This luminous bilingual anthology features eight contemporary women poets from Poland: Anna Adamowicz, Maria Cyranowicz, Hanna Janczak, Natalia Malek, Joanna Oparek, Zofia Skrzypulec, Katarzyna Szaulińska, and Ilona Witkowska. The opening “Cantata” section presents selections from each, displaying their range of styles, from the philosophical experimentation of Skrzypulec to Malek’s concise lyricism. Standout poems include Szaulińska’s “nirvana,” a typographically inventive examination of the relationship between body and technology, and Oparek’s “Berlin Porn,” a wide-ranging reflection on the eponymous city, violence against women, and how “sex and politics are so intimate together.” In the concluding “Octet” section, each contributor writes theoretically and reflectively about the act of writing. Their insights on craft are as varied and rousing as the poems themselves; Adamowicz imagines literary influence as fungus growing on tree stumps, while Cyranowicz reminds readers that “linguistic conditioning... does not proceed without oppression.” It’s a welcome introduction to major new voices on the world stage. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Love, divorce, illness, and grief are at the center of Brimhall’s expansive and moving fifth collection (after Come the Slumberless to the land of Nod). The title poem is among the book’s most evocative, framing love as something that, like the prodigal son, departs, endures hardship, and returns—sometimes changed, sometimes forgiven. At their best, Brimhall’s poems balance humor and grief, as in “Will & Testament”: “Bury me with one of your shirts/ in case I come back as a bloodhound. Save my favorite panties—/ the pink ones—for a sexier immortality or a lonely evening.” Similarly, “Body, Remember,” inspired by Cavafy, meditates on memory’s impermanence: “And over legs you endlessly shaved, grasses will grow like you—eager, wild, surviving every day they can.” Though the collection’s fire motif is persuasive in individual poems, it becomes overextended as the phoenix mythology collides with biblical references, diminishing its effect rather than deepening it. “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Sonnets” strains to braid fragmented lyricism and philosophical asides, sometimes feeling forced rather than revelatory. Despite these excesses, Brimhall remains a master of list-making, anaphora, and imagery. It adds up to a striking, if uneven, collection. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

This singular anthology presents 29 different translations of Tang poet Li Bai’s poem “Seeing Off a Friend.” Beginning with Ezra Pound’s famous (and dubious) 1915 version, which Billings bemoans set expectations for what Chinese poetry in English “should” sound like, he sheds light on the intricacies of Chinese verse through his commentary on each subsequent translation. His highly informative observations take the form of short essays, which are often amusing, as when he critiques a stilted line in Pound’s version: “The tone wavers between authenticity and a bad fortune cookie.” By attending closely to each version, Billings is able to highlight various aspects of the original, such as when he praises Gregory Whinchup’s translation for “how closely it follows the rhythm of the Chinese line. This not only gives it a lovely pacing but also drags the reader closer to the author—and yet so peacefully we hardly notice.” Over the course of the anthology, the reader develops a deeper appreciation for the original poem’s formal beauty and its translators’ ingenuities. The result is a fascinating initiation to the delights of Chinese verse. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

In her tender latest, Duhamel (Second Story) pays homage to her mother’s career as a nurse as well as her death at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when she was living in a nursing home among patients and staff “dress[ed] like astronauts.” These poems are bold, expansive, and prosaic; they do not shy away from the painful realities of end-of-life care, nor from the specific horrors of the early pandemic: “My mom has a bandage/ on her nose from where the ventilator cut her,/ and clear tubes of oxygen in her nostrils.” Elsewhere, the reader learns, “She has been confined to her room for over a year.” Though the collection dwells mostly in the isolated space of the nursing home, the outside world intrudes; Hurricane Elsa, Donald Trump, and the greater social ramifications of historic times haunt these poems, but the book’s intimacy gives it a timelessness that transcends world-changing events. “My mother stopped wearing a bra in Mount St. Rita’s Hospice,” she writes. “I called her a hippie and put a flower in her hair.” As Duhamel reflects on her transformed role—from child to caretaker to eulogizer—readers will appreciate how beautifully she relates the experience of love and loss. It’s a memorable and affecting collection. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hoffman’s beautifully crafted third collection (after When There Was Light) savors the everyday and grasps the ineffable with a tone that easily includes the quotidian alongside the mythological and the historical. Hoffman’s titles are outstanding, and her metaphors are often wry (“The world can be the saddest fish tank,” from the poem “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College”) or devastating (“The apple’s a for-sale sign swaying from the tree,” from “Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World”). In Hoffman’s poems, mythology illuminates the timelessness of female oppression. She excels at providing vivid details that capture the varied experiences and hardships faced by women, from Eurydice’s “boring /underwear” in the poem “The Townspeople Contemplate Eurydice” to a friend in high school “bleeding in the parking lot” in “Rose Ausländer, Jane Roe, & Me”. Throughout, Hoffman grapples eloquently with contemporary tragedy and sadness while pushing past silence. It’s a wise and moving volume. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Lin debuts with an impressive collection that tells the story of an undocumented daughter of parents who flee Communist China and become fundamentalist Christians in America. Drawing on her own experience of living as an undocumented American for 21 years, Lin poetically imagines her parents’ precarious journeys from China to Brazil to the U.S., exploring the profound impact of being undocumented while growing up in a fundamentalist household. In “I See Her Best,” the speaker extrapolates from an old photograph the compromises her mother made to survive: “1974. A young woman clasping the arm/ of a married man, her wrapped hair/ and secret smile, her face, or a version of the face/ I touch in my sleep.” Another poem explores how the speaker is forced to appease an authoritarian family: “My petitioner is interested in sex./... The agent at Homeland Security asks why/ I wanted my petitioner to be my petitioner./ The truth is my father saved three thousand dollars,/ the market rate for men/ who petition for illegal women.” These stunning poems breathe new life into the confessional form. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

