Peacock’s affecting and confessional latest (after A Friend Sails in on a Poem) wrestles with the aftermath of her late husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Throughout, she cultivates a landscape of emotional dichotomies, such as the feeling of “love-hate,” which she experienced first while caring for her sick sister as a child and then again while caring for her husband. “I hated giving what I barely had away,” she divulges, symbolizing her depleted psyche as being “like a stout cup, a thick glass, empty inside.” Employing skillful symmetry, she begins a poem with the memory of budding teenage romance with her husband—“I yield to a turquoise sky, becoming young:/ a chartreuse vision of suburban lawns”—and ends it with his “death face, an abandoned clay quarry/ filled with memory water.” She later returns to this imagery to contend with the torrential nature of grief: “Don’t be sorry if you cannot cry/ in memory water. Just swim in it.” Droll musings offer moments of necessary levity: “Is the soul hairless? Does it never secrete or flake?// Does it not have bunions?” This lyrical and vibrantly forthright volume reveals the iridescence of bereavement. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

After moving to the U.S. in 1941, philosopher and historian Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism) joined a circle of poets including Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, but her own poems “remained part of her private life” until after her death in 1975. “It is unknown whether she ever tried to publish them,” translator Hill remarks in the introduction to this illuminating collection. Arendt’s work on totalitarianism and her direct experience of escaping Europe are reflected in her poems, which are also in direct, at times allusive conversation with the German poets she treasured, including Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke. Their strength lies in their tenderness and self-exposure, including in some entries believed to be about her romance with Martin Heidegger: “Oh, you knew the smile with which I gave myself to you./ You knew how much I had to keep secret,/ Just to lie in the meadows and be with you.” Fracture, dislocation, and exile are themes: “I stand in no country,/ I am neither here nor there.” An elegiac tone also pervades: “But how does one live with the dead? Say,/ where is the sound of their company.” These unsparing, literate, and surprisingly candid poems offer a fascinating new angle on one of the 20th century’s great minds. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 09/27/2024 | Details & Permalink

Lee’s exhilarating seventh collection (after The Undressing) continues his journey into the sacred. With quicksilver agility, the poet moves between the role of son, father, lover, disciple, and teacher: “Have I said anything you didn’t already know?” A rigorous insistence on apophatic ways of knowing—“I too am bereft of means/ and must wait for God/ to finish this poem”—tips into rapturous certainty: “Wonderment without a single expectation,/ marvel free of questions, amazement not tied to doubt.” Parental devotion is absolute: “My mother’s stories are my stories forever”; “I dream upon my father’s dreams.” Addressing the beloved, the poet asks, “Did my desire to know you give rise to this body?/ Did you desire to be known call/ this body into being?” Romantic love assumes the attitude of prayer: “if cupping your face/ between the halves of my heart/ means those twin sepals never mending,/ may my heart remain broken forever.” The poet names his calling even as he gently disavows mastery: “Any wonder/ I set out on earth/ to learn to sing.” In his most overtly mystical book to date, Lee achieves a bracing radiance. (May)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

The striking latest from Umansky (The Barbarous Century) blends rage and desire with the perseverance required to endure American corruption and sexism. Confessional anecdotes are delivered with heavy repetition and single-word lines that seek to mimic how the mind speeds up, slows down, retreats, obsesses, and circles as it undergoes despair. Stamina, gratitude, and catharsis serve as pivotal motifs alongside themes of balance (healthy anger vs. inner peace; self-preservation vs. risk taking; doubt vs. certainty). Umansky describes watching a girl struggle to “rise against the spasm of silence,” her visage “a controlled earthquake of dread, of fragmented haunting.” After stating that the constitution protects people from tyranny, she asks, “what protects the people from the people? What/ protects the people from their selves?” Umansky remains steadfast in her conviction that tyranny cannot withstand collective resistance: “What perches, what roots, what winds and cracks/ What tenses and dwells, what ails us, and what hurtles us down// Into the whistling air of despair, all will not stop us.” Accessible and urgent, Umansky’s poems are a conduit for readers to harness their anxieties and channel them into fortitude. (June)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

Olson’s wise third collection (after Stay) is equal parts melodic and percussive, playing upon ideas of origin and extinction with remarkable tenderness. “Having Reached the Middle” (ironically, the final poem in the book) notes that this is “Not a nostalgia/ More a hard digging Uncover/ Stitch together a story/ that explains me to me.” Punctuation is entirely absent throughout, and even Olson’s capitalization is often more Dickinsonian than grammatically correct. These formal choices lend a heightened sense of presence, embodying the book’s notion that the past is an informant of—rather than a hurdle to—the now. The dead populate Olson’s pages not as ghosts, but as forces that alternately propel, push back, and transfix the speaker. A wonderful sense of permission emerges out of the vulnerability and brashness of Olson’s voice. In “Don’t Come Home,” the speaker advises, “Read this as you will then/ Not like school Not like/ a riddle For these/ are your poems and you/ are their people And they/ are so glad to see you again.” Olson’s poems are true companions: they speak colloquially and confessionally, administer tough love, and hold the reader’s hand, dragging them into the rural, familial, and visceral. This is a disarming, shimmering book. (July)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this propulsive fourth collection, Novak (New Life) explores the intersection of domestic life, new parenthood, and anorexic impulses, while enacting the tyrannical confines of the postpartum mind. The poems are agitated, full of sonic chatter as they make sense of the quotidian. “Highboy” asks, “What if simplicity saves nothing?/ If my monochrome chant is a red grunt?” Indeed, it is through wordplay that the book steadies itself, a kind of parish house of sound where the poet finds “all day long, the spread of history, goodness, the morning made me hungry, unstable, and talky.” Much of this talk is channeled into litanies that attempt to control food and feelings, as in the muscular and quirky “Abundance”: “making much of little ribbon brisket/ knish gnocchi/ rubber carrot,/ latex bone/ I chalked/ the rabbet day/ O Dei, sick present coughing blood carnations.” Beyond the purview of home, “the rules of dividends cracks sidewalks, slanting the historic district,” while inside, there are dinner parties to attend to. Thanks to Novak’s vivid language, these pages overflow with life’s complexities, terrors, and fragmentations. (July)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

