lbert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” It is in this vein that Sholeh Wolpé’s mesmerizing memoir in verse unfolds. In this lyrical and candid work, her fifth collection of poems, Wolpé invokes the abacus as an instrument of remembering. Through different countries and cultures, she carries us bead by bead on a journey of loss and triumph, love and exile. In the end, the tally is insight, not numbers, and we arrive at a place where nothing is too small for gratitude.

Above the Birch Line reflects a lifetime of observation and experience, and offers glimpses of the loves, aches, and comforts that have accompanied author Pia Taavila-Borsheim along the way. Written primarily in free verse, the poems are imagistic in nature, with an ongoing metaphor of visual representations of nature, especially water. Starting with her childhood and continuing through late adulthood, Taavila-Borsheim ruminates on her parents, travels, marriage, motherhood, and finally, aging and death.

Guest-edited by Razieh Araghi and Jaideep Pandey, this special issue explores the rich, multilingual, and transregional literary worlds shaped by and within the Islamicate sphere. 

From the Mughal court to Metro Detroit, from Malayalam ghazals to Kurdish-inflected Persian prison poetry, this issue brings together literary translations and critical reflections that unsettle assumptions about language, identity, and belonging. Rather than framing the Islamicate as a fixed geography or religious category, Absinthe 31 approaches it as a set of fluid crossings—linguistic, cultural, historical, and affective.

The issue features work in and from an expansive range of languages, including Persian, Arabic, Malayalam, Kurdish, Assamese, Amazigh, Armeno-Turkish, Dari, and Urdu—foregrounding both canonical and marginalized voices. It includes new English translations of ghazals, sīrahs, biographies, and poems originally written by poets and thinkers working across sectarian, linguistic, and national boundaries, and often negotiating minority or diasporic positionalities.

In addition to the translated works, many contributions are accompanied by translator commentaries that reflect on the ethics, politics, and poetics of translating from within the Islamicate literary landscape. Together, they suggest that translation is not just a means of access, but a mode of thinking—a method native to the Islamicate tradition itself. Spanning from the premodern courts of empire to contemporary diasporic communities, Absinthe 31 offers readers a vibrant and pluralistic vision of the Islamicate as a dynamic literary terrain shaped by continual movement, negotiation, and transformation.

Absinthe 28: Orphaned of Light features contemporary literature of migration translated from and to Arabic. In short stories, creative nonfiction essays, poetry, and selections from novels, a multiplicity of migration experiences is brought to the fore: life in diaspora, undocumented labor, refugeehood, human trafficking, internal displacement, exile. 

 

This issue brings together names familiar to readers of Arabic literature in translation, such as Ghassan Kanafani and Saadi Youssef, with writers making their English-language debuts, such as Dearborn, MI-based Kurdish Iraqi poet Gulala Nouri and Libyan novelist Mohamad Alasfar. Likewise, the issue includes veteran translators Marilyn Booth, Nancy Roberts, and Khaled Mattawa alongside newcomers, several of them graduate students at the University of Michigan.

 

Each piece is accompanied by a translator’s reflection that meditates on the work’s themes as well as the creative process of translation, and the issue’s poetry is presented in a side-by-side Arabic-English format. 

 

Absinthe 28 comes to us at a time when, according to the UN, one in every 78 people on earth is displaced. This collection serves as a reminder that translation and migration are inextricably linked.

 

Absinthe 29: Translating Jewish Multilingualism showcases the variety of languages and genres in which modern Jewish writers have expressed themselves. Spanning short stories, essays, poetry, and selections from novels, the selection of literary works featured in this issue of Absinthe cuts across distinctions between European and non-European literary traditions and addresses diverse themes, including social class, gender, immigration, religious traditions, love and marriage, and the act of writing itself.

Rather than consider disparate Jewish languages and histories in isolation, we bring them into conversation within an open-ended framework that explores Jewish multilingualism in the modern world. The multilingual narrative of Jewish modernity told through them, in seven languages, spans from the 1880s to the 2020s.

Its wide geographical distribution ranges from Tel Aviv to São Paulo through Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Livorno, Warsaw, Prague, and Chicago. Each text and context exhibits different aspects of the Jewish encounter with the conditions of modern society, exemplifying the ways in which Jewish writing engages and negotiates different cultures and traditions.

The new volume of Absinthe foregrounds the multilingual legacy of Jewish migration and diasporic life that has become ubiquitous in modern Jewish writing, and it is evident in the enriching and disruptive presence of multiple languages and literary traditions in each of these texts. The title of this volume, Translating Jewish Multilingualism, refers both to the English translations of these texts and to the processes of translation, mediation, and hybridization encapsulated in the works themselves.

Poems that traverse and question the lines between human and animal behavior.
 
Experimenting with time, language, and transgressing boundaries, the poems in absolute animal lean into Nabokov’s notion that precision belongs to poetry and intuition to science.
 
Rachel DeWoskin’s new collection navigates the chaos of societal and mortal uncertainty. Through formal poetry, DeWoskin finds sense amid disorder and unearths connections between the animal and the human, between the ancient and the contemporary, and between languages, incorporating translations from poems dating as far back as the Tang dynasty. From sonnet sequences about heart surgeries to examinations of vole romance and climate change, absolute animal investigates and moves across boundaries and invites us to consider what holds life, what lasts, what dies, and what defines and enriches the experience of being human.
 

A collection of essays highlighting the pervasive, yet often unacknowledged, role of Romantic poetry and poetics on modern and contemporary innovative poetry.

Literary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supposedly enervated “late-Romantic” poetry of the nineteenth century. The original essays in Active Romanticism challenge this interpretation by tracing the fundamental continuities between Romanticism’s poetic and political radicalism and the experimental movements in poetry from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

According to editors July Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson, “active romanticism” is a poetic response, direct or indirect, to pressing social issues and an attempt to redress forms of ideological repression; at its core, “active romanticism” champions democratic pluralism and confronts ideologies that suppress the evidence of pluralism. “Poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race,” declared poet William Blake at the beginning of the nineteenth century. No other statement from the era of the French Revolution marks with such terseness the challenge for poetry to participate in the liberation of human society from forms of inequality and invisibility. No other statement insists so vividly that a poetic event pushing for social progress demands the unfettering of traditional, customary poetic form and language.

Bringing together work by well-known writers and critics, ranging from scholarly studies to poets’ testimonials, Active Romanticism shows Romantic poetry not to be the sclerotic corpse against which the avant-garde reacted but rather the wellspring from which it flowed.

Offering a fundamental rethinking of the history of modern poetry, Carr and Robinson have grouped together in this collection a variety of essays that confirm the existence of Romanticism as an ongoing mode of poetic production that is innovative and dynamic, a continuation of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition, and a form that reacts and renews itself at any given moment of perceived social crisis.

This volume represents the most ambitious project of distinguished poet David Ferry’s life: a complete translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Ferry has long been known as the foremost contemporary translator of Latin poetry, and his translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics have become standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius, rendering Virgil’s formal, metrical lines into an English that is familiar, all while surrendering none of the poem’s original feel of the ancient world. In Ferry’s hands, the Aeneid becomes once more a lively, dramatic poem of daring and adventure, of love and loss, devotion and death.
 
The paperback and e-book editions include a new introduction by Richard F. Thomas, along with a new glossary of names that makes the book even more accessible for students and for general readers coming to the Aeneid for the first time who may need help acclimating to Virgil’s world.

In this deft analysis, Vernon Shetley shows how writers and readers of poetry, operating under very different conventions and expectations, have drifted apart, stranding the once-vital poetic enterprise on the distant margins of contemporary culture. Along with a clear understanding of where American poetry stands and how it got there, After the Death of Poetry offers a compelling set of prescriptions for its future, prescriptions that might enable the art to regain its lost stature in our intellectual life.

In exemplary case studies, Shetley identifies the very different ways in which three postwar poets—Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery—try to restore some of the challenge and risk that characterized modernist poetry's relation to its first readers. Sure to be controversial, this cogent analysis offers poets and readers a clear sense of direction and purpose, and so, the hope of reaching each other again.

Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.’s After the Operation reports from the No Man’s Land she wandered following eight hours of surgery to remove a brain tumor. What does the mind feel like after something has been taken out of your skull?  “An uninhabited coast,” or “all shatter and thoroughfare?” These spare poems interweave medical documents, journal entries, and memories, assembling a polyvocal chorus to document the surgery itself and the recuperation process. The decentralized perspective of After the Operation allows the reader to see the procedure holistically—medically, from the doctor’s perspective; subjectively, from the author’s; and vicariously, from her caretakers’, family’s, and friends’—while approximating the disassociation the patient feels as she navigates unexpected cognitive and emotional side effects. Sometimes bleak but always gorgeous, After the Operation does us a great service in illuminating and articulating the complexities of a serious medical event. This tangible chronicle of Gray’s terror, isolation, bafflement, desolation, love, loss, relief and gratitude serves as a beacon for all of us who will one day, as Susan Sontag says, find ourselves dwelling in “the kingdom of the sick.” Gray makes valiant use of her citizenship there, asking, “When they come for you, when the unfamiliar roar comes, and a sudden opening, and light pours in, when what had kept you safe, what had always been, is breached, pried open, and light pours in, what do you want to have been writing then?” After the Operation is her triumphant answer. 
 

Examines Herman Melville’s short fiction and poetry in the context of popular 1850s fiction
 
The study focuses on Melville’s vision of the purpose and function of language from Moby-Dick through Billy Budd with a special emphasis on how language—in function and form—follows and depends on the function and form of the body, how Melville’s attitude toward words echoes his attitude toward fish. Davis begins by locating and describing the fundamental dialectic formulated in Moby-Dick in the characters of Ahab and Ishmael. This dialectic produces two visions of bodily reality and two corresponding visions of language: Ahab’s, in which language is both weapon and substitute body, and Ishmael’s, in which language is an extension of the body—a medium of explanation, conversation, and play. These two forms of language provide a key to understanding the difficult relationships and formal changes in Melville’s writings after Moby-Dick.
 
By following each work’s attitude toward the dialectic, we can see the contours of the later career more clearly and so begin a movement away from weakly contextualized readings of individual novels and short stories to a more complete consideration of Melville’s career. Since the rediscovery of Herman Melville in the early decades of this century, criticism has been limited to the prose in general and to a few major works in particular.
 
Those who have given significant attention to the short fiction and poetry have done so frequently out of context, that is, in multi-author works devoted exclusively to these genres. The result has been a criticism with large gaps, most especially for works from Melville’s later career. The relative lack of interest in the poetry has left us with little understanding of how Melville’s later voices developed, of how the novels evolved into tales, the tales into poetry, and the poetry back into prose. In short, the development of Melville’s art during the final three decades of his life remains a subject of which we have been afforded only glimpses, rarely a continuous attention. After the Whale provides a new, more comprehensive understanding of Melville’s growth as a writer.
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Grief fractures and scars. In Afterlife Michael Dhyne picks up the shattered remains, examining each shard in the light, attempting to find meaning—or at least understanding—in the death of his father. 

“If I tell the story in reverse, / it still ends with nothing,” he writes. Yet it is in the telling that Dhyne’s story—and the world he creates—is filled. The echoes of his childhood loss reverberate through adolescence and adulthood, his body, the bodies of those he loves, and the world around them—from Bourbon Street to dark and lonely bedrooms, from grief support groups to heartachingly beautiful sunsets.

How we are shaped by our experiences, and how we refuse to be shaped, is at the heart of the poet’s search for memory, meaning, and love—in all its forms and wonders. This bold and tender debut is a rousing reminder that poetry and art can heal.
              to not forget. A girl says, 
                        Can I start with my birth? and I ask her if anything happened 

Attachments to proper names, traditions, and entrenched thought formations are a perennial problem and, as LM Rivera shows, an addiction. Against Heidegger is a collection of poetic meditations on that pervasive, and possibly eternal, compulsion. Rivera builds his idiosyncratically lyric argumentation against simplistic, naive, sentimental, and played-out narratives, opting instead for improvised, collaged, bursting-at-the-seams, experimental formations through which he thinks a concept through to its (im)possible end. On this philosophical-poetic journey, Rivera positions the grand figure of Martin Heidegger as a whipping boy who receives the punishment for the sins of blind tradition. Through this collection, Rivera attempts to sever many troubling yet lasting customs—be they overt, hidden, canonical, esoteric, forbidden, or blatantly authoritarian.
 

Winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2026 William Carlos Williams Prize

Recipient of the 2026 Medal Provocateur from the Eric Hoffer Awards

A poetic journey through the past of the Roman Empress Agrippina looks toward the future
 
Agrippina the Younger follows one woman’s study of another, separated by thousands of miles and two millennia but bound by a shared sense of powerlessness. Agrippina was a daughter in a golden political family, destined for greatness—but she hungered for more power than women were allowed. Exhausted by the misogyny of the present, Diana Arterian reaches into the past to try to understand the patriarchal systems of today. In lyric verse and prose poems, she traces Agrippina’s rise, interrogating a life studded with intrigue, sex, murder, and manipulation. Arterian eagerly pursues Agrippina through texts, ruins, and films, exhuming the hidden details of the ancient noblewoman’s life. These poems consider the valences of patriarchy, power, and the archive to try to answer the question: How do we recover a woman erased by history? 

2024 Elliot Cades Awardee

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. ‘Āina hānau—or the land of one’s birth—signifies identity through intimate and familial connections to place and creates a profound bond between the people in a community. McDougall’s poems flow seamlessly between ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and English, forming rhythms and patterns that impress on the reader a deep understanding of the land. Tracing flows from the mountains to the ocean, from the sky to the earth, and from ancestor to mother to child, these poems are rooted in the rich ancestral and contemporary literature of Hawaiʻi —moʻolelo, moʻokūʻauhau, and mele —honoring Hawaiian ʻāina, culture, language, histories, aesthetics, and futures.

The poems in Āina Hānau / Birth Land cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people. The ongoing environmental crisis in Hawaiʻi, inextricably linked to colonialism and tourism, is captured with stark intensity as McDougall writes, Violence is what we settle for / because we’ve been led to believe / green paper can feed us / more than green land. The experiences of birth, motherhood, miscarriage, and the power of Native Hawaiian traditions and self-advocacy in an often dismissive medical system is powerfully narrated by the speaker of the titular poem, written for McDougall’s daughters.

‘Āina Hānau reflects on what it means to be from and belong to an ʻāina hānau, as well as what it means to be an ‘āina hānau, as all mothers serve as the first birth lands for their children.

 Like the ancient medical text by Hippocrates that gives this book its title, Airs, Waters, Places looks with intensity and purpose at the elemental world to understand the possibility of an expanded notion of health in an often disconnected and disconnecting social order. In the poet's words, “To call language a nervous system might be useful: if each sentient being is analogous to cells within the organism, language is analogous to the nerves as well as the messages sent along those nerves. There is, there, if not eternity, at least delusion.” This is a book of various appetites in constant motion.

Inspired by the Greek myth of Alcestis, this poetry collection brings to life myriad voices who venture beyond the known world and exist between realities.

In Greek mythology, Alcestis descends to the mysterious kingdom of death in her beloved’s place. In The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, loss and queer desire echo across the multiverse. “In another life, I’m a . . .” sea witch or swineherd, vampire or troubadour, florist or fossil or museum guard, Oliver writes. These parallel personas inhabit space stations and medieval villages, excavate the Devonian seabed, and plumb a subterranean Anthropocene. In possible futures and imagined pasts, they might encounter “all wrong turns and broken signs” or carry “a suitcase full of stars.”

Oliver’s poems are animated by lush, unsettling verse and forms both traditional and experimental. The Alcestis Machine demonstrates how very present absence can be and how desire knows no boundaries. In neighborhood subdivisions or the vast reaches of space, it’s impossible to know “whose time is slipping / again.” Anyone “could come loose / from gravity’s shine.”

