The aftermath of death leaves many of us dumbstruck—turned inward and inarticulate. Having lost both parents, poet Rusty Morrison attempts to find in that shocked silence a language scored by the intimacy of that aloneness with death. Each poem-series in this book of multi-part sequences evolves a new form, stretching every sentence past expectation so as to disrupt the truisms of grief and find affinities in the shifting flux that death discloses. Readers are offered what the poet experienced in the writing process, not relief but a heightened intensity. Beyond elegy, Morrison’s new work embodies the volatility of death in life, which mourning allows us to experience.

Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast begins by considering philosophical questions arising from the experience of desire and intimacy: What does love reveal about — and make possible within — the individual? Can we ever truly understand another person’s experience of the world around them? To what extent is the other ultimately inaccessible, a world unto herself? Pillared by massive, ambitious poems in the tradition of Modernism, these lyrics imbue landscapes as varied as Greece and America with new tension, new significance, as the speaker searches for answers to these provocative questions of love and inheritance. Through her graceful curation of imagery and enviable command of narrative, Hiton ultimately transforms our understanding of history and desire.

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

‘With an eye roving like a documentary camera, Brandon Rushton delivers a post-wonder diorama of the contemporary non-urban United States in which the vaunted American lawn is artificial; the food is full of chemicals; and “what haven’t we / homogenized.” The freedoms of childhood and adolescence are figured here as a kind of lost, damaged paradise before everyone erases themselves into their adult roles: the contractor, the customer, the detective, the pilot, the bank teller, the embezzler, the broker, the milkshake maker. Rushton’s often interweaving lines serve as a formal objective correlative for our interwoven state in this world, which is composed of both the given and the made; the question of why on earth we have chosen what we have made is quietly fuming in every poem. “Honestly, the people / had hoped for more space / to feel spectacular.” The news about that spectacular feeling isn’t good, but knowing Rushton is out there watching, giving a damn, and writing his beautiful poems is reason for hope.’
—Donna Stonecipher

America that island off the coast of France hurtles across literary and linguistic borders, toward a lyricism that slows down experience to create a new form of elegiac memoir. Born in France, raised in Florida, Jesse Lee Kercheval now divides her time between the U.S. and Uruguay. Her poems speak to the impossibility of emigration, of ever being the citizen of only one country. Against the backdrops of Paris, Montevideo, and Florida, these poems explore citizenship and homelessness, motherhood and self, family and freedom. As the poems go from one place to another, they also connect places together; they mirror and combine images, imitate other poets and draw out long, original lines of reflecting and describing. Kercheval turns over and over again the very meaning of the word home, as the poems, like the poet, make the fraught journey back and forth between places like France and America. Even though places might be similar, or a poet might connect them, Kercheval still wonders, in her poem “The Red Balloon”: “is leaving / ever painless? Is returning?”

It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined—with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation, and hope. American Linden is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which by means of language move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world.

American Massif follows the first stages of one American Mastodon in his attempts to evolve. His life begins to resemble a human life. His mother appears human. His wife and children, human. His own birthplace and childhood. His appetites, sins, faith, cynicism, big plans. All apparently human. At the same time, all of these things are relinquished or increasingly subject to the story of his own extinction.
The massif’s landscapes are as varied as pinewoods, clay hills and prairie, but grow more abstract. In his naive way, A.M. moves through or ponders the Higgs Field, art, national and family states of emergency. From his own house to an airport, from volcano to museum, he goes foraging for images good enough to eat, for friends, for antidotes to apocalypse.
Perhaps no more human by the end, A.M. still bears his “girth and melancholy,” though having shed some of the illusions, like vestiges, with which he started. Dazed as much as sobered, he feels himself released into the world like a new habitat—however threatened. Rather, like the Pompeian who returns to her city, the Mastodon comes into his own.

Beeder’s third collection, And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey brims with lyrical invention and dark wit. In this lush universe, Hermes moonlights as a process server and malaria croons a love song; saints emerge from beans while Kronos and Eros argue at a local bar: ‘love’s nothing/but glimmer-to-wither, dawn’s fireflies expired.’ In language singularly baroque and hypnotic, Beeder takes us on a wild poetic adventure: this book is, as Dana Levin says, “a treasure-house wizarding through time,” through landscapes ancient and present, real and reimagined: gold mine to Victorian graveyard, a fair’s midway to The House of Être, from ‘late Holocene out to the farthest buoy’.

