Little Rock, Arkansas. Sibling Rivalry Press. 2019. 120 pages.
The United States is a young country, yet few phenomena that occur here are new. The AIDS epidemic is one of the foremost among the hand…
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New Delhi. HarperCollins India. 2019. 456 pages. Anisur Rahman, a former professor of English at Jamia Milia University in New Delhi, is a widely published scholar in the field of New Literatures in E…
Edmonton. Athabasca University Press. 2018. 108 pages. This book of translated poetry deserves strong reactions, and it both evokes and earns them. It is a complex if short work, and one’s responses m…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2019. 75 pages. What is it about Slovenian poets that continues to tickle American readers? The most famous of them, the late Tomaž Šalamun, was simply fun to rea…
Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2019. 94 pages. When faced with the term “country album,” I immediately think of songs from Nashville and Austin and the usual musical formula including a g…
Gainesville. University Press of Florida. 2019. 133 pages. Fernando Valverde, born in 1980 in Granada, is at the forefront of the “Poetry of Uncertainty,” which emerged in the early 2000s in Spain. T…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2019. 208 pages. For those readers somehow unfamiliar with Ciaran Carson’s poetry, these selected poems, chosen from thirteen books and pr…
Melbourne. Cordite Books. 2019. 73 pages. Before opening Nganajungu Yagu, readers see the image of an old-fashioned suitcase over which the author’s name and book’s title are superimposed. T…
New York. W.W. Norton. 2020. 112 pages. Major Jackson’s fifth book of poems is troubled by its own age. “The soil overruns with honey,” says the speaker in “I’ve Said Too Much,” a confession ripe with…
Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon Press. 2020. 64 pages. One morning last spring, the soil was thick with record-breaking rainfall. The rain itself had stopped hours before, but the ground was…
New York. Penguin. 2020. 160 pages. Despite disparities in time, space, and language, even in translation, Baudelaire’s address to the reader (“—Hypocrite reader,—My duplicate—My brother!”) has a par…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 112 pages. In his memoir He Held Radical Light, Christian Wiman beautifully illustrates his relinquishment of the ambition to write a poem that woul…
New York. Knopf. 2020. 128 pages. A new volume of poems by acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield is an event. After reading the poems in Ledger—a capacious, varied volume—it seems as if ordinary lif…
London. Chambers. 2019. 256 pages. Literature stands on the front lines, wherever noble human impulse confronts the void. Mass extinction of species, collapse of earth’s vital ecosystems, devastating…
New York. Nightboat Books. 2020. 104 pages. The contents of this posthumously published book of poems are presented in four long sequences in the form of notebook jottings, work-in-progress, stray th…
Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2019. 92 pages. The Hebrew language has a special term for the process of becoming less religious, which translates as “to revert to a mode of quest…
Cardigan, UK. Parthian Books. 2019. 115 pages. Haydar Ergülen, born in 1956, is from a stripe of contemporary living poets who have deftly streamed their peculiar national consciousness to the level…
Ripon, UK. Smokestack Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2019. 150 pages. Reja-e Busailah’s Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood is an extraordinary collection that presents details of a boy…
Les Brouzils, France. The Fortnightly Review. 2019. 160 pages. A uniquely valued genre in French letters is the cahier or carnet (notebook or journal). These collections are often li…
San Jose, California. Able Muse Press. 2019. 103 pages. It would be easy—too easy—to steal from Richard Wilbur and say Susan de Sola’s poetry is “call[ed] to the things of this world.” Too easy becaus…
New Delhi. Yoda Press. 2019. 126 pages. The ghazal, a form of Urdu poetry with a certain meter and rhyme, made its excursion into English with the forays of modern poets. Trailblazing Indian American…
Eastburn, U K. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2018. 119 pages. Negative of a Group Photograph includes thirty Persian poems by Azita Ghahreman with parallel English translations b…
Louisville, Kentucky. Sarabande Books. 2019. 36 pages. Khaled Mattawa’s Mare Nostrum is a lyrical account of the plight of migrants fleeing into Europe during Italy’s Mare Nostrum operation…
London. Zed Books. 2019. 208 pages. Translator Heinz Insu Fenkle writes in his introduction to Bandi’s The Red Years: “There are still numerous places where imprisonment, torture, and execut…
Reno. University of Nevada Press. 2019. 94 pages. Recently, in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma, saltwater began inexplicably bubbling up from the ground at a rate of “two-to-four gallons a minute,” killi…