The brilliant third collection from Tuffaha (Kaan and Her Sisters), who is of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian descent, evokes the weight of a homeland’s genocide, but is equally about the joys of heritage and the righteous pursuit of justice for one’s oppressed brothers and sisters. She eloquently captures the dichotomy of pain and comfort: “Be it a home;/ ancient breath and second/ letter of ancestry. Home of unripe figs// or of suffering?” In “Triptych,” Tuffaha alternates language from the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights with phrasing from an Israeli tourism ad (“No one belongs here more than you do”), highlighting the inherent disconnect between this welcoming attitude and the violent displacement of Palestinians from the region. She further castigates American politicians and activists who feign sympathy for the plight of the colonized while doing nothing to stop their violent oppression: “I thought of the word/ I have come to hate most in English/ which is peace/ because it is always pointed at my skull.” Tuffaha is defiant in the face of devastation, declaring in “Threads”: “Let us plan// to decolonize our spaces... Let us plan, brothers and sisters,/ a museum heist or a freedom march... You cannot swallow a life/ this large.” This superb volume sings of those determined to fight for a fairer future. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

This elegiac outing from Laméris (Bonfire Opera) is a testament to indelible love, offering a maelstrom of memory that briefly resurrects those she mourns. In the aftermath of losing her home, she prevails over despair through greater resolve: “my brother died,/ but I’m living twice—no, three times—for me, for him,/ and for my son.” With this magnanimity of spirit, her poems demonstrate a foundation of awe, curiosity, and reverence. She asks, “what if we remembered the shy soul/ in everything...// underdress the world, get close/ to its shiver, rock and spore, river/ and bark, the dandelion’s naked stem.” Through small reveries, the reader is called to mourn beside the poet. The day her son’s organs are harvested, she is greeted by the faint approach of bees breaking a placid silence: “a song/ of arrows—and all at once, I saw them, the one body/ they made, a kinetic cloud at the window,/ those wound-givers, honey-makers.” Wading through the bittersweet, she recalls her brother naming his plants after jazz musicians (Miles, Coltrane, Billie, Mingus, Cassandra) and nurturing them like kin. Wielding a gift for imagery and threaded with philosophical acuity, Laméris’s voice is incomparable. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

This pensive volume from Falconer (Forgive the Body This Failure) explores masculinity through a matrix of relationships that define and transform what it means to be a man in today’s world. Employing the metaphor of the rara avis—the rare bird—Falconer questions a heteronormative masculinity whose ideology is violently conferred: “Force-fed mice, sparrows, it couldn’t expel the bones, the claws, and died having eaten too much.” While the speaker of these poems endeavors to consider his own masculinity more thoughtfully, he often struggles to transcend his childhood experiences. In one poem, after scolding his sons for fighting in the backseat of the car, the speaker imagines his frightened children as adults confronting a masculinity that remains “a field of trees/ they can’t see through/ and must guess/ instead what lies/ beyond it.” Elsewhere, a bedtime story featuring the death of a father becomes a way for the speaker to reflect on the pathos and wonder of being both the son of a dying father and a father of two adopted sons: “Sometimes you want// a story to last forever, and sometimes/ you just want to know how it ends.” Haunting and moving, these poems wrestle with past experiences to envision new possibilities. (Sept.)

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“I am good with secrets,” Jackson confesses early in her subtle latest (after Moon Jar). She makes good on that statement in poems that detail the secrets of the departed, including roadkill, “recently dead butterflies,” a fallen bird (“limp feathered envelope”), and a “husband’s body still marred/ from what he had done/ to himself.” Death is mysteriously tinged with beauty in these poems, especially those that respond to and converse with the Swedish artist and spiritualist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). “The yellow bloomed/ like a beautiful atomic bomb,” Jackson writes in “De Fem (The Five),” inhabiting one of Klint’s jewel-toned, geometric canvases. Elsewhere, she reckons with great tragedy: “wild sibyl, my sister,/ a piece of the fire inside of me that blew away.” “Like Hilma,” she wants “to decode it all,/ but I’ll never know why/ my late husband took his life” (“The Tree of Life”). The question of why haunts this stirring collection, giving voice to the human instinct to seek answers from the dead. These poignant poems will linger in readers’ minds. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pan’s lyrical debut considers poetry’s role in reflecting on the past, offering insights on migration, identity, and memory that illuminate Chinese cultural history. Pan illustrates cultural dislocation through yearning and sorrow, as exemplified in “To My Classless Motherland” (“I bottle kerosene at a factory, sticking/ labels with the firm hands you gave me”) and “Ultimatum” (“If I forget one character a day/ I will have forgotten Chinese/ by the end of 2042”). Pan’s ability to transform environmental devastation into a reflection of emotional turmoil is particularly powerful, as are his observations that situate a modern China shaped by both current and past events: “I couldn’t make it back to China; I built a shrine for my hometown; I live in that light” (“February: A Dictionary of History, Drinks, War, Culture, and Coronavirus”). Showcasing his formal versatility, Pan alternates between couplets, lengthy lined stanzas, tercets, and quatrains, creating unexpected juxtapositions as he investigates displacement, selfhood, and heritage. The result is a surprising and striking collection. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

The world of matter and words entwine in this rich and demanding collection from Machado (Emporium). The poet considers the “kinetic enchantments” of the weather (“Material Witness”), gardens (“Feeling Transcripts from the Outpost”), and multicourse dinners (“Concerning Matters Culinary”). The title poem announces the book’s dominant style and preoccupations; in lines that do not lend themselves to immediate comprehension (“Coats fly open and blood boats./ The weather reports itself to a dead vertical left”), the borders between the physical and the spiritual, the material and the verbal, are blurred. Having dinner, the speaker feels their thoughts “INFUSING THE FOOD// INSTEAD OF THE OTHER/ WAY AROUND” and later considers how “where you co-sleep with grasses, the air balsamic/ an entropic transcript patterned on songs beyond/ your kind, it is thetic & encrypted.” Throughout, Machado displays an exuberant freedom in choosing the rare word (“anfractuous”; “degust”) and the obscure image (a “radical in your gut... measured the foreclosure of history”). She works in a pointedly anti-lyrical and anti-confessional mode, disdaining “those final years in which lyric was put before all” in favor of “an opaque zone.” Readers up for a challenge will be rewarded. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Lyrical and metaphysical riches gleam in Otta’s incandescent latest (after Antimateria). Compiled from four of Otta’s previous books, the poems saunter from the personal to the universal and back again. Frequent objects of study include the planets and stars, music and nightclubs, sex and love. Otta’s voice is utterly convincing across her varied tones and registers, from her mystical utterances (“Find the future/ in the part of heaven/ you can’t see”) to her cheeky aphorisms (“Let’s try this:/ If you’re dead blink twice/ I promise the second time will be incredible”). The best of these poems display a genius for combining existential insight with gleeful ornament. Throughout, Otta takes on beauty—of the body, poetry, music, and the galaxy—as a subject of serious inquiry and a path to transcendent truth: “This position—looking/ straight into the eyes of infinity/ Without blinking is so relaxing/ It reveals the electric mantle/ Where night samples sunlight” (“The Joy of Living”). The result is a magnificent collection from a vital poet. (Oct.)

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The ominous and cautionary sophomore volume from Ross (A Timeshare) explores intimacy through alienation and its potential for violence, laying bare the dynamics and motivations of desire. “His body was so beautiful, I wanted/ to hurt it,” Ross writes in “History,” “but I couldn’t/ do it right from outside./ I had to go in through the mind.” Later, she observes the significance of being on the receiving end of pain: “If you can let them/ hurt you deep enough, you’ll be/ inside the other person.” Ross resides in spaces of dislocation, making sharp observations about herself and her environment. She writes about an annual family reunion, teaching abroad, and, in one of the volume’s most vivid poems, a surreal job working for an artist in New York, where she was paid to tweeze apart the wings of butterflies and pin them onto Styrofoam: “we were paid per butterfly.” In another entry, she perfectly captures the mosaic of Airbnbs and cheap hotels that define a journey across the American West. “I try to force my soul up to the surface of my skin,” she remarks, an effort that is evident in each poem. These are strange and lucid poems from a gifted practitioner of the form. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Brilliantly translated by Kin and Hennessy, this captivating collection from Ukrainian poet Andrukhovych is animated by local legend, regional history, and personal recollection. Drawn from Andrukhovych’s five previous books and poetic cycles, these poems share an elegiac tone, imagining long-gone neighborhood characters as “ready again for quarrels and gossip,” in “lived-in cities... like soccer balls pierced with knives.” Andrukhovych is sensitive to the way emotional states shape experience as materially as facts; the pedestrians in an early poem walk with “their moods dependent on love and weather, coats and sorrows carried over their shoulders.” Some entries conjure up specific eccentrics, like the litigious Dr. Dutka, who “on the slope of wasted years... ended up as helpless as a bird in a bag,” and the umbrella repairman Oliynyk, whose shop, “a chapel embedded in a mossy wall,” is frequented by “the whole melancholy city.” Others look further back into Ukrainian and Eastern European history, to the last recorded “public burning of sorceresses” in 1719. Wide-ranging and representative of Andrukhovych’s many strengths, this is a valuable English-language introduction to an important poet. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Darkness brings revelation in this meditative offering from Ó Tuama (Feed the Beast). In “Who Do You Think I Am,” Persephone addresses Christ in a Hades-like garden. The dialogue unfolds in persona poems, with Persephone quipping, “Christ, you’re such a narcissist.” This interaction epitomizes Ó Tuama’s blending of mythology with a contemporary sensibility, casting biblical and mythic figures into modern, human dilemmas. These poetic dialogues become hymns and anti-hymns that interrogate the weight of creation. Even birdsong reflects the inherent selfishness of existence (“your cheeps are/ me me me”), and a newborn bird’s beak opening for bread is the object of condemnation: “The raw need, the pink demand of you. I can’t stand you.” In “Rite of Baptism,” Ó Tuama posits, “There is no such thing as the past/ just stories told about the past today.” The ghostly liturgy found throughout the collection feels less like a Day of the Dead celebration and more like a quiet reckoning with absence, as the poet baptizes the self into the loneliness of modern existence. It’s an admirable and noteworthy performance. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink