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

Maxwell (How the Hell Are You) demonstrates his stylistic range and inimitable sense of play in this strong selection of poems from the 1990s to today. Consistency and evolution are both apparent here; Maxwell has always been fascinated by the construction of sonic patterns, as one of the newer entries suggests: “What he made/ had form, so silence formed around it.” His verbal authority and dynamism allow him to shock and provoke readers with dark undertones of anger, political disquiet, and wistful notes of elegy made resonant by his skillful rhyme schemes. His writing becomes a fitting document for an unsettling epoch: “in the time I’m writing of/ which I am wreathing with the kind of/ ending poems are for.” Maxwell is also a poet of love and its loss: “This is the act of all the descended gods/ of every age and creed: to weary of all/ that never ends, to take a human hand,/ and go back into the house.” At the center of his poetic world is truth-telling: “I know the truth, I know its level sound./ It didn’t speak, or didn’t speak to me.” Entertaining but never superficial, these poems leave a mark. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

This expansive and admirable collection from Atwood (after Dearly) captures the prolific Canadian novelist, essayist, and poet’s brightest poems. Fans of Atwood can witness the evolution of her poetic mind, teasing out themes of fantasy, nature, and the female experience that she has explored throughout her career. “Sons branch out, but/ one woman leads to another,” she writes. Atwood is a master of setting an eerie stage quickly, as she does in “This is a Photograph of Me” from 1966, which describes a picture from the perspective of the drowned: “I am in the lake in the centre/ of the picture, just under the surface.” Elsewhere, the head of a hen that has just been cut from its body watches itself, “a single/ flopping breast,/ muttering about life/ in its thickening red voice.” She writes from a wide array of perspectives: Canadian settler and writer Susanna Moodie, goddesses, a tin woodwoman, Ava Gardner reincarnated as a magnolia, and animals. Atwood’s recent poems are confident and often funny. In “Thirty,” the octogenarian asks, “Do you ever reach a point at which/ you don’t find the children hilarious?/ By children, I mean–you understand—/ anyone younger than you.” Atwood proves yet again that she’s still at the top of her game. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this star-studded anthology, self-professed “Swiftie fangirl” Frederick Daugherty collects 113 poems inspired by the pop star’s music. Readers familiar with Swift’s oeuvre will delight in piecing together which songs go with which poems. Swift’s primary themes of love and heartache abound, and no one handles these better than Richard Siken, whose contribution “Close” includes the Swiftian lines “A barn dance, an icy road, a starry sky, a sudden glow—/ we were fluent in the language of it/... You were my best escape, my worst mistake.” Many of the poets adopt a style that mimics song lyrics, including Pulitzer winner Diane Seuss: “I was feather-young,/ just seven. Too young to believe// in heaven, or to know how to cry/ when something dies./ Then came my romantic era./ I was sassafras-leaf-green. Barely thirteen.” Kim Addonizio, Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Major Jackson, and Yusef Komunyakaa are also featured, among other luminaries. In a postscript titled “Outros,” contributors explain the unique process used in crafting their homage. The result is an excellent introduction to contemporary American poetry for Swift’s fans. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

The powerful, contemplative debut from Olayiwola takes readers on a provocative journey through landscapes of queer desire. The feeling of being submerged haunts these poems that explore intimacy, the weight of familial expectations, and Black masculinity as both performance and personal truth. Images move as fluidly as perspective, as in the line “spit of him landing atop your eyelid, that puddled need.” A poem set in a barber shop among men speaking of “sports, women, women as sports” prompts the speaker to self-consciously reflect on the hold a disapproving parent still has over him: “My mother’s voice in my head: Don’t/ embarrass me. Don’t/ embarrass God.// Such power. To throw God into doubt.” The speaker’s melancholy feeling that he cannot fully be himself among family extends to thoughtful, at times mournful poems about the difficulty, or impossibility, of satisfying desire. A poem set in a nightclub captures this sense of ambivalence: “Sweat: drips of soul leeched through the skin to prove simply,/ at times, there’s a soul at all/ to be lost. I lose myself/ in the dancing, I lose. I win.” This alluring collection charts an intimate and moving encounter with Black identity. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink