A collection of poems that blesses the reader with a spirit of hope, solace, and inspiration in their own seasons of adversity.

The Beautiful Immunity asks how we create good in an imperfect world of fallible souls. Spare and formally daring, these poems were refined through the catastrophes of wildfires, recession, and a major public health crisis through the hope of a beautiful immunity—an everlasting salve for the lost. This slender volume reads as the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of labor, documenting large-scale social, cultural, and political upheavals, as well as the moment when the word “anthropause” floated indelibly into the world’s vocabulary.
 

Children in Tactical Gear offers a brilliant feed of stark incantations and unsparing satire. Set in distinctly American landscapes, including toy weapon assembly lines and the compounds of the super rich, and voiced by imperiled children, failed adults, and even a smart home speaker, this collection demonstrates the unsettling force of a surreal imagination under duress.
 

Identity and understanding are fluid and plural, yet the histories of violence and oppression influence and shape everything in the world because the past, present, and future exist in the same plane and at the same time. Gagaan Xʼusyee / Beneath the Foot of the Sun is a unique collection of Indigenous cultural work and Lingít literature in the tradition of Nora Marks Dauenhauer and in the broader contemporary company of Joy Harjo and Sherwin Bitsui. Focused on the history of place and the Lingít and Haida people, who recognize little separation between life and art, these forty-six poems reach into the knowledge of the past, incorporate visions currently received, and draw a path for future generations.
 
The collection is divided into four sections based on how the Lingít talk about g̱agaan—the sun. Featuring some poems in English, some in Lingít, and some that combine the beauty of the two, Gagaan Xʼusyee / Beneath the Foot of the Sun displays an equal dignity in both languages that transcends monolingual constrictions.
 

A fantastical collection of poems by revolutionary Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén presented in a Spanish-English bilingual edition.
 
Born in Cuba to parents of African and European ancestry, Nicolás Guillén worked in printing presses and studied law before moving into Havana’s literary scene. A virtuosic maker and breaker of forms, Guillén rose to fame by transforming a popular form of Cuban music into poetry that called attention to the experience of Afro-Cuban people, and he continued to interweave his artistic and political commitments as he traveled the world.
 
Originally published in Spanish in 1967, The Great Zoo is a humorous and biting collection of poems that presents a fantastical bestiary of ideas, social concerns, landscapes, phenomena, and more. The “animals” on view in this menagerie include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, clouds from different countries, a singing guitar, a temperamental atomic bomb, blue-pelted police, a hurricane, the KKK, and the North Star, among many others. Translated by Aaron Coleman with a keen understanding of the contexts of colonial racialization, oppression, and exoticism, this bilingual edition stands as a testament to Guillén’s carnivalesque vision.
 

In Christian Collier’s debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost, this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and the specter of police brutality. With a profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir—a poem like “Beloved,” whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy. 
 

A poetry collection that explores the complexity of race and the body for a Black man in contemporary America.
 
The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”