London. Eyewear Publishing. 2013. ISBN 9781908998071David Shook is quite right that, on the days when you can see them through the pollution, the volcanoes that surround Mexico City are a perfect meta…
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- Szczecin, Poland. Forma. 2013. ISBN 9788363316365In July 2001 Anna Frajlich wrote in her poem “New York”: “This city is mine / and I belong to it / in the crystalline air / we sail along the shores /…
- Laura Healy, tr. New York. New Directions. 2013. ISBN 9780811219280 In the most recent posthumous publication of Robert Bolaño’s work in English, The Unknown University, fantastically…
- Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2013. ISBN 9780819572998The contemporary tagline “Just saying” adds cheerful sarcasm to any observation, disavowing the authority or urgency o…
- Eirik Lodén, tr. Stavanger, Norway. Wigestrand. 2012. ISBN 9788281401150Partly a poetic biography of Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802–87), partly the portrait of an epoch, An Elastic State of Mind…
- New York. New York Quarterly Books. 2013. ISBN 9781935520719In reading Benjamin Myers’s second collection of poetry, one is struck with how frequently “neighbors” and “neighborhood” occur, sometimes s…
- Han Dong. A Phone Call from Dalian. Nicky Harman et al., ed. Brookline, Massachusetts / Hong Kong. Zephyr / Chinese University Press of Hong Kong. 2012. ISBN 9780983297017Ouyang Ji…
- George Economou with Stavros Deligiorgis, tr. Bristol, United Kingdom. Shearsman. 2013. ISBN 9781848612662When Plato compared Greeks to frogs around a pond, he probably could not have envisioned…
- Megan Volpert, ed. Alexander, Arkansas. Sibling Rivalry. 2013. ISBN 9781937420420 Had Plato been privy to This Assignment Is So Gay, he might have changed his proclamation that would ban…
- George McWhirter, tr. Francisco Toledo, ill. San Francisco. City Lights. 2012. ISBN 9780872865648 With its side-by-side bilingual presentation, accompanied by Francisco Toledo’s bold, whimsical,…
- Jeffrey Yang, ed. New York. New Directions. 2013. ISBN 9780811220323It is not without reason that Hemingway symbolized death in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as a hyena who “slipped lightly alo…
- Karen Emmerich & Edmund Keeley, tr. Brooklyn, New York. Archipelago. 2013. ISBN 9781935744580Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) was one of the most respected twentieth-century Greek poets, “whose writing l…
- Tessa Ransford. Don’t Mention This to Anyone: Poems and Prose Fragments of Life in the Punjab. Jila Peacock, ill. Edinburgh. Luath. 2012. ISBN 9781908373182Tessa Ransford & Iyad Hayatleh.…
- William Pitt Root, tr. San Antonio, Texas. Wings Press. 2013. ISBN 9780916727871The powerful Odas elementales (1954; Eng. Elemental Odes, 1990) by Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (1904–1…
- Ljubica Arsovska & Peggy Reid, tr. Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon. 2012. ISBN 9781556593758The latest selection of poetry in English of the prominent Macedonian poet Lidija Dimkovsk…
- Emily Grosholz, tr. Farhad Ostovani, ill. Lanham, Maryland. Bucknell University Press / Rowman & Littlefield. 2012. ISBN 9781611484588This outwardly slight, paperbound volume opens to reveal…
- Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2013. ISBN 9780819573575There is a kind of fragmentation in contemporary poetry that fails to convince, that seems to have been born only in fragmen…
- Piotr Florczyk, tr. Los Angeles, California. Calypso. 2013. ISBN 9780983099994 Although Jarosław Mikołajewski’s poetry debuted in Poland in the 1990s, he has eluded American readers unt…
- Minneapolis, Minn. Graywolf. 2013. ISBN 9781555976378Like a man who takes clocks apart for the sheer joy of showing us the marvelous ways in which they work, James Longenbach displays a great talent f…
- Sudeep Sen, ed. New Delhi. HarperCollins India. 2012. ISBN 9789350290415 With the exception of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (2010), which fo…
- New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Ecco. 2012. ISBN 9780374126087Emerging from a reading of this accomplished collected works is like having run a rigorous marathon. While in shorter individual c…
- New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. ISBN 978-0374293321Despite his many accomplishments, including a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, C. K. Williams begins this book humbly, avowing in “Wh…
- Jonathan Stalling, tr. Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2012. ISBN 9780806142418A contemporary of Bei Dao, Mang Ke, and Duo Duo, Shi Zhi (b. 1948) was read and recited by thousands of younger-gen…
- André Naffis-Sahely, tr. Brooklyn, New York. Island Position. 2012. ISBN 9780984845316 It is unfortunate that Moroccan poet and novelist Abdellatif Laâbi is not better known in the English-speak-…
- Mumbai. Almost Island. 2012. ISBN 9788192129501Signs of a new, forthcoming collection by Adil Jussawalla, one of India’s finest English-language poets, had been in the air for some time. A small but s…