The thrilling latest by Santos Perez (from unincorporated territory [guma’]) gathers previously uncollected poems in a powerhouse package of decolonial Indigenous insight. A Chamoru poet native to Guam, he confronts the ongoing legacies of European settler colonialism and past injustices across Pacific islands to the U.S. mainland and beyond. In the title entry, Santos Perez defiantly addresses Ferdinand Magellan, famous for his circumnavigation of Earth, presenting an alternative, Indigenous perspective on Magellan’s arrival in Guam in 1521: “Call this mutiny,/ we discovered you/ lost and drifting/ in our already named ocean,/ we saved you/ diseased and starving.” Santos Perez frequently remixes inherited colonial forms of poetry, as in the abecedarian poem “ECL (English as a Colonial Language),” which lyrically highlights English’s destructive power to suppress Chamoru culture: “language lost/ mouths muted/ nouns in/ oceanic orature or/ pasifika palates/ quelled.” Balancing lyricism with an appealing political directness, these poems ask penetrating questions: “Can we disarm/ our nation/ if we don’t/ demilitarize/ our imagination?” This rousing and expansive collection points the way toward a more just future. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

In her precise latest, Armantrout (Finalists) addresses the limits of language during a precarious historical moment. This theme is captured decisively in the opening poem, “Here I Go”: “There’s no way to explain/ how faultlessly I want to write/ about how pointless all this is// ...like this ongoing attempt/ to catalog the world/ by latching each thing/ to the last/ memory it calls up.// Nothing recalls/ the new cat-6 haboob.” Armantrout loses none of her usual playfulness as she insistently probes for meaning in a time of catastrophe. Short, focused poems address topics ranging from the connection between beauty and significance to the sickening regularity of mass shootings in America. Other subjects are more innocuous, with often humorous imagery: a cauliflower head is “made of/ little noggins,” while a palm frond “shimmies/ like a tambourine.” In “Flame,” Armantrout slyly communicates that there is, in fact, no end to language, even as the apocalypse seems nigh: “In the midst of the evident collapse,/ I’m bored. What is there left/ to say, I say.” Armantrout’s love of language and the joy she brings to shaping it make this a welcome balm for uncertain times. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

This tender offering from Antrobus (To Sweeten Bitter) delves into new fatherhood, with an ominous, deeply felt question hanging over it: “why have children/ when the world is ending?” The collection is split into the anticipation, and then the reality, of a new baby, as Antrobus lays bare the fears, challenges, and shortcomings every bit as fully as the wave of affection and awe a first child trails in its wake: “The sun is rising and there’s nowhere to hide.” Time is an encroaching presence, as is the apocalyptic political landscape into which the child is to be born: “New dads are marching/ at the climate change protest”; “Freedom, wrote Camille T. Dungy, is measured, in part, by/ the freedom to choose one’s own name.” There is also a sense of coming to terms, particularly after the baby is born, with the poet’s own relationship to fathers and fatherhood (“I became fatherless at 26 and a father/ at 35”; “I thought about leaving/ thinking I need/ myself back need/ to stop the trigger/ of seeing my child/ get what I needed”), and with how one faces the world: “I broke up with righteousness. It sparkled on stage/ but annoyed everyone at the table.” It’s an unflinching and impactful look at the emotional dissonances of new parenthood. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink

This vibrant collection brings together 253 poems by 186 Latino poets from the early 17th century through 2023, showcasing a dynamic poetic tradition that engages with social and political issues and personal experiences. Exploring poetic movements with striking concision, González situates the anthology within a larger context of “interwoven legacies of colonialism and imperialism,” positioning Latino poetry as both a response to and a reshaping of historical forces. Standout contributions include Julia De Burgos’s touching reflections on memory and place, Francisco X. Alarcón’s vivid depiction of cultural duality (“un beso can’t/ be captured/ traded/ or sated”), and Claribel Alegría’s and Ernesto Cardenal’s poems grappling with political oppression. Particular attention is paid to such linguistic features as code-switching and Spanglish, framing these as vital expressions of bicultural experiences, and highlighting the collection’s thematic threads: cultural identity, memory, social justice, and the interplay between personal and collective histories. While the scope of the anthology means some individual poets receive less in-depth exploration, the breadth of voices ensures a comprehensive look at the evolution of Latino poetry. Casual readers and scholars alike have much to gain. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/23/2024 | Details & Permalink