Lyrical insights from an immigrant son navigating love, death, acceptance, and belonging along the United States and Mexico border. With a narrative voice that translates the unforgettable into something lyrical and magical, The Lost Nostalgias demonstrates Esteban Rodríguez's exploration of familial moments that move between the tragic, the trivial, and the triumphant. A mother's decaying teeth lead to questions of self-care and beauty; a quinceañera becomes a meditation on masculinity; a visit to the bank illuminates a father's existential fears; and a rave suddenly becomes a reflection on migration and survival. Because nothing is off the table under Rodríguez's tender lens, everything and everyone becomes deserving of admiration, dignity, and love.
An unflinching look at the intimate, dwindling natural world and our desire for human connection. Noah Davis's The Last Beast We Revel In coalesces around love for one's romantic partner, family, community, and the natural world. As the Appalachian Mountains continue to suffer from environmental catastrophes and abuses, the need to discover joy within the human and greater-than-human world is essential. In these poems, we travel with black bears and brook trouts, exploring old tunnel mines, summer rivers, the remains of meth houses, and tasting the sweetness of August tomatoes. Davis's poems balance revery, mourning, lust, and love while wading the rivers and meandering through the deep hollows of Appalachia's enduring landscape.
A hybrid collection that explores the dual nature of water as both a destructive and healing force, mirroring the experiences of Black women and girls. Nadia Alexis's Beyond the Watershed is a collection of poetry and award-winning photography--two mediums that speak to each other and expand the watershed moments influenced by life-changing events. Alexis delves into trauma, identity, healing, and survival through the lens of a Haitian American mother and daughter's experiences. These poems depict journeys from abuse to freedom, including the moments of joy in between, while contemplating the connection between the Black female experience and the natural world. Even though "there's no choice / in how the wounding is served," this striking poetic and visual account is a story of survival through love.
Poems that offer an honest portrayal of the complex realities of motherhood, including the devastating effects of postpartum depression. Maternal mental illness is an ongoing health crisis and deserves awareness, not only in the medical world but in the poetry world, too. Bridget Bell's All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy offers support to current mothers, mothers-to-be, family members of people suffering from perinatal mental illnesses, OB-GYNs, nurses, and any other healthcare providers. Bell uses various poetic forms to shed light on the challenges that come with motherhood, including the physical and emotional challenges of childbirth while celebrating the beauty of women's strength and resilience. Written with deep care and fearlessness, Bell's debut collection is both an educational tool and a powerful component of recovery in that shares others' similar stories.
A memorable debut collection that explores colonial and generational trauma. In this striking debut, DorsÃa Smith Silva explores the devastating effects of Hurricane MarÃa in Puerto Rico, highlighting the natural world, the lasting impact of hurricanes, and the marginalization of Puerto Ricans. These poems also focus on the multiple sites of oppression in the United States, especially the racial, social, and political injustices that occur every day. Smith Silva writes with a powerful, gripping voice, confronting the "drowning" of disenfranchised communities as they are displaced, exploited, and robbed of their identities, but remain resilient. Written with unflinching language and vivid imagery, In Inheritance of Drowning reveals the many facets of the lives of marginalized people.
A stunning poetry collection that offers solace and understanding. Jack Ridl's latest collection, All at Once, is structured as a lyrical collage that looks back at his eighty years of life in a rearview mirror. Nothing eludes this poet's attention, reflection, or unbridled joy. Ridl's poems, written in a direct style and tender voice, bring together mismatched meditations, leading us to experience the reality that neither ourselves nor wherever we are is one-sided. These poems are musings on loss and grief, softly interwoven with devotion, human connection, and love. In the words of his daughter when she was seven years old, "Daddy, 'with' is the most important word in the world because we are always 'with.'" Each person reveals infinite realities of "with." All at Once is for anyone in need of companionship or a gentle smile.
A heartfelt collection that tumbles through a life of love in all its iterations. In this collection of poems, curves in all their forms-a woman's full hips, a rolling mountain, water's soft bend, or the thrum of Irish immigrants living at the hard edges-are the focus. In their music, these poems celebrate queer love, map loss and liberation, and explore lovers' scars and the knot of kinship that remains even when love fades. Tragic and tender, The Curve of Things traces the ecstatic joys and difficulties of loving women, celebrating this sweeping terrain of desire. A hymn of unapologetic intimacy and delicate language, these poems choose love over defeat and celebrate the warmth that humanity is capable of.
Seraphim shares the joyous rhythm that sustains Black womxn. Seraphim, Angelique Zobitz's debut collection, radiates with light and wonder. These poems reveal how Black womxn and girls carve out, create, and pass along that lightness in their daily lives. Zobitz pays homage to an array of Black womxn, including bell hooks, Roberta Flack, and Megan Thee Stallion. If you've ever wondered how Black womxn can glow so incandescent, this collection is the answer. This isn't about pain, despair, or the indomitable strength of Black womxn, but rather a vibrant celebration of the love and joy at the forefront of their lives. Seraphim speaks in many voices-sensual, angry, defiant, soft, vulnerable, and continuously reborn.
