The moving, polyvocal latest from Stepanova (War of the Beasts and the Animals) is a book-length snowscape sequence that blends voices of fracture and love, evoking Ovid in exile and other historical touchstones, from Baron Munchausen to Hans Christian Andersen. Skillfully rendered by Dugdale, the air in these poems is infused with such dangers as “Airborne particles of frost ash/ Tiny cavalry officers” (noncoincidentally, the book was written during Covid-19 lockdowns). There is a feeling of arrest in these pages (“We, wrapped in snow for safe-keeping/ Like pictures overlaid with glassine,/ Suddenly came to a stop”), but there’s equally a difficult hopefulness, the voices reaching for “that place where misfortune is not known,” however forlorn their searching. It adds up to a finely woven exercise in vocalization that always looks toward redemption, or at least respite, from its shocking precarity: “if time has a pocket then place me in it, gently.” A political undertow—including mentions of “the god of anger” and “one/ Whose power is equal with that of the gods”—adds to the collection’s depth. Bound together by a gently thoughtful steeliness, these poetic utterances are at once plaintive and resolute. (May)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

The stunning latest from Barnett (Human Hours) blends the witty and the philosophical to offer a study in “restricted fragile materials,” or the bewildering condition of being alive. A sequence on loneliness runs through the collection, capturing the often ignored or unrendered sensations from life’s earliest moments (“The doctors snip the cord. I don’t know if that’s when it starts”) to its last in elegiac notes struck in poems for a father, and others for a friend. This is as much a taxonomy of “the science of love” as it is a thoughtful, literate, and discursive gathering of evidence as to how one might live deliberately, carefully, and honestly (“Flawed solutions are sometimes answered prayers,” the speaker remarks.) The voice is self-aware and open to the world, at times almost self-defeatingly so, like the moth “choosing transcendence/ over other basic needs.” Like their speaker, these poems “wander/ the Museum of Useful Life” making “mortal noise”—an unpacking, with comic timing, of the fact that “The human condition is made of moisture and heat.” Urbane, perceptive, and starkly humane, these are poems of quiet alarm, at once companionable and singular. (May)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

In these intellectual and precise poems, Revell (White Campion) explores the darker side of human progress with inventive language and apt allusions to myth and religion. In “Light, Zeal,” he contemplates the damage done by “extravagance”: “Out of Eden, future Edens, a dozen/ Names for every creature, and new green/ Buds on the dead willow. Impossible/ To find any harm in extravagance taking/ Refuge, undertaking the old purposes of/ Creation. But harm there was.” Some of Revell’s complaints veer dangerously close to elitism, as in his criticism of the summer blockbuster: “Disney and the Metaphysicals, men/ Equally impossible to emulate/ As our theaters fill with emptiness,/ As our poems go lame into the lean dearth/ Of their English.” Elsewhere, though, his passion for his art form is profoundly and simply expressed, “Poetry/ Is the groundless belief in fearful/ Attention,” as is his philosophy on love: “Romance is the kindergarten of savagery.” Revell’s elegies are especially successful, including those dedicated to fellow poets Jean Valentine and Yves Bonnefoy. Teeming with symbolism and metaphor, this collection is less grounded in the corporeal world than the poet’s previous works. It’s a pleasure to see Revell continue to evolve four decades into his illustrious career. (June)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

Māori poet Tibble (Poukahangatus) meditates on the turbulence of youth and the spiritual guidance of her ancestors in her sagacious and impishly outspoken second collection. These poems engage with overt and overlooked subjugation, the weight of expectation, and the quest for self-containment in piquant, virtuosic stream of consciousness fused with ripe sensuality and robust lyricism. Playful slang, refreshing impropriety, and the Māori language establish an aura of authenticity and relatability that Gen Z and Millennials specifically will appreciate. Hilarious, punchy one-liners are ubiquitous—from the vision of AI strippers and the concept of “slutty food” to “taking boyfriends/ like appointments with a doctor.” Indulgence is epitomized in a summary of nights out, employed by exquisite wordplay: “Hoarded invitations to swanky lobotomies/ where I sipped Dom Perignon and rolled my eyes in divination.” In the collection’s denouement, Tibble basks in the embrace of her ancestors: “They gas me full tank and/ yas me in the mirror/ as I summon them out of me with/ my mascara wands and glitter.” Refulgent moons, fevered trysts, and racing cars backdrop the speaker’s search for true fulfillment. These poems pulsate with the heightened emotions of formative years. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

The clever debut from Rajpal launches the reader into a spiritual journey through an ars poetica of social justice. The collection intertwines experimental forms with lyrical explorations of identity and history in the context of the partition of India and Pakistan, as well as the post-9/11 American Sikh experience. In “Aphasia,” reflection on a grandfather’s stroke is enriched by references to Punjabi scripts, “since the stroke filled his skull/ with the blood in midnight’s ink/ he writes back home from the half/ of himself charda where the sun rise/ to lehnda punjab where the sun leaves.” Language is versatile throughout, wielded as weapon, prayer, or family tree, and even transforming the act of slicing an orange into a metaphor for cultural cleaving: “to cut the flesh of my orange i|n|h|e|r|i|t|ance.” The poem “Patriot Act, Miscellaneous” imagines footnotes to the Patriot Act, a gesture on the verge of becoming clichéd in contemporary poetry, but the erasure technique adds an interesting layer here, emphasizing the question of origin and identity, “but where are you really from? he asked me, again on page 40./ no w(here)/ a place not bound in time.” This is a moving study of the role and limits of language in cultural displacement. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 03/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

The ruminative second collection from Parry (Jinx) draws the reader in with offbeat images and erudition that lead to intimate questions and observations. In these mostly one- and two-page poems (as well as two sequences, “Marginal Glosses” and “The Squint”), Parry’s inspirations include pop songs, rat brains, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Romeo and Juliet. The book opens with “The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space” (“all jig sawed into place”). The final stanza reflects, “Grateful.../ to have had my time at a kink of neural space/ ...to that where you had yours.” “Speculum” quotes the Bible (“through a glass darkly”), then offers, “Hard to know thyself,/ when for years the only way was with a mirror,/ tilted up.” Parry finds new meanings in her “cover” of “I Think We’re Alone Now,” as well as in “It’s the lark that sings so out of tune.” Romeo’s line “I must be gone and live” is here given to a woman seeking freedom from a claustrophobic relationship. In “The Squint,” Parry refers to the “partial view” of “The Lepers’ Window,” which captures both the frustration of limited vision and the impact of moments of clarity. These poems are full of surprises. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 03/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

The assured debut from Osinaike puts Black masculinity under the microscope in poems full of humor and vulnerability. With impressive sensitivity, Osinaike unmasks the insecurities that hide behind the performance of Black male identity, as in the poem “An Inconvenience,” in which the speaker writes, “I do my job/ the same as any man with a need to provide/ for his need to provide.” Poems rhythmically swell to convey how personal struggles transmute into larger concerns for an entire community: “A horse loses a race.// A race/ loses its culture. A culture loses its place. A place loses its mothers. Mothers lose// their babies. Babies lose their wonder.” It would be easy for the critique to turn satirical, but Osinaike’s verses charm with their inquisitive tone and direct address: “Fellas, what does it/ mean to you// to be the bigger man? I haven’t/ figured it out for myself.” A sense of possibility permeates the poems as they reorient the place of the individual within the collective: “We were deliberating all of what we could make from scratch.” This insightful outing points the way toward hope. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 03/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

This essential anthology, edited by poet and YA author Alexander (Why Fathers Cry at Night), includes work by more than 100 living Black poets, from Elizabeth Acevedo to Rita Dove. In his introduction, Alexander centers joy and wonder as guiding principles behind his selections, describing the anthology as “a gathering space for Black poets to honor and celebrate. To be romantic and provocative. To be unburdened and bodacious.” Indeed, joy permeates the poems, from Tony Medina’s ebullient “Black Boys,” in which he writes, “Black boys be bouquets of tanka/ Bunched up like flowers,” to Tyree Daye’s “Inheritance,” a meditation on what connects people to their forebears: “My mother will leave me her mother’s deep-black/ cast-iron skillet someday,/ I will fry okra in it,/ weigh my whole life on its black handle,/ lift it up to feel a people in my hand.” Xan Forest Phillips’s “Want Could Kill Me” explores desire and intimacy: “I want to buy you/ a cobalt velvet couch/ all your haters’ teeth/ strung up like pearls/ ...but my pockets/ are filled with/ lint and love alone.” Featuring a refreshing mix of established and emerging voices, this vital volume showcases a thriving and multifaceted poetic tradition. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 03/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Lee articulates the joys and alienations of being an outsider in her contemplative debut. Born in South Korea, Lee grew up in Peru with her Korean parents, never feeling quite like she belonged. Yet, this rootlessness inspires more awe than agony. She frequently draws culinary connections to these feelings; a whiff of sesame oil is “the smell of an unfamiliar soil,/ a country I was born to but didn’t/ grow up with.” Elsewhere, Lee fills the empty space of her ignorance with the folkloric, imagining new beginnings: “My origin story: My mother found me as a chestnut dangling”; “When I was given a norigae to hang/ under my first hangbok jacket, I foresaw/ a pendulous love in my life. I alternated/ between laughing and sobbing. Short horns/ appeared on my back.” She writes with reverence of watching her mother make kimchi and seeing her cry “when she’d had no one to talk to in Korean.” Later, Lee declares of her mother, “She taught me how to be a foreigner,/ garner my sunspots, some left by harsher stars,/ some gentler, knit a plentiful basket out of myself.” Peppered with polyglotism, tender with the thrills of discovery—of a new food, friend, or facet of oneself—these poems make Lee’s wonder for the world palpable. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

The formally inventive and devastatingly evocative latest from Alyan (The Twenty-Ninth Year) reckons with grief, displacement, and enduring kinship. From Beirut to the U.S. to Jerusalem to Kuwait, Alyan draws from her experience as a Palestinian American to examine where one’s home is under occupation and forced displacement. An interaction with an Israeli soldier in Jerusalem, in which her passport is withheld until she agrees to take her hair down, is referenced repeatedly, evoking the helplessness of the occupied. Alyan’s ghazals are the jewels of the collection. In “Fatima :: Dust Ghazal,” the speaker has married “Salim with the long neck,” and in the process “became wife to three countries.” There’s plenty of joy—and defiance—in these pages. In “Tonight I’ll Dream of Nadia,” the speaker experiences the pleasure of being with her family when a loved one is in the hospital on a ventilator. At the poem’s end, she is in a nightclub: “I am/ everyone’s daughter, everyone’s wife, I muscle/ through the crowd to dance, I feel her hand in/ my hair as the machine breathes for us both.” These powerful poems linger long in the mind. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/01/2024 | Details & Permalink