In this unprecedented anthology, acclaimed poets from around the world select poems from their countries of origin to share with a wider audience. Readers will find eloquence, urgency, and idiosyncrasy, poems all in English but springing from drastically varied voices, geographies, and histories. Using an artist’s rather than a scholar’s approach, these poems — chosen out of love and admiration by practicing poets — show the vitality of English deployed by revered and emerging poets in Ghana (selected by Kwame Dawes), India (by Sudeep Sen), South Africa (by Rustum Kozain), the Caribbean (by Ishion Hutchinson and five other Caribbean poets), Canada (by Todd Swift), and the Antipodes: New Zealand (by Hinemoana Baker) and Australia (by Les Murray). Mindful of the contentious history of colonization and its staining of any notion of a unified Anglophone poetics, editors Catherine Barnett and Tiphanie Yanique have created an “anthology of anthologies”: a choral oratorio, a many-accented gathering of voices that invites further discovery and promotes an intra-cultural conversation. Featured poets include: Ama Ata Aidoo, Tatamkulu Afrika, Kofi Anyidoho, Tusiata Avia, Kofi Awoonor, Marion Bethel, Christian Bök, Jenny Bornholdt, Dionne Brand, Kamau Brathwaite, Diana Brebner, Abena Busia, Michelle Cahill, Christian Campbell, Vahni Capildeo, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Amit Chaudhuri, George Elliot Clarke, Jennifer Compton, Jeremy Cronin, Mahadai Das, Ingrid de Kok, Peter Goldsworthy, Lorna Goodison, Bernadette Hall, Lesbia Harford, Shake Keane, A. M. Klein, Shara McCallum, Bill Manhire, Kei Miller, Arthur Nortje, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyeman, Richard Outram, P. K. Page, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Olive Senior, Mongane Wally Serote, Kenneth Slessor, Kelwyn Sole, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Habib Tiwoni, Hone Tuwhare, Priscila Uppal, Chris van Wyk, David Wevill, Judith Wright, and many more.

“Celebrated poet and professor Lawrence Raab’s tenth collection of poetry is one of mysterious and visionary sight, quiet music, and the unaffected stillness of reflection that is common to masterpieces capable of holding their potency for generations.”
—Marina Brown, Los Angeles Review
“Every poem in April at the Ruins is a powerhouse: rich, quietly essential, profoundly lucid. Many have flavors of the best parables or folk tales, bringing us into intimate relation with mysteries and transformations abounding around and inside us…. Raab’s sense of irony is unerring. These poems prove that one of the only true forms of consolation is giving darkness its due.”
—Amy Gerstler
“[T]his collection isn’t just nostalgic. Instead, it is full of wonder. Wonder and the ability to step through wonder into a whole new place.”
—Alexis David, Compulsive Reader

Ashore sees mystery and spirituality in common nature, in the last of winter leaves and the green mountains that are covered by traffic. It sees violence, also, which everyone shares in a floating island of plastic or an albatross’ exploded stomach. In these poems, Nakashani is humble, responsible, and caring about the places she inhabits. Her poems ask us to care for what is small and specific in our own places, and they restore a kind of faith in these. To Nakashani, “it is enough, this tiny orbit, the spider’s quivering step.”

From the author of the award-winning book of poems, Miracle Fruit, comes the eagerly anticipated second collection, At the Drive-In Volcano. In this new and imaginative followup, Aimee Nezhukumatathil examines the full circle journey of desire, loss, and ultimately, an exuberant lovetraveling around a world brimming with wild and delicious offerings such as iced waterfalls, jackfruit, and pistol shrimp. From the tropical landscapes of the Caribbean, India, and the Philippines to the deep winters of western New York and mild autumns of Ohio, the natural world Nezhukumatathil describes is dark but also lovelyso full of enchantment and magic. Here, worms glow in the dark, lizards speak, the most delicious soup in the world turns out to be deadly, and a woman eats soil as if it were candy. Her trademark charm, verve and wit remain elemental and a delight to behold, even in the face of a crumbling relationship. These poems confront delicate subjects of love and loss with an exacting exuberance and elegance not hardly seen in a writer so young.

Samantha Peabody, a seasoned bio-acoustician and eccentric recluse living in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, recalls in this journal-like novel her year with two children who accompanied her in a “Sonic Adventure Program,” deep in the woods. Spending time with the girls, eight-year-old Betty and six-year-old Janet, Sam must confront her conscience in light of an ever-widening communion with the forest around them. This is the tale of an aging adult and two troubled children and their shared journey to compassion. In its uncanny texture and structure, the novel contemplates the transformations possible for those who listen to — and truly hear — the sounds of wilderness, where one’s true nature sings.

Atlas Hour is a collection of poem-maps whose cosmology embraces the works and lives of the painters Vermeer and Mark Rothko, Fra Angelico and Gerhard Richter, the anonymous child-artists of the Nazis’ Terezin transit camp and the poet’s own children. Sifting and selecting moments in history and in the annals of art, these poems bring the stuff of everyday into relationship with the great mysteries of existence: what we believe, who we love, whom and what we choose to hurt or leave unharmed.

A powerful sequel to The Us, which ended with the son Ay wounded, rendered silent and immobile by a head injury. In Ay, the boy is propped up and worshiped, as others project a kind of divinity onto his stillness. While Ay recovers, in a series of lyrical monologues he discovers an individual self-awareness, separate from family and tribe. “Musically rugged, riddled with insight, resonant, gripping, and chock-full of moments that startle with their vividness (‘What eats grass slow and bent- / necked, eyed from the side, is deer’) Ay deploys its fertile idiom not only for the pleasure of it, which is immeasurable, but as a medium through which to investigate the mechanics of subjectivity, grief, empathy, and forgiveness. The result is one of the most radically inventive and invigorating books of poetry I’ve read in years” — Timothy Donnelly