Muldoon’s well-selected anthology of sonnets takes its title from a line in Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,” in which he writes of “the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.” Confinement, Muldoon notes, is one of the aspects that unites the history of the sonnet, that “most persistent but also the most pervasive” of forms, as he writes in his witty and illuminating introduction. He is insightful on the ways African American poets have worked with and expanded the sonnet’s boundaries, noting that poets such as Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes have “evoked the boundedness of the sonnet not so much to assert national or cultural belonging, as to trouble the limitations such concepts imply.” This is borne out by the defiant assertion in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”: “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Muldoon draws out other tropes and traditions that prove to be useful and indicative guides through this democratic anthology, which is arranged alphabetically instead of chronologically to highlight the universality of the form’s possibilities and mix of chaos and control. It’s a welcome primer on an always relevant poetic form. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This brilliant collection of previously unpublished poems from Berryman’s Dream Songs cycle is proof, as Shane McCrae writes in the introduction, that he “understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form.” For McCrae, Henry—Berryman’s alter-ego in the Songs—“is a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled.” It’s extraordinary to reencounter that voice—at once comic, tragic, and heartbreaking—across the span of these poems, many of which achieve the heights of those that established Berryman’s stellar reputation. The entries exhibit the familiar lurch from high to low and disordered and disjointed syntax. Among the finest are elegies for other poets, such as Louis MacNeice and Delmore Schwartz, which affectingly turn toward melancholy, “Over the dark miles I seize in my hand/ his, and with him I hope she slept/ the grimy night gone by,” or woundable romanticism, “where once we risked the rest of it on love/ where once somewhat now we grow bewildered & hardened—but not good enough.” Courtly, profound, and irresistible, this is a gift for readers already tuned into Huffy Henry and those new to Berryman’s essential American songbook. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In a brief introduction to this strong bilingual collection from Follain, who died in 1971, translator Seguin argues that “time is his ultimate subject—how it overlaps and doubles back in memory, how each arriving instant contains past and future, and how sad it is to lose it.” Follain’s poems richly illustrate this attention to time: “Countrysides soak up ancient sun/ although the past/ will never come back the same.” The volume arranges Follain’s tenderly observant and crystalline poems into three sections—two focused on poems from 1933–1953 and 1960–1971, respectively, plus a shorter sequence of prose poems from 1957. Follain’s love for “hear[ing] in the depths of memory/ the creaking of doors in cold rooms/ while poplars rustled on the riverbanks” causes “one’s blood thrill,” a reading experience that is vivid and expansive. Despite the poet’s retrospective gaze and his knowledge that “the next century will be worse,” he provides comfort in moments that recognize that “lovers [still] go by singing.” The result is a lively survey of a writer who feels fresh, even as he speaks to and from history. Devotees of the French pastoral will be especially keen to take a look. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Baker’s graceful latest (after Whale Fall) announces that “the world is in pieces,” but nevertheless eschews despair. In these poems, “the heart lies open to the world,” where past and present meet until “years don’t matter.” There’s a yearning, keening quality to Baker’s writing, an attempt to get across “the flavor of some happiness, when we were happy,” and a sense of dawning understanding. “I would like to leave a good accounting of my life,” he writes, “And leave, when I leave, by a quiet path.” The well-trodden paths of memory announce themselves throughout the volume, asking readers to slow their own stride and take in the scenery—birds, landscapes, and fauna—populating Baker’s work: “You would miss it if you were hurrying.” In a seemingly quiet voice that resounds through the well-crafted musicality of his lines, Baker offsets the drift toward melancholy with an urge to celebrate beauty and what endures of it: “I think we live in many times at once,” he notes in a poem that channels and communes with Anne Bradstreet. Self-aware and bruised but celebratory, this astonishes. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

The title of Zwart’s ruminative debut refers to epitaphs carved on gravestones. Fittingly, the impulse for unlikely pairings (“odd” and “sad”) pulses throughout these poems, from “the pocks Christmas lights burn/ into a porch rail’s ruff of snow” to the mylar cemetery balloon described as “a silver pita... bleeding helium molecules.” Even joyful metaphors (“every peach,/ a geode”) give way to the underlying tragedy that runs through the collection: the childhood death of the poet’s younger brother. At the heart of the volume is a single powerful image: “my brother’s baldness,/ adding wattage to his eyes.” It becomes clear, as the book progresses, that calamity is inextricably tied to the oddness of the ordinary: “for forty years I have remembered the first night// of Adam’s sickness more than any other thing:/ the strange sauce on my Grandma’s pasta.” While fear of death is never far from these poems, the struggle against it is somewhat relieved by time, the poet’s clean biopsy results, and her love of her children and their creations: “Is it nexterday?/ one used to ask, meaning tomorrow.” Though a few of Zwart’s imaginative leaps feel strained, readers will find these searching and spiritual poems linguistically textured and appealingly direct. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Intellectually rigorous and emotionally piercing, Villanueva’s sophomore collection (after Reliquaria) threads Greek myth, Christian iconography, and family history into a frank exploration of mortality. The poems address grief and loss from many angles—from the pain of a loved one’s death to solastalgia (distress caused by environmental change), and most vividly, mourning for the loss of safety as fascism descends upon the United States. A wrenching series of sonnets that opens the book addresses the murders of Black men by police and the devastation left behind for their loved ones and communities: “Today they are/ burning the names of the boys they are/ shooting in the street. This because we—// and they—know ashes mean undone leads/ and muzzles loosened, floodlights and flares,/ eyes doused with milk.” Elsewhere, Villanueva provides an emotional counterbalance by depicting Penelope from The Odyssey as a radiant figure, alive “among all-trembling miracles.” Throughout, Villanueva’s imagery is textured and evocative (“From the overlook// you catch fog giving way to Mt./ Baker, the egrets like knuckles/ into the mouth of the after-/ noon”). The result is a dynamic book of witness, resistance, and radical hope. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

By turns darkly funny and achingly tender, Dabrowski’s latest (after Black Square) examines the blessing and curse of memory, and how everyday objects can hold profound significance. Dabrowski specializes in making the ordinary exceptional. In “Crayons,” for instance, a domestic scene of children coloring is elevated to dramatic heights by the poet’s flight of fancy. In “Jam Jars,” the eponymous containers are infused with whimsy as receptacles for memories: “In they pressed through every single skin pore, so/ I shut them up in separate jam jars and took them down/ to the cellar. Sometimes I remove a drop from each one,/ mix them in a glass of water and look to see what would happen.” In “This Is the End,” a former lover’s tampon left behind in the speaker’s bathroom inspires despair, then feigned indifference. Though often sardonic and witty, Dabrowski is at his best in more sincere moments, as when he writes of fatherhood or losing out on love. Clever, deeply felt, and delivered with deceptive simplicity, these poems transform the trivial into something monumental. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

Perennial themes—family, identity, tradition, place—take center stage in Belfiglio’s ruminative if uneven debut. Whether the poems concern Belfiglio’s Italian heritage, her romantic relationships, or the places she’s lived, they point always toward the importance of relationships to one’s identity. “A compelling story can pin/ my attention more than anything,” she writes, an interest evidenced by the many stories relayed here, including her grandfather’s 1912 immigration to the United States. The collection is replete with familial names, domestic trappings like furniture and food, and the mythology of Italian American clans. In a second thread that traces urban life and queer desire, the poems feel somewhat predictable. The brightest moments come in entries like “Basin,” which focuses on specifics that more convincingly evoke urban longing (“Maybe you won’t feel alone/ if you look into every set of eyes/ like a friend’s”) and elicits deeper emotional responses than the volume’s more abstract pieces. “I’d rather live in the what if,” Belfiglio writes, and the best of these poems glimmer with their accounting of a life full of what-ifs. There are moments of sincere reflection to be found here. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

The wry and sprawling final offering from the late, great Hejinian (Fall Creek) comprises a book-length prose poem in which the speaker moves through the motions and emotions of the “every day,” engaging with a cast of local characters. By doing so, Hejinian and her narrator explore a central philosophical concern: What does it mean to be a thinking, perceiving individual in a society of thinking, perceiving individuals? “I am just one of many irritable efficiency-demonstrating pedestrians pushing past,” Hejinian writes with the characteristic mixture of wit and wisdom that define her impressive oeuvre. Through the book’s many leaps and bounds across time, place, and literature, she questions, lauds, and critiques the human capacity for attention, reason, interpretation, memory, and freedom, playing what she calls “the phenomenal world’s ongoing game of hide and seek.” “Often,” Hejinian writes, “the reasoning human is like a squirrel or packrat pitting things in strange or unwarranted or unreceptive places.” A sharp poetic investigation of being, this will appeal to curious readers who want to know themselves, and others, more acutely. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

The complex and skillful third outing from Salerno (Tributary) features intricate poems tracking the devastating effects of endometriosis. Throughout, Salerno draws gorgeous and bracing parallels between the human and nonhuman worlds: “like the lowly orchid leaving the butterflies and bees out of its own replication entirely,/ my understory stripped clean.” Dandelions provide a way to imagine internal processes (“how gorgeous /and sharp within you the tendrils leeching, the radiant and bitter blooms”), tulips evoke the cervix (“their flushed double ruby cups unfurl”), and the patient movingly admits they “could only watch what was happening to me happen to me.” In counterpoint to these corporeal poems, the collection’s prose poems launch the reader into interstellar orbits and astrophysical musings (“a lustral rippling, extraterrestrial”). The overriding theme of the book may be loss—of organs and tissues, female reproductive capacity, autonomy, essence and possibility—but the poems themselves refuse elegy. Energetic language presses forward through long lines, redacted documentary evidence, and sustained images as if traditional lyric forms could neither contain nor adequately express the poet’s rage toward the medical establishment and received ideas about art and beauty: “They’re// all I can see./ Fucking daffodils./ Fucking daffodils.” Readers will find this unflinching and affecting collection tough to shake. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink