New Delhi. Copper Coin. 2017. 166 pages.As a publication format, the “new and selected poems” allows a poet’s corpus to grow incrementally and retrospectively at the same time, with each new collectio…
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Tucson. University of Arizona Press. 2017. 82 pages.The lacunae in literary and cultural studies of the Pacific is here mended and woven into the fabric of the basket in Marshallese daughter Kathy Jet…
London. Enitharmon Press. 2017. 189 pages.Considering the breadth of poetry contained within, Writing the Real is a relatively brief but highly dense collection. For those interested in the e…
New York. Liveright. 2017. 153 pages.The difficulty of translation increases with the complexity of the text. With poetry, there’s a great deal to be lost in translation. Simon Armitage’s new verse tr…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2016 (©2015). 112 pages.Anyone raised in or near an indigenous culture will understand the ways in which language permeates the local sense…
Fayetteville, New York. Bitter Oleander Press. 2016. 117 pages.The Hunchbacks’ Bus marks the first published collection of Nora Iuga’s poetry in English, a reminder that too many prominent Ro…
New Delhi. Nirala. 2016. 81 pages.On what seemed like an ordinary day in 2015, a series of rumbles jostled the Nepali region, killing thousands and thrusting countless more into homelessness. An encou…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2016. 94 pages.American readers owe their gratitude to White Pine Press and to translators YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker for making BoSeon Shim’s fascinating K…
Athens. Ypokeimeno Press. 2016. 62 pages.Jazra Grozny is the long-awaited first poetry collection in Greek of the controversial and charismatic Greek-Chechen poet Jazra Khaleed. For the last…
Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2016. 89 pages.Mohsen Emadi writes a poetry of borders and crossings (WLT, March 2015, 42–44). His poems lay bare a world dissected by boundaries both real and ima…
Norman, Oklahoma. Mongrel Empire Press. 2016. 80 pages.Each of us has a familiar universe that we hide from everyone else. Erika T. Wurth’s collection A Thousand Horses out to Sea is an invit…
Carouge, Switzerland. Editions Zoé. 2016. 200 pages.Western Europe is usually credited with inventing expressionism and surrealism at the end of the nineteenth century, but both artistic movement…
Lyttelton, New Zealand. Cold Hub Press. 2016. 173 pages.Blanca Castellón’s use of language in the collection Water for Days of Thirst is at times sparse and direct and occasionally disorienti…
Norman, Oklahoma. Mezcalita Press. 2016. 96 pages.Contemporary poetry can be formulaic: the vague flow of emotion Mary Kinzie calls the “Rhapsodic Fallacy,” the neoconfessional anecdote Donald Hall re…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 111 pages.From shards of a “hand-me-down life,” “sufficiently tragic,” Safiya Sinclair conjures poetic magic, casting a spell whereby “cannibal master…
Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press. 2016. 286 pages.América Invertida owes its name to the well-known 1943 drawing in which vanguard painter Joaquín Torres García turned the map of t…
New York. Knopf. 2016. 96 pages.Published posthumously, The Last Shift is and will be the last book of new poetry by Philip Levine, his “last shift” of turning the scrap metal of the inescapa…
Hexham, UK. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2016. 80 pages.Widely recognized as Malawi’s most celebrated poet, Jack Mapanje belongs to the generation of Africa’s renowned writers imprisoned…
Notre Dame, Indiana. Action Books. 2016. 77 pages.In her epilogue to Cheer Up, Femme Fatale, translator Ji Yoon Lee asserts that this book is “crawling with things that go missing.” Indeed, i…
Montréal. Editions Druide. 2016. 123 pages.Hélène Dorion’s two latest volumes are autobiographical prose poems written in homage to her dying parents. In Recommencements (2014), Dorion o…
Sydney. Pitt Street Poetry. 2016. 77 pages.Eileen Chong identifies writing as “an act of recovery, of piecing together, of recording, re-ordering and re-inventing.” In Painting Red Orchids…
Honolulu. University of Hawai’i Press. 2016. 170 pages.Korea’s rapid ascent to first-world status in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is astonishing. In addition to economic and political…
New York. Knopf. 2016. 108 pages.This latest book by Sharon Olds, Odes (a near perfect rhyme), contains sixty-four poems of praise. They are not written in the traditional English form of the…
Toronto. Mawenzi House. 2016. 78 pages.Innu Assi means “land of the people” in the language of the Pessamit Innu. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s Assi Manifesto grounds itself in Innu land…
Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2016. 90 pages.According to the back cover of Watch Out, “Many critics count [Raeber] among the more significant writers of the second half of the twentiet…