Durham, North Carolina. Duke University Press. 2018. 242 pages.
Consisting of a series of prose poems, The Blue Clerk attests to Dionne Brand’s keen social, aesthetic, and linguistic sensibi…
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London. Unbound. 2018. 256 pages. Yahia Lababidi has done something at once anachronistic and deeply contemporary with Where Epics Fail, his wide-ranging collection of aphorisms. The book is…
Toronto. Mawenzi House. 2018. 72 pages. In her first English-translated collection, Assi Manifesto (see WLT, Jan. 2017), Natasha Kanapé Fontaine reached back into ancient tr…
Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2019. 128 pages. Whether a product of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or an ancient survival mechanism, it is exceedingly easy for us to cordon ourselves off from th…
Denver. 3: A Taos Press. 2018. 117 pages. Poet Lauren Camp takes us for a deep dive into the landscape and culture of New Mexico and its wealth of personality in her new book, Turquoise Door.…
Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. 120 pages. Ada Limón’s breathtaking new collection opens with “A Name,” a poem that asks whether Eve, when she named the animals, “ever wanted / them to speak bac…
Broome, Australia. Magabala Books. 2018. 179 pages. This discursively monumental collection asserts unwavering pressure on the idea of “Australia”; from within colonially bounded domains, where “One N…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 96 pages. This stunning new volume from Adam Zagajewski deserves to be read by anyone who has wondered how language can describe absence. It is a classic con…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2018. 73 pages. I was introduced to the riveting work of Tanella Boni, a critically acclaimed Ivorian poet and novelist, while reading A Rain of Words …
County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2018. 46 pages. Most of the poems in Ultima Ora are brief, sometimes epigrammatic, sometimes anecdotal. In the best of them, the brevit…
Manchester, United Kingdom. Carcanet Press. 2018. 96 pages. James Harpur’s The White Silhouette is a beautiful collection of poetry in three parts. “The White Silhouette” is a tour of faith a…
Normal, Illinois. Co•im•press. 2018. 288 pages. Recipient of the Cervantes Prize, Juan Gelman is best known for his activism, passion, and the tragic death of his son and daughter-in-law during Argent…
Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 88 pages. Blessed are the ones with attics in their homes. For an attic is a rare construct that serves as a repository of bits and pieces of memory, which in a hectic life are…
Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2018. 143 pages. It is not easy to select poems from twenty-five robust years of poetic output into one slim volume, especially for the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu. The Wild…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2018. 61 pages. The title of Conor O’Callaghan’s new book, Live Streaming, immediately poses an interpretive question. If “līve,”…
Manchester, United Kingdom. Carcanet Press. 2018. 110 pages. In 1909 anthropologist Arnold van Gennep introduced the concept of the “liminal period of ritual,” a transition located between separation…
New York. Akashic Books. 2018. 350 pages. The New-Generation African Poets book series is an ambitious program to publish together poets who have yet to publish full-length books. The 2018 ed…
Northfield, Massachusetts. Talisman House. 2018. 52 pages. Eileen Myles’s blurb on the back cover of Brane Mozetič’s book maintains that the poems are “tiny novels” and “end like tiny movies.” One can…
Broome, Australia. Magabala Books. 2018. 149 pages. If poets are compelled toward cultivating voice, then, logically enough, to what ends? In his recent monograph, Polysituatedness: A Poetics of D…
Bhubaneshwar, India. Dhauli Books. 2018. 126 pages. Young Indian English poet Aditya Shankar is a man acutely aware of the quantity of material objects that are piled up against human sensations or em…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2018. 104 pages. When I was very young and growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I was sure that the mountains I saw every day were a massive painting on the side of the universe…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2018. 180 pages. There is visceral excitement upon welcoming a new poet into one’s personal canon—it’s like collecting a little bit of immortal light—and Russian p…
Chicago. Swan Isle Press (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2018. 99 pages. Born in Havana, Cuba, but raised in Florida, Ruth Behar explores the poetics of identity, not only as a Cuban living in…
Minneapolis. Milkweed. 2018. 88 pages. The late Max Ritvo was something of a rising star in American poetry before his death, at only twenty-six, in 2016. This volume, edited by Louise Glück, offers s…
New Delhi. Red River. 2017. 74 pages. The word “Sanskarnama” is a curious mixture of Sanskrit and Persian meaning “a chronicle of culture.” Nabina Das, in her collection of searing poems, has used thi…