County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2018. 46 pages.Most of the poems in Ultima Ora are brief, sometimes epigrammatic, sometimes anecdotal. In the best of them, the brevity…
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Manchester, United Kingdom. Carcanet Press. 2018. 96 pages.James Harpur’s The White Silhouette is a beautiful collection of poetry in three parts. “The White Silhouette” is a tour of faith an…
Normal, Illinois. Co•im•press. 2018. 288 pages.Recipient of the Cervantes Prize, Juan Gelman is best known for his activism, passion, and the tragic death of his son and daughter-in-law during Argenti…
Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 88 pages.Blessed are the ones with attics in their homes. For an attic is a rare construct that serves as a repository of bits and pieces of memory, which in a hectic life are…
Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2018. 143 pages.It is not easy to select poems from twenty-five robust years of poetic output into one slim volume, especially for the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu. The Wild…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2018. 61 pages.The title of Conor O’Callaghan’s new book, Live Streaming, immediately poses an interpretive question. If “līve,” t…
Manchester, United Kingdom. Carcanet Press. 2018. 110 pages.In 1909 anthropologist Arnold van Gennep introduced the concept of the “liminal period of ritual,” a transition located between separation a…
New York. Akashic Books. 2018. 350 pages.The New-Generation African Poets book series is an ambitious program to publish together poets who have yet to publish full-length books. The 2018 edi…
Northfield, Massachusetts. Talisman House. 2018. 52 pages.Eileen Myles’s blurb on the back cover of Brane Mozetič’s book maintains that the poems are “tiny novels” and “end like tiny movies.” One can…
Broome, Australia. Magabala Books. 2018. 149 pages.If poets are compelled toward cultivating voice, then, logically enough, to what ends? In his recent monograph, Polysituatedness: A Poetics of Di…
Bhubaneshwar, India. Dhauli Books. 2018. 126 pages.Young Indian English poet Aditya Shankar is a man acutely aware of the quantity of material objects that are piled up against human sensations or emo…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2018. 104 pages.When I was very young and growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I was sure that the mountains I saw every day were a massive painting on the side of the universe r…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2018. 180 pages.There is visceral excitement upon welcoming a new poet into one’s personal canon—it’s like collecting a little bit of immortal light—and Russian po…
Chicago. Swan Isle Press (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2018. 99 pages.Born in Havana, Cuba, but raised in Florida, Ruth Behar explores the poetics of identity, not only as a Cuban living in e…
Minneapolis. Milkweed. 2018. 88 pages.The late Max Ritvo was something of a rising star in American poetry before his death, at only twenty-six, in 2016. This volume, edited by Louise Glück, offers se…
New Delhi. Red River. 2017. 74 pages.The word “Sanskarnama” is a curious mixture of Sanskrit and Persian meaning “a chronicle of culture.” Nabina Das, in her collection of searing poems, has used this…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2018. 140 pages.The Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s Unexpected Development (Unerwarteter Verlauf) appeared this year with White Pine Press, accompanied b…
Lafarre, France. Les éditions de la Tortue. 2018. 119 pages.Born in 1944 in Washington, DC, poet and playwright Lance Henson grew up in Calumet, Oklahoma, with his traditional Tsis-tsis-tas (Southern…
Hexham, Northumberland. Bloodaxe Books / Dufour Editions. 2017. 128 pages.Ahren Warner’s third book is, from the start, clearly about the weight of history. “[E]ach city east of Bremen bears the pockm…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2018. 96 pages.Our grandparents warned us of the existential dread that the modern world would eventually bring to us, and in her book …
Los Angeles. Rare Bird Books. 2018. 128 pages.Julayne Lee’s debut poetry collection is a tightrope walk between rage and respect. Not My White Savior begins with an introduction that helps re…
Warrensburg, Missouri. Pleiades Press. 2018. 91 pages.Every literary work is a product of its place, but few forms are so susceptible to absorbing their surroundings as poetry. Even the poetic works t…
Anderson, South Carolina. Parlor Press. 2017. 121 pages.In the short introduction to Grasshopppers’ Eyes, the book’s translators assert a “Buddhist influence underlying [Ko’s] vision of exist…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2018. 150 pages.When Richard Sieburth published the first translations of Gershom Scholem’s poetry in Bomb magazine in 2002, it was a great revelation to Scholem’…
Glen Ellen, California. Copper Coin. 2017. 58 pages.Sophia Naz walks a tightrope between two languages, English and Urdu, and her new collection of poems, Pointillism, is a pointer to that.…