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"wyrd] bird grapples with the impossibility and necessity of affirming mystical experience in a world fraught with ecological and individual loss. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, fragmentary notebook, collection of poems, and scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as a guide through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by figures from Milton's Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats's hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition's central poetic texts. Refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches out an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love"--

"The "breathing place" - individual, bespoken - is where the world enters uninvited, where "fair is only an experiment," where poetry's resistance has "slackened, gray, with some rain," where "the garden is a gulf in the intercom, where "today's word from Delphi / is delphinium, expensive / blue word, dust payment due tomorrow," where "seven of my sweet loves drove off of cliffs . . ." - in short, a place of jolts and wrongs, if also of opportunities: "Engage / Lower your oars for the recommencing." It is met here by a style of nervous immediacy, a style built for alertness, not comfort, ready to shove the English language around Americanly, as Gertrude Stein encouraged and Dickinson mastered, and, further, to break out of reality, that already known"--

"Inspired by Lorca's passionate cante jondo or deep song, and the artist author's family history with Andalusian flamenco, Raft of Flame's poems weave together in a time-travelling epic that searches myth and nature for identity, personal and cultural. Imagining when Cortâes lands in Mexico, the collection includes conversations between a conquistador and an Olmec sculpture, Frida Kahlo and Velazquez, Dorothy and Glinda the Good Witch. Navigating her Latina and European heritage through art made by artists of the ancient Americas and Spain, Alvarez maps intersections between personal and political history. Vivid lyrics interrogate the complexities of mixed race. Vital to its narrative is how nature continues to be trapped in the violence of colonization"--

"Native Pacific Islander writer Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry comprised of free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a form he calls "recycling." Habitat Threshold begins with the birth and growth of the author's daughter and captures her childlike awe at the wondrous planet. As the book progresses, however, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinctions, water struggles, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, Perez mourns lost habitats and species and faces his fears about the world his daughter will inherit. Yet this work does not end at the threshold of elegy; instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected--a future in which we cultivate love and "carry each other towards the horizon of care.""--

"The addiction of devotion to proper names is a perennial problem and it will be going nowhere. Against Heidegger is a collection of poetic meditations on that precise and, possibly, eternal addiction. LM Rivera continues his idiosyncratically lyric argumentation against grounded, so-called straight forward, naive, sentimental, easy narratives-opting instead for improvised, collaged, bursting, experimental formations of thinking through a concept to its (im)possible end. The grand philosopher, Martin Heidegger, acts as guide and whipping boy (and well deserved), as the author of this collection attempts to sever many troubled but lasting attachments to myriad traditions-be they overt, canonical, hidden, esoteric, forbidden, or downright disgraceful"--

"La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living runs a bow across physical and mental planes to reveal the kingdoms inhabiting them. From the small towns strung along the coast of the Big Island of Hawai'i to the land-locked landscapes of Paraguay to the volcanic surface of Venus, this is a field guide to flora, fauna, and mineralia encountered, real and imagined. Packed tightly into exploratory rocket segments, these poems ignite our gravest flaws to send our grandest potentials into orbit, showering us all in an antidotal salve to viewing any life as ordinary. Banzai has a literal translation of "10,000 years" and was used by the Japanese as a rallying cry in imperialistic and militaristic contexts. Today, the word has a comparatively neutral translation of "Hurrah!" in Japan and beyond. In La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living, Hasegawa aims to reclaim banzai, recasting the language of war and blind loyalty into the language of a life and poetry created against racism and harmful norms, and toward tolerance and self-acceptance"--

"Scatterplot navigates the landscape of imagination through a series of variations on being lost-and found. Koehn's investigations allow the failures of consciousness, the gaps in the knowable, as he grapples with a sensory terrain perceivable in the shadow of natural history and the glow of the family room TV. Here is a father and son walking the sloughs of the California Delta through the mayhem of a world dismissive of, but requiring, love. The work diagrams connections from media, art, film, music, nature, history, and details about members of his family into a web of coordinates forming constellations of beauty and tragedy. From the music of Bad Brains to the life-cycle of the Tongue Eating Louse to the deconstruction of Mutant Mania toys to the talking poems of David Antin to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain - the work details both how this writer embraces the present, and takes responsibility for his insufficiencies and fiascos, in a world so full of imperfection one can't but both laugh and cry. In what amount to a mix of experiments - erasures, surreal narratives, collage, walking/talking poems, and more - the delta between right now and forever seems inextricably present and pleasurably mixed. Wild vulnerability, infinitely odd observation, and uninhibited daring inhabit these poems"--

"Borderland Apocrypha is centered around the collective histories of Mexican lynchings following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and the subsequent erasures, traumas, and state-sanctioned violences committed towards communities of color in the present day. Cody's debut collection responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories via an experimental poetic that invents and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book's axis in a resistance, a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. Part autohistoria, part docupoetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha exhumes the past in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and future- building"--

"The poems in the book attempt to locate the slippery presence of silence in paintings and photographs, in the absences of bird sound, in ruin, pauses, and grief, and in the opaqueness of others and oneself. They address both the destruction behind some kinds of silence and the revitalizing possibilities in silent contemplation"--

