Roman poet Bellezza (1944–1996) evinces a fixation on death in this intricate collection, his first to be published in English. Indeed, death is a near-constant presence (“We should take note of this:/ that we are flesh and we die”; the body is a “beast that sweats as proof while waiting/ to become cold as a slab of marble”). This obsession provides the backdrop to his vivid explorations of gay sex and desire in “At the Amber Palace,” “Coliseum,” and “[In the mornings, beer, ‘salade,’ a bit of caviar].” There and elsewhere, Bellezza composes erotic scenes of overwhelming poignancy: a casual lover borrows an old T-shirt “to go/ to the sea where you don’t drown/ while bathing your wings.” His later poems take on new dimensions, incorporating odes to his cats (“catness is a constant/ and magnificent essence/ of which men are/ totally lacking”) and arch political commentary (“the bourgeoisie... fears the monsters/ it itself produces”). With the arrival, in poems such as “AIDS” and “[Once again behold repetition],” of the epidemic that would take his life, Bellessa finds, devastatingly, a central subject for his career-long preoccupations: death and eros. It’s a brutal and beautiful introduction to a potent poetic voice. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

The vibrant first volume of selected works by Danish poet and memoirist Ditlevsen (the Copenhagen Trilogy) to be published in English showcases her clever and emotionally resonant poetry. Like her confessional American contemporaries Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Ditlevsen (1917–1976) delves into the deprivations and humiliations of mid-20th-century womanhood and heterosexual romantic love (she married and divorced four times). The title poem features a woman speaking to the young girl she once was, reflecting with melancholy on her wasted potential and how expectations differ from reality: “You had a girl’s dream of a husband and baby,/ and you got what you wanted but were still alone.” In “Marriage,” the speaker’s identity dissolves completely into her home and husband: “And I, who inhabit this house so completely,/ fertilizing the dust with a tenuous idea/ of a life that’s my own, kneeling each day/ in vague prayer next to the mop bucket’s/ yellow-enamelled, stoic fidelity.” Like Plath and Sexton, Ditlevsen died by suicide after what seems to have been a lifetime of suffering. Despite her troubled marriages and struggles with addiction, she published 30 books and was a beloved literary figure in Denmark. This wonderful collection is sure to find an appreciative new audience for her stark and captivating observations of love, loss, and disillusion. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Ekhō, the mountain nymph of Greek myth, transforms her disability (as a result of Hera’s wrath, Ekhō can only repeat the speech of others) into a creative act in this imaginative debut from Orlando, who brings wry humor to the tale: “the nymphs were ambivalent/ toward his large thunderbolts/ but feigned admiration.” After falling for indifferent Narcissus, who drowns in self-love, Ekhō embeds herself in a mountain and imagines alternative histories: “Loss propels desperate/ attempts to rebuild the self,/ with any material at hand.” Philosophical digressions on the echo, a conference among famous mountains, and a robot’s soliloquy (by Alexa, the Amazon Echo’s voice-activated helper) lead to the climax in part three, an absurd Greek play set at a cocktail party, in which Ekhō and Alexa meet and converse. This sad and funny encounter, in which artificial intelligence and poetic diction bounce off each other, rises to the occasion: “Alexa: I beckon to human call, but I do not return it/ fully./ Ekhō: Nothing returns fully.” It’s a worthy collection. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

The bracing latest collection from Welsh poet Lewis (Chaotic Angels) traces an arc from the trauma of maternal abuse (“she abseils and crawls/ ticking, inside my ear”) through aftershocks of chronic illness, self-harm, and shame (“I’m roadkill,/ waiting for the coup de grâce”) to recovery (“I am found”). Her lines both stun and revive, moving between Plathian imagery (“It’s the snare in the brain, spring-loaded/ for suicide”) and disarming candor (“Underneath, I’m a bit of a sweetie”). The collection radiates hard-won self-possession: “Who says you can’t choose// your own household gods?” By the time she pleads, “Give me moths for eyelids, or a world/ I can bear,” the reader has come to trust the poet’s resilience. In thickets of lush language (“I’m here for the final/ sugar-rush, as fruit flush to bruises”), austere life lessons are offered: “Being alive/ is both trauma and sovereign /remedy. You cannot choose.” Quiet persistence is both a life skill and a literary strategy: “I’ve lived so long now on so little// that the merest wisp of a thermal/ pulls me aloft, the stitch that was dropped// picked up again.” Readers will enjoy discovering this writer of extraordinary gifts. (May)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This innovative debut mixes poetry, prose, and photographs to chronicle Poetic’s family history and roots in the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. He describes his family’s reverence for vinyl records and how his own interest developed into a passion for remixing, sampling, and revisiting albums and other emblems of Black life. Fittingly, the book explores Poetic’s polyphonic relationship to identity; in a prose section, his first visit to Jamaica puts into perspective the annual jibes his mother endures as the cook of the Thanksgiving Day meal: “That holiday gathering was a chance for her to perform a cultural ritual that would affirm her membership in our clan; the jokes turned it into a scarification ceremony.” The speaker travels to Cuba to uncover more familial connections, including a meeting between relatives that must be moderated by a translator, causing the speaker to reflect, “our native tongues are not indigenous/ to our bodies, they are proofs of purchase replicating/ on autopilot, auction-block fugitives pledging allegiance/ to the branding iron.” Poetic’s generous account carefully excavates the many departures and returns of his life. (July)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Dharker (Luck Is the Hook) combines her poetry and drawings to deliver an exquisite and complex vision of exile, immigration, and adopted homelands. The poems go beyond simple ekphrasis to consider the power dynamics of language and text; in one entry responding to a 19th-century sketch by Queen Victoria (of the Maharaja Duleep Singh dressing the queen’s son, Prince Arthur, in a turban), the speaker reflects on what is missing: “We stand outside the line/ of vision, millions of us, day labourers/ in paradise gardens, who scurry underground/ so our shadows never mar the path of the king.” Dharker’s illustrations amplify the language of the poems to create potent visual metaphors, as in a series of drawings that depict threads of fabric on a traditional loom transforming into lines of poetry, suggesting an alchemical interplay between the two forms. Elsewhere, Dharker expresses concern over the use of technologies, such as drones, to construct images largely indifferent to human suffering: “All simplified./ Some live, some die.” This spectacular collection astonishes. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

The captivating latest from Addonizio (after Now We’re Getting Somewhere) offers a catalog of real and imagined endings (“after a while, you want to give up/ and say kill me now”) through which a blithe, if slightly intoxicated, voice endures: “I prefer to stay here saying many pointless things.” Whether mocking her own desperation in a dive bar or fleabag motel (“I know my soul is small; it just wants a decent hotel room”), Addonizio is a master of the one-liner: “If you make a mistake, repeat it; that’s what God did.” Amid serious reasons for angst, she notes that her mother’s ashes smell of the jar’s former contents, raspberry jam. The personal is also cosmic: “you be a dead language; I’ll be an extinct civilization.” What Addonizio seems to hate most is sentimentality, though she acknowledges that a sense of loss is hard to shake. In a memory of Paris (visited once 30 years ago), vanished family members and literary figures merge in the living past: “Look at them, alive in this poem, holding their menus & about to disappear./ De Beauvoir weeps as Sartre’s lowered in.” Addonizio never disappoints. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

First published in 1967, this brilliantly inventive collection from Cuban poet Guillén (Yoruba from Cuba) takes the reader through “a great zoo” that “was created/ for natives and foreigners/ and the pride of our nation.” Each of the collection’s 39 poems corresponds to one of the zoo’s “specimens,” including real-life animals (“Beetles,” “Gorilla,” “Monkeys”) as well as natural phenomena (“The Winds,” “The Clouds”), human figures (“Gangster,” “The Pimp”), astronomical objects (“Moon”, “The North Star”), and intangible subjects (“The Dream,” “The Hunger”). Several poems display an interest in race and Blackness, as in “KKK” and “The Rivers,” where “the Mississippi with its Blacks” and “the Amazon with its Indians” are compared to “serpents... coiled up on themselves.” The poetic voice is often understated and lighthearted (“The papaya./ Vegetal/ animal./ It’s not true/ that it’s familiar with original sin”), though it moves, at times, into rich figuration (the clouds “that announce the Evening Star” are “like serpents in flames”). With wit and irony, Guillén, a major figure in Latin American poetry whose parents were of African and European ancestry, toggles between seeing and being seen, spectator and spectacle, transforming familiar parts of the world into objects of observation. Readers will be wowed. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

George (Asterisk) examines in her stunning third collection the space left by the death of a loved one—not an emptiness, but a collection of artifacts and memories, a world that suddenly takes on new meaning. The collection’s title suggests the overlaying of a new existence over the speaker’s old one, but recently enough that a past image remains visible as an outline. Fragments of the deceased still pulse with life in a photograph, and the memory of a snowstorm is described as “The air a world/ of cold white bees.” In other arresting moments, George describes a striking tableau of the body of the deceased: “Hands folded like a bride. Dark cave/ of the mouth, open.” Life’s ongoing nature is at times a comfort, at times unimaginable to the speaker: “The earth goes on without me./ It’s humiliating./ Peony shoots pushing their purple faces/ out of the ground.” In the brilliantly disconcerting “Autobiography of a Vulture,” death sustains life: “I hatched from the void./ Crawled into the glow/ on my pinhooks, craving meat./ The first scrap unlocked my throat./ All of us in the nest/ open and swaying for it—/ little death flowers.” This is a monumental work on death and grieving in a deceptively slim package. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

In her contemplative 11th collection, Hahn (Foreign Bodies) offers a sustained meditation on poetic process. Continuing her lifelong devotion to formal experimentation, Hahn works within traditional Western forms (pantoum, villanelle, sestina) as well as newer forms, such as the golden shovel. Japanese forms (zuihitsu, tanka) draw inspiration from sources as divergent as Kaga no Chiyo, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wright, and the New York Times. In the book’s intertwining of present and past, a ghost theme emerges through “A grove of memory. A marsh of forms.” After all, Hahn writes, “Aren’t allusions just ghosts?” Reflecting on her early work, she finds that she has unwittingly become an influence on younger poets: “I thought my Narrow Road would be my exploration, not models for others to follow”; “I wish/ I could just be counted like a bee/ darting then resting in the dark for renewal.” The mature poet has a new set of intentions: “More than ever—I wish to draw the body back in. I wish for a drawer of spondees.” An affectionate and candid letter from a writer to her readers, this is sure to especially delight aspiring poets. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink