In this well selected and compulsively readable anthology, Harvard English professor Burt (We Are Mermaids) presents 51 poems that address and exemplify queerness in America. In the introduction, Burt explains that she chose to only include poems published post-1969, establishing the year of the Stonewall riots as the inception of modern queer identity. She additionally provides helpful context for each poem in an accompanying essay. The anthology moves chronologically, beginning with Frank O’Hara’s “Homosexuality,” which addresses closeted life in its opening line, “So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping/ our mouths shut.” From the 1990s to the 2000s, the anthology introduces an increasing number of poets of trans and other gender identities, including the glorious ode to genderqueer sex “Suits and Ties” by Samuel Ace. Danez Smith’s 2022 poem “Waiting for You to Die So I Can Be Myself” picks up where O’Hara left off, articulating the strain of hiding one’s true self: “i want to say something without saying it/ but there’s no time. i’m waiting for a few folks/ i love dearly to die so i can be myself.” Burt’s insightful commentary draws through lines between eras and poets, making this a valuable text for the classroom and a dynamic and comprehensive collection for casual readers of contemporary poetry. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

This spirited volume is filled with surprises that only Gerstler (Index of Women) could conceive of. In “Finding Your Voice,” she drops what might be the world’s weirdest yet most precisely accurate simile: “Tonight, your mind’s shy as an otter drying a saint’s feet with her fur.” The next line shifts to the larger question the collection explores: “Is the dilemma not having a self, or possessing too many?” Gerstler’s poems may be filled with shifting forms, but they are deeply grounded in human desire, longing, loss, and the things that make humans the tender beings they are. “I regret not wanting what I’m supposed to want,” she writes in “Leniency Letter,” offering a list of mistakes and wrongdoings. And yet, there’s pleasure in not wanting what one is supposed to want, as Gerstler suggests in these confessions. At the end of “Leniency Letter,” she inquires, “Are we square now? Can I go?” The speaker does not feel remorse for being a singular, flawed being—and neither should the reader. “Don’t let your hearts get lost in the sauce/ as forests go velvet with moss,” she warns in one of her sonnets that masterfully plays with sound. Readers will be delighted and entranced. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

This exquisite dual-language edition of Gil de Biedma’s selected poems reveals the voice of a preeminent poet of mid-20th-century Spain. Gil de Biedma (1929–1990), a closeted gay man and left-wing intellectual who worked as a business executive, lived most of his life under the conservative dictatorship of Franco and was part of a generation of Spanish artists who strived to express themselves in an era of ruthless censorship and repression. As Spencer Reece writes in his foreword, Gil de Biedma’s poems reflected the necessity of disguise: “Gil de Biedma went poetically undetected in a suit, tie, dress shoes, briefcase and his cigarette.” Yet the pressure of wearing a mask also led to poems of remarkable insight, eroticism, and resistance, as the title poem suggests: “we slide back/ toward the two-faced past to shut out/ this terror we feel, same as the one/ we also knew then, day by day.” Forced to self-censor, the speaker sees sex become a painful struggle: “I would fornicate carefully,// feel myself die for each drop/ of pleasure, making it hurt.” These haunting poems astound in their quiet complexity and timeless resonance. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Undocumented and formerly undocumented poets forge a radical new poetics of belonging in this exciting anthology that transforms the language of documentation into art. The collection pulses with formal innovation: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s “table {border-collapse: collapse;}” turns cold bureaucratic syntax into burning testimony, while Wo Chan’s drag performances and Laurel Chen’s ecological meditations expand what undocumented literature can contain, turning government forms into portals and official paperwork into poetry. The contributors don’t just switch between languages but create new ones, building linguistic homes in the spaces between nations. An archive of joy and struggle emerges, in which poetry preserves what official documents cannot. As Yosimar Reyes writes, “There is nothing beautiful about being undocumented, but if I must find something, it is that we found each other with our voices.” Through their vivid writings, these marginalized voices reaffirm poetry’s capacity to observe, recall, and deliver alternative realities. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