Aleksandr Tvardovskii was not only one of the finest, most popular and most important poets of his epoch, but also the editor of Novyi mir, the most prominent Soviet literary journal of the postwar period until the 1970s. This book is a detailed biography of the writer and journal editor who probably changed the literary culture of the Soviet Union more than any other person in the two decades after Stalin's death. Geoffrey Hosking shows how Tvardovskii gradually evolved from being an ardent Stalinist who renounced his own so-called “kulak” family to becoming a convinced advocate of tolerance, an all-human morality, civil rights, and free literary creativity.
By giving a balanced account of his strengths and weaknesses, his achievements and failures, the author succeeds in giving the fullest picture available anywhere of a controversial man who turns out to be more complex than he has been portrayed so far. To understand him better is to understand why the Soviet intelligentsia changed so fundamentally in the USSR’s final decades, a change that helps to explain the rise of Gorbachev twenty years later. The study—which includes an in-depth analysis of Tvardovskii’s major works—also helps to better understand the fate of culture under an authoritarian regime and the intricacies of the struggle against censorship.

A collection of poems that embrace musicality and locate the patterns of ancient songs in the body, nature, and world events.
 
Alibi, in Latin, meant “elsewhere,” and “lullaby”—from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by—has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of “thrill, dread, certainty.”
 
In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, “empathy through distress,” unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory, Alibi Lullaby is a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.
 

The lyrics in All Black Everything shine with work and the freedom of young people. Full of menace and humor, objects of warfare and luxury consumption are transformed with Shane Book’s blade of caustic irony against the worldwide nihilism of cash payments, guns, and disease. In their syncopated, slangy, and musically enjambed flow of the digital world, a poet known for singular collections has produced his most inventive and uncompromising volume yet.

The political sublime of Caribbean poetics ebb and flood in this contagious new voice of borrowings, hijacking the trap house. This is an original collection, daring to assume the voice of the system and its death drives, having fun, mixing it up, throwing hands too. If old pirates rob I, then Shane Book has stolen back something from them. All Black Everything is a redemption song.
 

Reuniting poems previously published in two separate books, All Calm Beyond brings together the work included in Twenty Shadows (1995) and The River I Know You By (1999), both written by Stephen Knauth in the period after his son Benjamin died of an early childhood cancer. These striking and stricken pages chart the path between acute mourning to the beginning of recovery, asking what it looks like to continue despite the permanence of loss. What it looks like is a halting progression made between stumbles, a battleworn collage of best efforts. This is his impossibly won wisdom: "Grief is like the blind mule you'd like to murder / until you look back and see how far it brought you." In these lyrics, Knauth mixes the transcendent diction of religion with the plain reality of ordinary speech, Christian imagery with Buddhist teaching, and the human scale of society with the indifferent vastness of nature. If grief is not a redundant abyss the bereft parent continually circles, if its process actually traverses spiritual ground, Knauth approaches and dares ask the inconceivable question faith requires of him: "And death, death of a child, has it likewise its / cruel and sturdy purpose?" No, of course not, these elegies and meditations repeat; yet, in response to the tragedy of surviving one's child, a father's sorrow attests to the dimensions of eternity, a measure beyond human comprehension except for the ceaseless pain of existing without his son and the shared devotion that binds family together even after a life is over. Maybe, then, "if only to attach to the bereaved / one end of the silver thread of oblivion, umbilicus / through which ghostly underworld placentas / deliver their dark nutrition?" Yes, and forever, forever, no. The wound is an ouroboros; love is the answer and the question, the conditions that brought forth the child and all that's left in his wake. Love, that immense and ferocious tenderness for which there is no good synonym. If love makes us susceptible to loss, then "the silence itself recalls what's missing, what's done." So we sit in the waiting room of this world, listening to what comes through "faintly, faintly, through the membrane," and remember that what will be is only possible because of what was, and walk forward to reach, perhaps, the calm beyond, because, "not knowing / where they have gone, we are left with our quiet / duty to the dead, with vows to take // and each day break, to embrace / what remains, to give, to glaze / every stick and stamen with our love."

Poems that offer an honest portrayal of the complex realities of motherhood, including the devastating effects of postpartum depression.

Maternal mental illness is an ongoing health crisis and deserves awareness, not only in the medical world but in the poetry world, too. Bridget Bell’s All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy offers support to current mothers, mothers-to-be, family members of people suffering from perinatal mental illnesses, OB-GYNs, nurses, and any other healthcare providers. Bell uses various poetic forms to shed light on the challenges that come with motherhood, including the physical and emotional challenges of childbirth while celebrating the beauty of women’s strength and resilience. Written with deep care and fearlessness, Bell’s debut collection is both an educational tool and a powerful component of recovery in that shares others’ similar stories.
 

