Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2015. 88 pages.In “Beyond Confession” (2001), Alicia Ostriker insists that a poetry of witness should not only include “history” and “the news” but that it…
VERSE
Normal, Illinois. co•im•press. 2015. 376 pages.The title rings true. Juan Gelman’s Oxen Rage embodies tremendous tension (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 28). Submission and anger compete within…
Brooklyn, New York. Akashic Books, 2015. 103 pages.Born in Jamaica to a pharmacist mother and a policeman father, Colin Channer, an award-winning Caribbean diaspora writer in the US, has published a d…
Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2015. 103 pages.There is nothing like it in Chicano literature. Rudolfo Anaya’s writing, distinct and unusual since the publication of Bless Me, Última (…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 249 pages.When C. K. Williams died last year, he left behind more than half a century’s worth of superb work as well as a sterling reputation attested to b…
Tucson, Arizona. Schaffner Press. 2015. 239 pages.We live in a time of brevity. From the truncated language of text messages to the popularity of the 140-word tweet, we have lost our patience for exte…
London. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2015. 66 pages.“My hands dissolve in water. / My body wastes away. / The air drifts past and through me / Each night and every day. // Bright darkness is my comfort,…
Rochester, New York. Tiger Bark Press. 2015. 127 pages. In order to achieve inner stillness, one must first withstand turmoil. Experience of a major world war, a fellow writer’s public rejection of hi…
New York. Chelsea Editions. 2015. 427 pages.To dip into this volume, with its splendid translator’s introduction, is first to connect with a vital Italian poetic tradition. Although Lorenzo Calogero w…
Hilversum, Netherlands. Tungsten Press. 2015. 30 pages. The world of poetry suffered a deep loss last spring when Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Franz Wright died at sixty-two. Son of James Wright,…
Brookline, Massachusetts. Zephyr Press. 2014. 123 pages.The poems in Grass Roots speak almost exclusively of the present moment, which in Xiang Yang’s case happens to be the point at which th…
Los Angeles. Phoneme. 2015. 240 pages.While exiled in Madrid, the hypercosmopolitan poet Alfonso Reyes wrote Visión de Anáhuac, 1519 (1915), an exquisite narrative of Tenochtitlán and its con…
Budapest. Magvető. 2015. 64 pages.It was nine years ago that Zsuzsa Rakovszky published her last book of poetry, Visszaút az időben (Going back in time). Since then, proving her prowess as a…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 117 pages.The first challenging thing a reader encounters in this new collection by Paul Muldoon is the title itself. How literally can we expect the title…
New York. W.W. Norton. 2015. 160 pages.This is not merely a book of poetry. These are instructions for the soul, a song to lead the reader home. With Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Press 53. 2015. 91 pages.It is easy to like Hedy Habra’s poetry. She has proven herself a versatile poet and has a distinguished body of poetry to her credit. After Habr…
Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2015. 108 pages.Slovenian poet Aleš Debeljak’s new bilingual volume, Smugglers, contains five cycles and four nonrhymed quatrains. Each of the individual po…
Gurgaon, India. Hachette India. 2015. 70 pages.Meena Alexander is among the most visible of South Asian American poets writing in the US. She is prolific, having to her credit seven books of poetry, a…
Clare You & Richard Silberg, tr. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2014. ISBN 9781935210603Moon Chung-hee’s short lines are incendiary, bright with images of life as a wife and poet within phal…
Patty Crane, tr. Louisville, Kentucky. Sarabande Books. 2015. ISBN 9781941411216Sometimes a new piece of shared cultural heritage seems to click into place; the appearance of Bright Scythe—se…
Budapest. Libri. 2014. ISBN 9789633103814János Térey, one of the most significant Hungarian poets of the middle generation, has written a number of books in which he reinvents epic poetry, using…
Rugby, England. Nine Arches Press. 2015. ISBN 9780993120114Any discussion of differences between American and British poetry begins and ends with the fact that we hardly ever read each other. Why…
Fady Joudah, tr. Portland, Oregon. Tavern Books. 2014. ISBN 9781935635406Petra is a beautiful hand-sewn chapbook whose text is set in handsome Garamond typeface printed on archival-quality pa…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2014. ISBN 9780374535612Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems in two volumes, the first including poems from 1966…
County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2015. isbn 9781910669082The little town in which I teach has sustained a Thursday-night open-mic poetry event for the last twenty-one years, and…