Todmorden. Arc. 2020. 77 pages.
THE VILLANELLE OCCUPIES an unstable canonical history. Jean Passerat’s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” (written in 1574, published in 1606) is the only exa…
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New York. Penguin Random House. 2020. 112 pages. SLIPPERINESS IN LANGUAGE, often invoked as a postmodern outcome of oppositional poetry, could mean, in some parts of the world, slippe…
Cincinatti. Hebrew Union College Press. 2020. 188 pages. THE POET TUVIA RUEBNER left this world just months before the arrival of a pandemic that has since shaken it. For a life shape…
New York. NYRB. 2021. 144 pages. IN NAJWAN DARWISH‘S unflinching new collection of poems, Exhausted on the Cross, we witness a poet in conflict with his calling, conversing w…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2019. 120 pages. IN THE PREFACE to Liking in Silence, eminent Korean poet Kim Sa-in tells his readers that “[growing] up through an era o…
New York. Black Spruce Press. 2020. 80 pages. BLACK ICE IS A forceful confrontation with the elements, with the fates, with the self-deceptive possibilities of all human life…
Selected Poems, 1968–1996 New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 174 pages. Less Than One New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020 (©1986). 501 pages. On Grief and Reason…
Szczecin, Poland. Forma. 2020. 64 pages. CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ CALLED Anna Frajlich’s poems cantilenas; Stanisław Gliwa said, “You use the keyboard of Polish language so elegantly and with s…
Montreal. Metonymy Press. 2020. 104 pages. AS THE FIRST POETRY collection by a self-identifying queer/trans Mauritian artist, ZOM-FAM is a milestone in Mauritian literature.…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2020. 204 pages. THE ITALIAN WORD allegria does not have a true equivalent in English, which makes Allegria a sensible choice for the ti…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 112 pages. VALZHYNA MORT’S VOICE FEELS as if it survived a poetic conflagration. There is an imprint of crushed existence—charred bones and…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2020. 112 pages. AN ATLAS IS A BOOK of maps and charts. But what would a “fugitive atlas” look like? In his fifth full-length collection of poems, MacArth…
New Delhi. Yoda Press. 2019. 106 pages. THE IRISH HELD a distinctive position in the British Empire. They were colonized by Britain but were also its accessory to empire in India—to t…
Nacogdoches, Texas. Stephen F. Austin University Press. 2020. 112 pages. ENJOYABLE AND INSIGHTFUL, Fred Dings’s The Four Rings consists of striking images that accompany bot…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2020. 111 pages. NANCY MOREJÓN HAS LONG been synonymous with Cuban poetry (see WLT, Summer 2002, Autumn 2019). In this succinct collecti…
Edinburgh, UK. Hybrid Press. 2020. 95 pages. OISÍN BREEN’S Flowers, All Sorts in Blossom, Figs, Berries, and Fruits Forgotten is an unrestrained book of free-form poetry that…
Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Eulalia Books. 2019. 168 pages. BORN AND RAISED IN ARTIGAS, a town in northern Uruguay across a river from Brazil, Fabián Severo writes in Portuñol, a regional…
Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon Press. 2020. 94 pages. PHILIP METRES’S SHRAPNEL MAPS is an impressive work of listening, learning, and journeying into the trauma of…
New York. New Press. 2020. 240 pages. NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O’S first venture into epic poetry is a triumph of the form, which resounds with the lyrical heartbeat of the Gĩkũyũ people in Ke…
New York. Penguin. 2020. 77 pages. DURING A 2019 INTERVIEW with Helena de Groot about the publication of What You Have Heard Is True, Carolyn Forché responded to a question a…
New Delhi. Speaking Tiger Books. 2019. 88 pages. CLASSICAL INDIAN LITERATURE (religious as well as secular, in Sanskrit but also Prakrit, Pali, and Tamil) continues to inspire contem…
Winston Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2020. 112 pages. KEEN OBSERVATION is expected of a poet, and Irish poet Frank Ormsby satisfies many times over in The…
Todmorden, United Kingdom. Arc. 2020. 133 pages. BORN IN GERMANY in 1952 to a Jewish mother who had survived the Holocaust in hiding, Esther Dischereit grew up in a haunted society, w…
Beaumont, Texas. Lamar University Literary Press. 2020. 286 pages. A REMARKABLE POETRY career is packaged in this collection. Jonas Zdanys has published poetry in English for fifty ye…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2020. 73 pages. IN LATER EMPERORS, Evan Jones’s learning is clearly displayed in his engagement with Roman history and in the breadth of his allusio…