"Glitter Road reflects on the end of a marriage, loss, and a new relationship against the backdrop of a Mississippi season. She explores the history and legacy of Emmett Till, how his story is braided with hers, and how race binds us all together. These poems reclaim the vulnerable, intimate parts of a life in transition and celebrate womanhood through awakenings, landscapes, meanders, and possibilities. She declares, 'I am done telling the kinder story. I am a myth of my own making'" --
A collection of essays full of startling directness, fearlessness, and surprise. Filled with profound reflections and snapshots from the past, Karen Chase's History is Embarrassing weaves together threads from one single life-a girl suffering from polio, a poet, a Jewish woman, a writer, and a painter. Like Chase, the characters who populate these essays are outsiders-undercover cops, a gay couple in 1500s India, bear poachers, psychiatric patients, and even a president-each a meaningful part of history. Divided into three parts-histories, pleasures, and horrors-History is Embarrassing is an assortment of thought-provoking essays that are sure to resonate with many readers.
A portrait of marriage, caretaking, grief, and recovery. Carole Stone's Limited Editions is an end-of-life narrative journey, from her long-term marriage to the illness and death of her husband. Stone's honest, understated, and detailed poems, each packed with narrative, bring us to the heart of her loss. Stone does not flinch in her descriptions of her husband's suffering and dying moments. She dispassionately describes the everyday details of coping with being on her own--from daily household chores to the loneliness of being single as an aging woman. With Stone's crisp observations and raw honesty, Limited Editions challenges the reader to think about death, grief, widowhood, and aging as a natural process in the life cycle.
Italian Blood traces the bloodline of a family from first cuts to open wounds to healing revealing how violence becomes a legacy that can only be broken by speaking truth. Blood is a character in family stories that flows thickly through our lineage.
Family, friendships, the fear of uncertainty and the regret and damage from the choices we make
The death of a youngest child; an alcoholic, distant father; a grief-stricken family; tentative faith: this sequence of poems that explores how death and loss color memory and influence the ways family members relate to one another's shared history.
This collection tells of a young man dealing with the challenges of being mixed-race, growing up, facing police, and confronting himself. In a time of profound change for the world around him, he seeks to "remember / just when I stopped being cute."
Wormser's eleventh poetry collection shows him at the apex of his truth-pursuing powers. From a young woman's nude selfie to the affair between Akhmatova and Modigliani to the brief life of a Jewish Râesistance fighter, his fierce insights shine.
Atefat-Peckham's poetry interrogates the distances between people and nation, the living and the dead, and the human and the divine to salvage and articulate the radical, empathetic soul after public tragedy as well as communal and personal loss.
Celebrates the courageous journey across boundaries, the intersections between liminal spaces, and the tenacity to endure
This poetry collection explores themes of home, grieving, and kinship. With wonder, empathy, and even rage, Dialect of Distant Harbors summons a shared humanity to examine issues of illness and family. Dipika Mukherjee's poems redefine belonging and migration in a misogynistic and racist world. "A grievous vastness to this world," she writes, "beyond human experience." As the world recovers from a global pandemic and the failure of modern government, these poems are incantations to our connections to the human family--whether in Asia, Europe, or the United States. Dialect of Distant Harbors focuses on what is most resilient in ourselves and our communities.
Poems centered on survival and perseverance in the face of long-term illness. Delivered a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia with a ten percent prognosis for survival, Dr. Dianne Silvestri surrenders her white coat for a hospital gown. Aided by her attentive medical team, family, and friends, she navigates the surreal world of chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and subsequent threats from graft-versus-host disease and serious infections of her compromised immune system. But I Still Have My Fingerprints speaks to the difficulties of "surviving survival." With a clear eye for irony and analogy and a commitment to curiosity and truth, Silvestri writes through her struggles and victories. She gives us poems with unique perspectives, fresh images, and unquenchable optimism, in her perseverance to redefine life beyond what was lost.
Painting a raw picture of feeling broken "in some fundamental way," Carson's poems sing to how that feeling can be mended
Explores the pushpull of received histories, of forces we can't control no matter how hard we try
"From Kendrick to Kanye, to a Sunday in Oakland with Frank Ocean's falsetto in the foreground, Mausoleum of Flowers is still life set against the backdrop of demise. Daniel Summerhill's sophomore collection grabs fate by the throat and confronts it. What does it mean to continue living when your friends are dying beside you? This collection melds an exploration of spirituality and rebellion with Black tradition. Summerhill's poems invite the reader near in order to self-excavate and explore tones of loss, love, and light"--
A poetic meditation on life, loss, and legacy. "So what lasts?" asks the speaker in the poem "El Anatsui." This is the central question of Susan Jackson's new collection In the River of Songs. Jackson is a poet dedicated to exploring the mysteries of what it means to be fully human in a world where love, loss, pain, and joy are irrevocably nested together. These poems seem to answer that whatever does last is not easily defined; maybe only the intangible qualities of heart, perseverance, generosity of spirit, and moments when the poet is suddenly anchored in appreciation for "the ever-flowing fullness of the world." Readers will be touched by the intimate beauty of the poems in this new volume.
A critical look at female queerness through the lens of first-generation culture. Â In Tanto Tanto, a queer daughter of immigrants highlights the struggles she faces in romantic relationships amidst a culture of oppressive, culturally sanctioned heteronormativity. Exploring the consequences of queer love in both contemporary American and Luso-American societies, Tanto Tanto unsettles ideas about the privileged queer body, romantic love, queer motherhood, femininity, gender identity, sex, and more. This collection makes visible and troubling what is often overlooked, misunderstood, and romanticized in âAmericanâ? homosexuality.
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