The reflective debut from Paty plays with patterns of sunlight and opaqueness, exploring the limits of perception and expression while characterizing human interaction as “little incursions into our separateness.” A “jalousie” is a louvered window that both shades and exposes, whose “slat beheads my landlord’s swan-shaped planting pot.” Here, it is also an apt metaphor for consciousness and desire, as Paty’s skilled writing demonstrates—one doesn’t look out without also looking in: “you want/ what she has/ easy limbs and/ a deft gait/ but don’t you/ already have it?” Viewing a changed city through the slats of memory or a workday through a constant stream of backward-looking thought (in the long poem “Premise”), the writer posits the human figure against a fleeting landscape: “that was childhood, then childhood was over.” Welcome rhymes emerge from time to time: “One renders what is happening/ moves to say what has been./ A tenderness to walk the fault lines/ and slip oneself in.” While abstract enough to stymie some readers, most of these finely crafted poems offer their textured surfaces with a calm intelligence and without pretension. It’s a strong first outing. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kuipers’s wickedly erotic and ingenious fourth collection (after All Its Charms) explores identity and how the body is invested with meaning that is continuously shifting. Among other topics, these poems address coming to terms with one’s evolving sexuality (notably in “The Magician’s Woodpile,” which depicts the speaker setting fire to a pile of penises), the adrenaline of new romance, and the steady simmer of attraction to a long-term partner. Kuipers expertly mixes frank expressions of sexual desire with the domestic, subverting common preconceptions and breaking arbitrary boundaries surrounding the body. “In the Outdoor Shower with My Pregnant Wife” is a rapturous ode not only to a woman’s pregnant body but to the ways in which it is permanently altered by pregnancy: “I want already/ the body scarred by stretch marks, the extra flap/ of skin to hang soft at her waist, the feet/ that will never again be quite so small.” Kuipers is exceptional at setting the scene with a carefully chosen detail, as in “The Wound,” which begins, “It was the winter the dog swallowed// a sewing needle.” This wide-ranging collection tackles love in its varied forms with originality and hard-won wisdom. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

The visceral latest from Zamora (Quotient) offers powerful and disquieting vignettes exploring racism, language, and the body. As a Latina raised in the grip of persecution, financial adversity, and abuse, the poet lays bare the impact of vulnerability and neglect: “My body a ghost of an outline, behind empty glass,/ reverberates.” She describes these power dynamics as a looming predator—“whiteness wants to swallow my veins, pull my spine/ through incisors—a meal to wipe from chin, wash hands & be done”—and denounces America’s negligence: “A nation sits/ laminating an open wound, vulnus sclopetarium—anatomic/ site of injury—repeats in stagnation.” Elsewhere, Zamora derides how ideology manipulates semantics (“A definition depends on who speaks & who remains silent”) while longing to express what has no verbal equivalent: “I too grope for words. My dust-devil/ heart. All this time, I chase my own ribs, each/ stair of bone, a climb.” Anatomical and ecological metaphors, bleak sociopolitical realities, and confessional reverie are bolstered through strategic use of white space, erasure, and repetition. Palpable and urgent, these potent poems revel in defiance, catharsis, and wonder. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Romanian author and political activist Blandiana (Five Books) enthralls in this anthology of her early work. Fidelity to truth, ethical inquiry, union with nature, and the ubiquity of the soul underscore narratives that resuscitate awe and riot against passivity: “I search for the beginning of evil/ Just as, when a child, I searched for the edges of the rain...// But the evil always stops before/ I can find the border/ and it starts again/ Before I find out how far the good extends.” Death is exquisitely depicted as the stilling of time’s current: “time is never the core,/ But only the beginning and the end–/ and death is also a span of time/Until you are dead/ and then, unborn from the hands of the clock,/ the river abides in itself/ Like a sea.” Political volatility is likened to a looming drought or tempest: “In the country’s soul/ It’s always yesterday,/ the same old fears that it might not rain/ or there might be too much rain.” With nonpareil enlightenment, valor, and spectral beauty, Blandiana’s visions make an indelible impression. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink