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

Poet and essayist Peter Stitt describes not a perfect life achieved, but his search for that ideal, writing of books he has loved and of the often difficult lives of writers, including his teachers John Berryman and James Wright. Generous and alert in his fascinations, Stitt explores the quest for freedom in thought and action among the Amish, the French partisans, and the “heretical” Cathars, and he offers a fresh perspective on parenting, meditating on the life of an adopted stepdaughter.

What happens when the imagined life and the stories we tell ourselves become terrifying, given our human ability to inhabit both mental and physical worlds? Bertram’s third full-length collection pivots on an extended piece of creative nonfiction, “Forecast,” which shows how obsessive thinking can begin in actual occurrences that are then exploded in the imagination. The science is personal, as the factual is tinted and stylized, filtered through a self grappling with the difficulty of knowing what is “real.”

“Karen An-hwei Lee’s third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity’s essential components: memory, spirituality, emotion, thought….Contemplative and linguistically sophisticated,Phyla of Joy is simply exquisite —‘ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.’” — Rigoberto González

There’s an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word “joy” in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.

In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe’s minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.

In the late nineteenth century, in Washington Square, two children play with a red balloon… and so begins the strange romance between Daniel, beautiful and tiny, and Grace, known as The Fat Princess, an orphaned girl whose enormous girth matches her wealth. Each wishes for a life of the mind, for artistic mastery, to be read and to be understood — most of all by each other — but through their lives, the couple only occasionally meet, until Daniel uncovers Grace’s great secret in her House of Death.

That rush in between when it all comes undone. Knowing its edge like your own pulse and breathing. As I knew them this morning, racing a 10K in late-spring heat, the taste of panic in the last two miles as everything slipped away, losing time and barely finishing. A tingling in my limbs as if I were driving on ice, the road beneath me suddenly gone, the feeling of that in my hands. Deeper than words, being lost for a moment and then being done. Left with a pounding, stiff-legged stagger. Spiritual improvisations, radiant acts of attention: echoing Thoreau's Walden, the meditations of Guy Davenport, and Kenny Moore's groundbreaking articles for Sports Illustrated, Thomas Gardner strides through inner and outer landscapes. Freed by disciplined effort, the runner's mind here roams and mourns and remembers.

Improvising on the tropes of classic pulp fiction, including genres like crime noir, horror, sci-fi, superhero, espionage, and vigilante, Tony Barnstone’s audacious new poems are counterpointed by the mischievous (and blood-splattered) ink drawings of Iranian artist Amin Mansouri. At times reinventing the sonnet tradition, Barnstone’s linked sequences evoke serial-format comics and cinema, as each series breaks into discrete frames propelled by action. The ancient gods and epics have been high-jacked by animations and video games, but pulp remains unconquerable — ghastly, shameless, outrageous — and fun!