The poems begin where language fails, where speech becomes disembodied, and syntax skids to a stop that dissolves into gesture. Where its form reaches an end, formlessness offers a space ripe with possibility. Here we find Harpo, reaching into the frustrated endpoint of language to find a method for its resurrection. Fry sees that language becomes a tool for alienation and uses the poems in Harpo Before the Opus to excavate paths back to tenderness. These are poems from the edge, pulling language out from its failure and into a fervent interrogation of its possibilities. What was once a tool of capitalistic alienation now serves as material for building connections. In spiraling explorations of rhetoric, these poems allow language to break from its prescribed structures, and instead, it becomes a gestural embrace of feeling and being. Fry utilizes a Marxist lens to scrutinize and reinvent the use of language. In Fry‿s hands, language is rendered a visceral and sensual material, forming poems that are both deeply felt philosophical inquiries and wildly playful exercises of wit. Â

What happens when the faith and community we once held close sours into an experience of tragedy? In Since Sunday, we find a poet who is rebuilding a sense of faith after fleeing religious abuse. Doubt, shame, uncertainty, and the pains of loss create the ground from which these poems grow. After severance from her religion, established values, and sense of direction, Tomaselli embarks on recovery as an active and intentional pursuit. The poems reveal a resilience that must be lived as a daily effort to cope with trauma and to root oneself in the present.    Through wit, vulnerability, and rich lyrical language, Tomaselli invites us to walk with her through loss and on to a persistent process of discovery. The poems chronicle a cultivation of awe, unearthing a fresh faith rooted in the present realness of everyday experiences. Stripped of the orthodoxy that both grew and crushed her, she reconstructs a new core of trust for herself.  Here we learn with the poet to seek celebration in daily life and to foster a sense of beauty from the mundane.

"This book is a dark, 21st-century fairytale set to music, short attentions spans, and long, shared familial memories. The narration takes place inside a Black, female body more attached to and comfortable with outside narratives, lyrics, stories, dreams, aspirational relationships, and images, than herself. Once she turns down the noise, she discovers boundaries, real and perceived, societal and self-imposed, and the horrific and wonderful things that can happen when they are breached"--

"The poems that comprise Variations on Dawn and Dusk are best considered as a single inquiry broken into discrete parts--they don't build exactly one upon another, they aren't a progressive series, but each is a meditation gathered around fundamental points of concern: light, dark, sky, cloud, faith, doubt, thought, care, memory, dust, and more. The project as a whole is meant as an imitation of so deep it becomes a participation in Robert Irwin's untitled (dawn to dusk) (2016), a permanent installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX"--

The three works of poetry that constitute Tribunal were written in the current context of seemingly ubiquitous warfare and the specter of unabashed neo-fascism, ethno-nationalism, and--especially in the United States--reassertions of white supremacy. As renowned poet Lyn Hejinian recounts, the inspiration for Tribunal gradually took shape over the course of almost a decade in the collaborative work she has done to fight neoliberal policies that dismantle the public sphere through actions that include privatizing the commons, busting unions, and imposing a corporate, profiteering model on a range of institutions including public higher education. Hejinian explores a broad range of responses to our deeply troubling historical period in Tribunal's three collections. These poems express an emotional scope that includes fury, sadness, and even, at times, something very close to pity for our humanity, perpetually unable to avoid its own penchant for cruelty. Hejinian is the rare poet who can bring to the page a rich, complex rendering of how mutually exclusive emotions can exist simultaneously. We lose safety and surety, but we gain a wider lens on contemporary crises from her sometimes lacerating, sometimes intensely beautiful lyric verse. It's only in such an artistic and emotional landscape that readers, thinkers, artists, workers, and all comrades against injustice can manage to keep inventing, imagining, and hoping. Throughout these crises, the poet returns to language as a meaningful space in which to grapple with a seemingly endless cycle of conflict. While the works can be read as expressions of protest or dissent, they powerfully convey an argument for artmaking itself--and a turn to its affirmation of life.

This is a book about Americans. Not the ones brunching in Park Slope or farming in Wranglers or trading synergies in a boardroom; they are not executives or socialites. They are not the salt of the earth. Nor are they huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are the others of the everyday, the Americans no one sees. These are the brown and bland ones who understand the good, tough money in working a double, who know which end of a joint to hit. They can find Karachi on a map. They know a shortcut to Ikea. They can land a punchline. These are their poems. In The 44th of July, Jaswinder Bolina offers bracing and often humorous reflections on American culture through the lens of an alienated outsider at a deliberately uncomfortable distance that puts the oddities of the culture on full display. Exploring the nuances of life in an America that doesn't treat you as one of its own, yet whose benefits still touch your life, these exquisitely crafted poems sing in a kaleidoscopic collaging of language the mundane, yet surreal experience of being in between a cultural heritage of migration and poverty and daily life in a discriminatory yet prosperous nation. Both complicit in global capitalism and victims of the inequality that makes it possible, these are the Americans who are caught in a system with no clear place for them. Bolina opens the space to include the excluded, bringing voice and embodied consciousness to experiences that are essential to Americanness, but get removed from view in the chasms between self and other, immigrant and citizen.

"Jason Bayani's second book of poems, Locus, centers the post-1965 Immigration Act Filipinx in America. Weaving his way through the muddled recordings of history and personal memory, Bayani looks to tell a story of migrant bodies, the impermanence of home, and how one learns to find themself in the transient states of the experienced and mythologized America"--

The poems in Lynn Xu's striking debut collection, Debts & Lessons, travel under the power of history's illusory engine and echo its ululations of love, violence, and lament.

Selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2015 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Contest

Considered one of the founders of European romanticism, Holderlin had a mere 10 years to develop his distinctive style before falling prey to a debilitating mental illness. This collection of poetry ranges from the odes of his developmental period to the majestic hymns and strangely prophetic modern compositions created in his later years.