“Because it is easier to miss a stranger / with your mother’s name,” Allison Benis White instead writes about five women named Wendy as a way into the complex grief that still lingers after the death of a sixth Wendy, the author’s long-absent mother. A series of epistolary poems addressed to Wendy O. Williams becomes an occasion for the speaker to eulogize as well as reflect on the singer’s life and eventual suicide: “What kind of love is death, I’m asking?” In the section devoted to Wendy Torrance, the fictional wife from The Shining who was bludgeoned by her husband, the speaker muses on the inadequacy of language to resolve or even contain grief in the wake of trauma: “A book is a coffin. Hoarsely. A white sheet draped over the cage of being.” Ultimately, The Wendys is a book of silences and space in which tenderness and violence exist in exquisite tension. “If to speak is to die,” White writes in “Ignis Fatuus,” “I will whisper.”

What if we desire what harms us? What if we learn to mimic that harm, hurting ourselves to stay safe from external assaults? What if we cannot give this harm a name but know from the injury that something has happened to us? What if? What if the Invader Is Beautiful? The acute titular question of Louise Mathias’ third collection of poetry establishes the stakes for these poems, puncturing the silence around the nuances of abusive relationships. 

Mathias delves into a brackish psyche, attempting to process these intimate violences while wrestling with the self-doubt that she has been a participant in her own suffering. f poetry is truth, then Mathias achieves the purest form in this book, a catechism that affirms that willingness can be compromised, that consent to physical pain is not consent to cruelty, and that we can forgive ourselves self-abandoning coping mechanisms to reclaim a righteous anger. The existence of these poems has not just a conceptual but a functional materiality, as bricks lain to pave a path out. What if the poet leaves the woods where once she “ate needles for love” and “pried the poison from a flower?” Perhaps she will stumble into the clearing where a “moonlit kindness” can touch her skin.

In this electrifying debut, lyric works to untangle slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide. “When my father finally / died,” Vyas writes, “we [...] burned, / like an effigy, the voiceless body.” Grief returns us to elemental silence, where “the wind is a muted vowel in the brush of pine / branches” across American landscapes. These poems extend formal experimentation, caesurae, and enjambment to reach into the emptiness and fractures that remain. This language listens as much as it sings, asking: can we recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy, and caste hierarchies? Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive? A monument to yesterday and a missive to tomorrow, When I Reach for Your Pulse reminds us of both the burden and the promise of inheritance. “[T]he wail outlasts / the dream,” but time falls like water and so “the stream survives its source.”

While Hoffman’s debut collection interrogated the mythos built around grief, inhabiting an Alaska of the mind, her stunning sophomore collection When There Was Light looks at the past for what it was.These poems map out a topography where global movements of diaspora and war live alongside personal reckonings: a house’s foreclosure, parents’ divorce, the indelible night spent drunk with a best friend “[lying] down inside a chronic row of corn.” Here, her father’s voice “is the stray dog barking / at the snow, believing the little strawberries grow wilder / against a field.” In these pages, she points to Russia and Poland and Germany, saying, “It was / another time. My people / another time. The synagogues burn decades / of new snow.” The brilliance of this collection illuminates the relationship between memory and language; “another time” means different, back then, gone and lost to us, and it means over and over, always, again. With this linguistic dexterity and lyrical tenderness, Hoffman’s work bridges private and public histories, reminding us of the years cloaked in shadows and the years when there was light.

When You're Deep in a Thing reimagines the coming of age book and the masculine tropes of the bildungsroman, suggesting that adulthood never vanquishes the kids we were. When Cappo's speaker returns home for holidays, "memories / of hangdog childhood seep in / like methane." Despite temporal distance, he perpetually finds himself in the museum of paternal absence, the house his father left, where "ghosts whisper" and "frames / fade to shame." From this possessed site, the collection bravely asks, how does one make sense of boyhood? Become a man without guidance? As the certainties of a religious upbringing vanish, the physical and spiritual boundaries of the world threaten to disintegrate. From depression, to political violence, to the certainty of death, Cappo's exigent debut ventures to discover an intimate humanity against all odds. At these poems' horizons, a tenacity remains, a determination to find sweetness, candor, and connection in this troubled world, where "the air's still, // The ground a trembling silence," yet "scathed we set out again."

Poems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language. 
 
In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence—grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty—into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book’s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty’s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages—those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become—Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul’s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.