Marking Aiden Heung’s debut collection, All There Is to Lose is the 2024 winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. The selecting judge, National Book Award Finalist Ilya Kaminsky, praises the resonant particularities and depth of feeling found in these poems, which convert “elegy [into] its driving force.” Poet and Critic Felicity Plunkett observes, “Dreams and memory move through these porous, venturesome poems. The spectral jostles with the sensual to tell ‘a story in which I could be found.’ Achily tender, they open to light, love and the jab of a joke.” Poet David Tait notes, “Unsettling and luminous, the poems preserve the memory of Village 915: its volatile seasons and hard-worn inhabitants, its headstones, spirits, and myriad forms of water. Here you’ll find not only poems of lyrical beauty, but of grim exactness.” The result is a stunning achievement of a first book, what Kaminsky identifies as an exemplar of “that ages-old mode of poetry wherein the poet uses language to break bread with the dead, to bring them back to life, if only for the moment, for a portion of the moment, an instant, before the line breaks.” Channeling the poet as medium, “I am the tension on the bow that draws the arrow,” Heung writes in “Epilogue.” “To lose myself — that is my destiny.” 

Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979, when his first book of poetry went to press, he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.

Dakin Matthews is an acclaimed actor, whose relationship with the stage and lyrical performance has made him keenly aware of the splendor and meaningfulness of Thomas Aquinas' often overlooked verse. The 'songs of Aquinas' are treasuries of theological wisdom but also serve to stir the mind to participate in prayer with as much zeal as the heart and mouth. Matthews offers an introduction to Aquinas and his main objectives for writing, and then relates the more serious theological treatises to the style and purposes of his verse. It is a full but never overwhelming immersion in Thomistic thought, as well as a brilliant guide to Medieval Latin and the art of translation.      

Matthews' particular attention is given to "Lauda Sion," and he breaks it down, verse by verse, providing an analysis of the Latin text and commentary on its poetic structure, but also illuminates the doctrinal references to Aquinas' other scholarly works and Scripture. His approach is both technical and intermittently personal, and as such this book might serve as a two-week source of daily meditations. 
            
The Alleluias of the Mind is a wonderful contribution to the body of Thomistic commentary and will appear before the close of the 750th anniversary of the death of Thomas Aquinas. It is also a wonderful complement to the year devoted to Eucharistic revival in the American Catholic Church. 
 

This study reconsiders and reassesses the work of Allen Tate as a poet whose themes and expression place him among the most studied and canonical Modernists of the last century. Allen Tate (1899-1979), a former Poet Laureate of the US, although generally regarded during his lifetime as one of the twentieth century's preeminent literary critics and men of letters, has been largely overlooked by critics in the years since his death. John V. Glass III rectifies this by tracing the development of Tate's thought and verse from his early years as a student at Vanderbilt in the 1920s through his final terza-rima sequence completed in the 1950s. Tate's poetry in the intervening years charts the course of an American modernist who brings to bear on the problems of his age the unique perspective of a southerner, one who refuses either to accept sentimentality or to repudiate the past in his search for a solution to the dissociation of sensibility.

These poems explore interlocking themes of sacrifice willing and forced and the sacred dimension of nature and the need for healing in the suffering world.

A debut poetry collection set in and around Louisiana’s fishing village of Cocodrie

Altars of Spine and Fraction follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the privilege to reject or indulge it.

Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by boys raised in the Deep South.

Prayer is an articulation of our noblest desires, our deepest yearnings, and our darkest places. The prayers in this collection speak directly to the complexity of human life--whether you seek expression for joy, wonder, perplexity, or heartache, for personal use or for your community, you will find here a voice for your experience that will help you linger in the blessings and move forward through the pain. This collection includes prayers for personal use, prayers for use at communal gatherings, prayers and readings for moments of grief and moments of joy, a collection of daily Psalms, and focus phrases and questions for meditation. These readings for contemplative practice and communal gatherings will aid in the search for clarity, for strength beyond what we know, and for an affirmation of holiness, of goodness, of the grandeur of God.

The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism.Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today.Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.