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…
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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 pock…
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 r…
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…
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 exis…
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.…
New York. NYQ Books. 2017. 88 pages. Trauma and grief tend to control one’s life once they have interjected themselves, and yet we continue to write about them as strangers—a carousel of sobriety and…
Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. 84 pages. Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance progresses through gradual inoculation. Bit by bit, the reader becomes accustomed to the irony and para…
Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre Dame Press. 2018. 92 pages. In Kevin Hart’s eighth book of poetry, he uses poetry to talk to the absent or, rather, the ambiguously present: his late father, G…
New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 591 pages. At nearly six hundred pages, this beautifully produced book is comprised of eleven sections of poetry (Galway Kinnell’s ten books and a section of…
Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2018. 68 pages. Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir has done the seemingly impossible: taken our contemporary capitalist culture, suffused with moralism as well as not-so-hidden prej…
New Delhi. Speaking Tiger. 2017. 272 pages. C. P. Surendran is, in many ways, a shadowy figure in Indian English poetry. He doesn’t dwell under the blazing lights of ill-deserved fame but in a dark sp…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2017. 90 pages. An acclaimed poet fond of mixing childhood and ecology, myths and quantum science, D. Nurkse publishes here his eleventh volume of poetry. Resonating with su…
Hexham, United Kingdom. Bloodaxe Books / Dufour Editions. 2017. 94 pages. The latest collection of poems from prizewinning British author Philip Gross, A Bright Acoustic, is a singularly atte…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2018. 112 pages. Even though we now have the scientific ability to understand the various regions of the world our ancestors came from, and even time frames of ancestral m…
Storrs, Connecticut. World Poetry Books. 2017. 148 pages. Perhaps more than any other oral epic, The Odyssey is a story about retelling one’s own story. It, therefore, demands to be recast an…
Hexham, United Kingdom. Bloodaxe. 2017. 144 pages. Fresh from their magisterial translation of Ana Blandiana’s My Native Land A4 (Bloodaxe, 2010), translators Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica P…
London. Seagull Books. 2017. 133 pages. Yves Bonnefoy, undoubtedly one of the major French poets of the last six decades, passed away in 2016, and Ensemble Encore, or Together Still,…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2018. 96 pages. In his latest volume of poems, Li-Young Lee has managed to yoke together lyrical and testimonial voices (see WLT, Jan. 2018, 13–17). Indeed, its title,…
Los Angeles. Green Integer. 2017. 95 pages. Ah, Mouthless Things, published in Korean in 2003 and now translated for the first time into English, is a pocket-sized collection of poems that be…
Kolkata. Hawakal. 2017. 62 pages. Poetry is a journey in quietude, and Kiriti Sengupta’s Solitary Stillness is no exception. Sengupta has traveled extensively, and his poetic exuberance is ne…
Kolkata, India. Hawakal. 2017. 76 pages. In an interview, Linda Ashok, a poet from India whose first collection of poetry, Whorelight, was recently published with a foreword by renowned poet…