New York. W. W. Norton. 2022. 112 pages.
JOSEPH BRODSKY SAID somewhere that “poetry is what every language hopes to become.” This means that poetry is aspirational at the level of lan…
VERSE
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2022. 146 pages. RECENTLY I FOUND myself way high up in the hills of Berkeley—at the outermost lip of Tilden Park, when the blue-gray dusk turned all…
Fayetteville. University of Arkansas Press. 2022. 124 pages. ON THE OPENING PAGE of her newest collection, Abacus of Loss: A Memoir in Verse, Iranian-born poet Sholeh Wolpé s…
Philadelphia. Paul Dry Books. 2022. 69 pages. A little over halfway through Boris Dralyuk’s new collection of poems, in one of its many sonnets, the reader meets a beguiling but familiar image: a man…
Makhanda, South Africa. Deep South. 2021. 67 pages. Dimakatso Sedite’s marvelous debut, Yellow Shade, opens with the poem “Middle-town,” a meditation on the speaker’s origins in a township i…
Trenton, New Jersey. Africa World Press. 2021. 69 pages. IN I Come from a Country, Tijan M. Sallah brings to the façade a deep sense of purpose and a richness of heart for th…
Denver. Wisdom Body Collective. 2021. 78 pages. WISDOM BODY COLLECTIVE has released an anthology of thirty-three poems and letters addressing themes Diane di Prima outlined half a cen…
Sydney. Giramondo. 2022. 96 pages. BEFORE OPENING THIS book, I kept picturing Leonardo DiCaprio fending off a lunging set of teeth and claws, alone in a North American forest. What is…
Cardigan, Wales. Parthian. 2022. 308 pages. TEMPO: Excursions in 21st Century Italian Poetry is an excellent bilingual survey of current Italian poetry’s diversity a…
Cambridge, UK. Pippa Rann Books & Media. 2021. 176 pages. SUDEEP SEN IS a prolific poet, translator, and editor of influential anthologies. His newest work, Anthropocene,…
New York. Knopf. 2022. 286 pages. AT THE CORE of A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, is a double (external/internal) exile that causes the poet to periodically ab…
New York. Penguin. 2022. 128 pages. TIME IS A MOTHER is Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection and his first book since 2019, when the award-winning novel On Ear…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet Press. 2022. 152 pages. SECULAR ATHEISTS OR adherents to faiths other than Christianity who admire fine poetry should not avoid reading John F. Deane’s new bo…
Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2021. 206 pages. UKRAINIAN POET Natalka Bilotserkivets had her first two collections of poems published in the 1970s, although she started writing…
Waratah, Australia. Puncher & Wattmann. 2021. 98 pages. FIFTEENERS IS THE latest stunning installment in this storied poet’s fearless oeuvre, and Jordie Albiston’s book of strange…
London. Seagull Books. 2021. 124 pages. ALAIN MABANCKOU, a native of the Congo and a longtime professor at UCLA, is one of the world’s leading francophone authors. If…
New York. New Directions. 2022. 121 pages. DURING HER SHORT lifetime, Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967) risked everything to become one of Iran’s foremost feminist voices. Her poem “Sin”…
New York. Farrar Straus and Giroux. 2021. 64 pages. LOUISE GLÜCK HAS been the recipient of nearly every award recognizing a poet’s craft. In November 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Pr…-
New York. Farrar Straus and Giroux. 2021. 64 pages. LOUISE GLÜCK HAS been the recipient of nearly every award recognizing a poet’s craft. In November 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Pr…
Boston. Beacon Press. 2021. 112 pages. THE POEMS OF Dear Specimen combine human and ecological grief into an elegy for all earthly life. W. J. Herbert’s poems cohere into a n…
Brooklyn. Ugly Duckling Presse. 2021. 153 pages. POLINA BARSKOVA, poet and professor, is the author of twelve books of poetry in Russian and two books of prose, with three books (or p…
New Haven. Yale University Press. 2021. 255 pages. WHEN ASKED ABOUT her primary influences, María Baranda pointed to Lebanese poet Andrée Chedid for her “luminosity” and the textures…
New Orleans. Diálogos Books. 2021. 227 pages. WITH ALMOST NO subject matter being taboo in postmodern poetry, ironically the oldest subject of all is, for most contemporary poets, str…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2022. 96 pages. WITH DISTANT TRANSIT, her new poetry collection in English, Maja Haderlap returns to the questions that inform her prizewinning n…
Tallahassee. Anhinga Press. 2021. 128 pages. CLEMONCE HEARD PRESENTS a timely yet timeless collection in Tragic City, consisting of poems that artfully push against a singula…