New York. New Directions. 2019. 80 pages.
Throughout this newest collection, Dunya Mikhail writes poems of cities, friends, grandmothers, goddesses, of girls who might “outgrow / their dresses / whil…
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Toronto. House of Anansi Press. 2018. 112 pages. River Woman—profoundly personal, politically charged, playful and burning with love and loss—is a brilliant poetic work by Governor Gen…
Louisville, Kentucky. Sarabande Books. 2019. 98 pages. Historical reenactments have gained a burgeoning popularity recently. According to Jenny Thompson, author of War Games (2004), more tha…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2019. 128 pages. This newest collection by Dorianne Laux includes selections from her five previous books of poetry and thirty-two pages of new poetry, some of her best to dat…
Madrid. Amagord Ediciones. 2018. 281 pages. Los huesos de mi abuelo teaches me things about our terra, flora, and fauna that it seems I have only passively understood. “The sound of the firs…
Durham, North Carolina. Duke University Press. 2019. 144 pages. Renato Rosaldo established himself as an ethno-poet with his groundbreaking 2013 volume The Day of Shelly’s Death, which combi…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2019. 72 pages. Much of the narrative arc—and indeed art—of Emily Skaja’s debut collection, Brute, is marked in the first poem of the book. There is skillf…
South Bend, Indiana. Action Books. 2019. 105 pages. There is poetry that tries hard to be poetic, and there is poetry that tries hard not to be poetic. Kim Yideum’s poetry is the second sort. Y…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2019. 90 pages. Embattled Representative Ilhan Omar recently said of herself and her fellow freshman congresswomen of color, “We are not there to be quiet. We a…
Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 64 pages. Huzaifa Pandit lives in Kashmir, India, a region under turmoil from two hostile nations that have kept this beautiful land locked in. Never a day goes by witho…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2019. 76 pages. This book-length series of poems, Ilya Kaminsky’s second collection, is written as two progressively darkening acts of a play set in the imaginary town of…
Toronto, Ontario. Mawenzi House. 2018. 112 pages. Reading Sasenarine Persaud’s newest collection, Monsoon on the Fingers of God, is like stepping inside a clock and running a thumb alo…
Washington, DC. Scarith. 2018. 92 pages. Panna Naik’s The Astrologer’s Sparrow is a sonorous collection of poems drawn from her eleven verse collections published between 1976 (The Begin…
Hexham, United Kingdom. Bloodaxe Books (Distr. Dufour Editions). 2019. 128 pages. Days of Grace is an ascension, lifting the reader through three sections through silence into clouds a…
Fayetteville, New York. Bitter Oleander Press. 2018. 97 pages. Italian poet Franca Mancinelli’s The Little Book of Passage, with facing-page translation by John Taylor, exemplifies the best…
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 s…
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 b…
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 t…
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 t…
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 ba…
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…
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 co…
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 brevity…