Mlinko’s sonically rich latest (after Venice) draws on familial intimacy, loss, and the search for deeper understanding in poems that deal with the death of a mother and its generational impact: “my relatives/ changed their amphibrachic name to Bass.” Mlinko is rarely less than dazzling thanks to the pleasure and rigor of her phrasing: “A seraglio of interior paramours”; “The lighthouse fruits like a bromeliad.” These layered, allusive, and intelligent poems are various in their tones and colors, doing much to ensure that they keep “the ear at right angles to the eye” (“The Empire of Flora”). Many walk a line between wit and meditation (“the Unreal Conditional the tragic tense,” or, as she writes elsewhere, “The coolness is applied to parts in pain”). There is a moving and unignorable sense of grief and loss beneath the surface, in an expertly managed balance with the luster of the vocabulary and music of these poems. Full of exquisitely observed internal and external landscapes (“I’ve been exiled to Paradise,/ it seems”), this is exemplary. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Cravens opens her searching debut with a litany of loose anapests and delicious slant rhymes on the theme of pleasure: “Not the pleasure of lovers but the pleasure of letters,/ a pleasure like weather, delayed and prepared for,/ not the pleasure of lessons but the pleasure of errors.” The book’s questionable delights—terrors, daughters, unanswered letters—are revisited in the sparser poems that follow, which offer cryptic vignettes of sexual explorations and familial dysfunction that move through Brooklyn, rural landscapes, and Lebanon (briefly) before arriving in California: “after the party, Ellen choked me against the refrigerator./ It was very quiet. Other students filtered into the snow./ Can there be a story where a character wants nothing?/ Even in happiness I did not find much satisfaction.” Another poem recalls, “Last night I let a stranger hit me in the face./ She was a therapist. After, we discussed real estate.” “Jacob Riis Beach” develops into an elegantly stark recollection of a building and a relationship: “Damp brick walls, cracked windows./ Then I remember its absence. In the end,/ there is only exposure: the wind-blown recess/ where a building stood.” Though occasionally uneven, particularly in its more fragmentary poems, this collection successfully delivers the eros and disorder of young adult life. (June)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Berry’s Sunday morning walks are the inspiration for these “Sabbath poems,” which he has been writing since 1979. Existing in a space of reverence and reflection, they are full of powerful turns of phrase that feel like incantations: “a world of words could not/ describe this wordless world”; “the river is a place passing through a passing place.” In this companion volume to 2014’s This Day, Berry continues exploring the themes that have been the foundation of his life’s work: the natural world, deep respect and awe for sustainable agricultural practices, and an ongoing lament of the damage humans have caused to both. His famous rejection of modern technology—Berry does not use a computer—and sharp criticism of contemporary society has earned him beloved fans, though some poems can feel as though they are reprimanding the reader: “If not for mortality and its troubles/ all humans would be idiots or/ monsters, for they would see no limits/ to their selves and their hungers.” Elsewhere, Berry vibrantly renders redemptive moments spent in nature. Readers will find solace in these contemplative and captivating pages. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this tender debut, Nebeolisa witnesses and mourns the death of his mother from cancer, recounting how a “seed-like tumor/ [that had] been in her thigh for twenty-seven years” grew to the size of a “pumpkin.” Nebeolisa’s attention to his mother’s changing body is meticulously and compassionately observed, from “the chemo rash/ on the back of her hand” to her coughing, “like the sound/ of maize seeds in the maws of a grinder.” Compounding the poet’s grief is his move from Nigeria to the United States for his education, which diminishes his relationship with his mother to phone calls and gnaws him with guilt: “I did not want to describe the little things/ I was enjoying in the US,” he confesses, “the endless days of uninterrupted electricity.” His mother—steadfast, warm, and rooted in faith—responds with love, support, stoicism, and sadness, as does his sister, who becomes their mother’s end-of-life caregiver. Nebeolisa’s poems are rich with familial and emotional nuances, and are left artfully unresolved. A robust assemblage of dreamscapes, conversations, prayers, and meditations on life and death, this collection humanely reckons with the realities of losing a parent. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Challenging the notion of “American” poetry by including the entire Americas from ancient pre-Columbian cultures to the present, this expansive anthology is divided into thematic “galleries” and “maps,” guiding readers through a maze of poetic innovations and traditions. The first gallery juxtaposes Indigenous oral traditions with European colonizers’ written records, resulting in a powerful dialogue between conquerors and conquered: “Mayans started writing when English (even Old English) had yet to be born. By the seventh century A.D., when English literature made its first tentative appearance, Mayans had a long tradition of inscribing... the walls of temples and palaces, and they had also begun to write books.” Critical to the anthology’s success is the notion of “omnipoetics,” challenging the hierarchical structures of literary canon formation by exploring “on a worldwide scale, toward an anthology of everything.” The collection features surprising and exciting juxtapositions: Roger Williams appears next to Úrsula de Jesús, followed by a poem by Anne Bradstreet. This seminal effort redefines what it means to write and read poetry in the Americas. It’s a must-read. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

In her frankly feminist ninth collection, Kocher (godhouse) dissects the dangers beneath the male gaze, the specter of which shadows women everywhere. “The latest trend on the app is” features a chilling compendium of phrases men have said to the poet and other women, demonstrating how a supposed compliment can incite fear: “He says, lithe and I am broken for ten more years./ You’re beautiful I hear as a threat, as carcinogen, a concern reclined.” Kocher’s playful and inquisitive approach to language belies a delicate mastery. She captures the subjective experience of a feeling with uncanny accuracy: “I understand what it means to feel jealous./ It’s the possibility of an other-object gushing through the sluices of a/ never-named you.” Elsewhere, Kocher exalts the divine feminine, honoring Louise Glück, Junee Jordan, and a teenage friend named Donna, who imparted wisdom about lipstick: “Donna who teaches me at 14 that magenta belongs everywhere.” These whip-smart and evocative poems derive meaning from both the darkness and the light, drawing readers in with a beguiling intimacy. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Gibson’s deeply enjoyable latest (after Little Glass Planet) marvels at small acts of attention. Moving freely among subjects including technology, politics, the natural world, and memory, Gibson animates his poems with epiphanies both large and small, all made possible by his fine-tuned observation and humor. For example, in a poem that cleverly articulates the paradoxical necessity of continuous human input in the development of artificial intelligence, Gibson muses, “The more questions/ I ask the great machine,/ the more human/ it becomes. Hello, machine,/ what are you making/ of your inner life?” The poems use direct address to great effect, startling the reader into a deeper sense of the fantastic within the seemingly mundane: “Life, I love you! Fireworks, fossil record,/ Twizzlers, tonsillectomy, it mumbles back.” In the lengthy title poem, Gibson’s attentiveness gathers steam, collecting a far-ranging assortment of observations to reframe reality in unique ways: “The morning is/ not yet its own. Biographies share the same ending./ I glance at the sun the way a thief looks at his fingers.” This perceptive and surprising collection shines. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

In his meditative ninth collection, Rohrer (The Others) reflects with infectious wonder on the most important things in life—among them family, books, and natural and human-made landscapes. He captures the gray ennui of deep winter—“Dingy February I pass/ through it like curtains”—and the subtle, surreal horrors of the grocery store: “all the former live things/ arranged in cold pyramids.” The final section, “Army of Poets,” features homages to some of his influences, including Lewis Warsh, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Anna Akhmatova. While Rohrer’s irreverent tone is often charming, reader mileage will vary on how the ode to Akhmatova toggles between Rohrer’s drunken memories of a doomed relationship from his youth and details of the Russian poet’s persecution by the state. In contrast, “For a Farrier” makes palpable the speaker’s kind veneration for his fellow creatures: “Reading a kind of laborious/ poem about rural things/ and a horse is shot/ for breaking its leg./ I still don’t get it./ Surely there’s a way/ to heal a horse.” In these ruminative pages, Rohrer demonstrates a sensitivity to the world and a talent for capturing great joy and sorrow. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

Broaddus’s enchanting, hallucinatory sophomore volume (after Temporal Anomalies) explores the fantasy of identity. One series of poems imagines the inner world of J. Robert Oppenheimer through a funhouse mirror, while another—titled “African Mask” after the work of photographer Phyllis Galembo—imagines a series of increasingly ominous false faces. While identity is seemingly a construct, Broaddus also demonstrates how difficult it is to shed when the state enforces penalties for doing so. He references Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, who died fighting for Biafran independence, in a poem about police violence that begins, “Another black man is/ dead. My country is authorized).” Elsewhere, Broaddus combines surreal and apocalyptic imagery with playful rhyme to charming effect: “Deepsea lobsters, suddenly beached,/ explode. Is there no place in creation for the haphazard/ crustacean?” A comically bizarre poem titled “What to Do If You Are Stuck in an Elevator” answers its own question and perfectly epitomizes the poet’s tone in the first line: “You will need a goat.” This skillful collection will resonate with those attuned to late-stage capitalism’s many absurdities. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink

The blistering and mournful second collection from Abu Toha (Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear) recounts the violence of the Israeli occupation that both he and past generations of his family have experienced in Gaza. In the book’s epigraph, he declares his unbreakable connection to his homeland: “Every child in Gaza is me./ Every mother and father are me./ Every house is my heart./ Every tree is my leg.” Abu Toha offers affecting firsthand accounts of life in a refugee camp (“a mother collects her daughter’s/ flesh in a piggy bank”) and of individuals listening to nearby explosions, powerless to protect themselves or their children. Even the wound over the decade-old loss of his brother is made newly fresh: “Now it’s 2024 and the cemetery you were buried in was razed by/ Israeli bulldozers and tanks. How can I find you now?” Grief is palpable and seemingly endless, striking to the very core of the poet’s identity: “I’ve personally lost three friends to war,/ a city to darkness, and a language to fear.” Abu Toha eloquently captures the brutality and urgency of the present moment. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/01/2024 | Details & Permalink