The impressive debut from Tolase weaves strands of transatlantic history and personal narrative to create a picture of African migration that is true to its many complications and contradictions. The poems move back and forth across the Atlantic, predominantly from Nigeria to the United States, exploring the dizzying experience of leaving one context for another, and often considering what is lost in the exchange. A series of “Refuge Sonnets,” for example, highlights the sense of dislocation the speaker feels under the stereotyping gaze of others: “I step into the new world and people stare at me. They want/ to ask how I arrived here, and if it’s true I brought desert sand/ with me.” Tolase has a knack for spotting the comical absurdities of the African immigrant experience, as in “White Girls Guide To Dating Black Boys,” which includes the speaker’s instructions, “If you invite him to/ your family’s dinner, spend a week/ teaching your grandma to act right.// If you must train your mom, too/ maybe wait until one of them is dead.” Powerful lines ponder the impossibility of a return: “I love you is as true as a train/ traveling into the past.” This searing collection captures the elusiveness of home. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In his meditative third collection, Campbell (Noctuary) brings to vivid life the land and sea that defined his youth in the Outer Hebrides, interweaving references to ancient myths and the effects of climate change on the natural world and its inhabitants. There are several thematic series in the collection, including poems centered around jobs the speaker once held on the islands. “Apprenticeship” describes the work of sorting the catches of crabbers: “Hours, you would weigh/ by hand and eye and a slow part of the mind,// young jeweller at a tray of breathing stones.” Many poems feature animals—the threat against them, but equally their remarkable endurance—and there is an abiding Blakean metaphysics throughout, as in “Theology”: “I would explain the soul like this:/ as whisky in the barrel cask—/ that light caught. Grained, proofed, stored and kept/ bound in a dark in wonderment.” While the subject matter can be bleak, an existential exuberance permeates, the tone set by the opening poem, which quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins’s last words: “I am so Happy. I am so Happy. I Loved my Life.” As long as there is life on Earth, there is beauty to admire and reason to persevere, Campbell suggests. This offers an essential glimmer of hope in the dark night of the late Anthropocene. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This powerful volume by Palestinian poet Darwish excerpts seven of his collections and introduces vibrant, previously unpublished work. Expansive in breadth and beauty, the collection catalogs a decade’s worth of Darwish’s meditations, lamentations, furies, fears, prayers, and revelations. Throughout, he reckons with what translator Abu-Zeid aptly calls “the precocious nature of Palestinian existence” in the face of horrifying historical and ongoing violence. The quiet, insistent thrust of Darwish’s spare and lyrical poetic line imparts “the world unfurling in an instant.” These poems joke, jab, mourn, and confide. “Write your orphaned lyric,” Darwish urges, and this telling becomes a “spiritual practice.” His poems demand that readers bear witness to the brutality inflicted on his people—“the colonizers and exploiters,/ the stealers of dreams”—but also invite a deeper understanding of Palestinian history and resilience. “That which is lost forever,” he writes, “that which no one knows/ but me—/ I want you to know it too.” The result is a moving, timely, and necessary collection. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Familial and queer desires pulse with tenderness and nostalgia in Martínez-Leyva’s excellent debut. Brilliantly orchestrated in three movements that mirror stages of exile and return, the collection orbits around the disappearance of Angelo, the speaker’s brother, whose absence haunts these poems. Martínez-Leyva renders this loss in language that refuses easy consolation, as in “Portrait of an Absent Brother,” in which memory distills to its essential elements: “The way his fingers/ pushed back/ my hair—/ this is what I choose to remember.” The poet’s code-switching between English and Spanish creates syncopation, echoing the linguistic in-betweenness his multilingual speakers navigate. His subversive reclamation of Western imagery—cowboys, horses, desert landscapes—to explore queer desire and cultural displacement is particularly striking. In the poems “Vaquero” and “Show Pony,” traditional masculine images become sites of both danger and liberation: “Take me mercilessly: skinned knees and jacked-up teeth.” These poems reveal the fine line between desire and loss with unflinching beauty. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Skillfully translated by Almeida, Iannamico’s debut volume is sweet and serious by turns, endowing everyday encounters with transformative potential and swiftly closing the gap between the material and the metaphoric. In the nine-line poem “Dresses,” she moves from the idea that dresses are “the best kind of garment/ for the spirit” to the assertion that “there are dresses/ that are spirits/ on their own.” Most entries are similarly airy and short, reviving familiar experiences in the space of a few lines. A bed with “clean sheets recently made” becomes an envelope, and the sleeper in it a letter. In the rain, a “house pulsates/ warm inside/ wet outside/ like a seed/ about to grow.” As night comes, “the crickets turn on” just as the radio does. Iannamico’s images are meant to be accessible: “to write is to graffiti,” according to one poem. The wind and clouds recur as motifs; clouds are seen as “lovers approaching each other/ ominously/ lovingly,” and the wind turns out to be created by the beating wings of a bird so big “it takes up the whole sky.” Readers will be won over by this charming collection. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

The fascinating debut from Schweig interrogates disconnection, labor, language, and meaning against the backdrop of late-stage capitalism. In “Toward the Great Unity,” Schweig explores the futility of seeking meaning in a utopian vision: “I thought I’d find The Great Unity. It seems there is none.” The poem aptly juxtaposes personal grief and historical weight: “Rarely, he flickers before me, that boy, whom I could never fully record in poetry, in history.” The speaker’s search for transcendence reflects the limits of language and the impossibility of utopia. “The Tower” expands these themes into an allegory of modern labor: “Every morning was identical to every other/ as if the first morning had gone viral forever.” Schweig’s use of anaphora and repetition creates a hypnotic rhythm, drawing readers into the recursive nature of her speakers’ thoughts. Yet for all its inventive form and verve, the collection occasionally leans too heavily on familiar, stale critiques of capitalism and alienation. In “Waves,” for example, a privileged speaker checks into a resort with her infant son and husband: “Maids come imperceptibly while we’re at breakfast/ and make our bed. Privilege is the dream of not having/ to make one’s bed.” Beyond the well-worn frameworks of postmodern ennui lies a well-devised, cohesive collection. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink