caskets by Mahogany L. Browne (November 15)

Like most young black girls growing up in Northern California, Mahogany L. Browne tussles with ideas of femininity & gender roles, addiction & the prison industrial complex, sexuality & seclusion. Inquiries of the living and dying survive on the pages of Kissing Caskets as the reader is invited to do the self excavation. Each poem a eulogized celebration of what we lose to the dark when no one is looking.

This American Ghost by Michael Wasson (November 1)

The poems in This American Ghost address the complicated and often invisible consequences of our American expansion—the violence and history of the indigenous body as an inheritor of trauma. Whether in the grief and lingering aftermath of a loved one’s suicide, counting the pulse of the chaotic viscera when entering indigenous myth, or re-witnessing the state-sanctioned loss and tearing of a body’s mother tongue, these poems stand waiting at the border between survival and what’s been erased—these ghosts left breathing and still longing for any bloom inside the wreckage of our American conquest.

Throughout this short collection, words and phrases are braided with English and nimipuutímt, images of surrealism enter desperate realities, underscoring how language—which begins in the body as it listens to the immediate world—is the only fabric we have to dress and ultimately give shape to our wounds.

#poetry collection recs #poets of color #book recs #poetry recs #out of my collection #chapbook recs #recs

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