Bird’s first full-length collection, Hera Lindsay Bird, was a bestseller in her native New Zealand. Her energetic second volume moves from comedic adolescent shame to the sexual travesties and wisdom of early adulthood: “Now I have a Masters degree in poetry and no longer wet myself/ But I still have to die in antiquated flowers.” Randomly absurd at times, histrionic yet fresh, the poems accelerate and teeter on the edge: “That’s what love is like.../ It’s like firing a gun into a time machine and accidentally hitting Hitler.../ it’s like masturbating to a documentary on South African mines and ejaculating real diamonds.” Bird delivers emotion offset by absurdity (“life is great/ it’s like being given a rare and historically significant flute/ and using it to beat a harmless old man to death”) as she moves from failed hookups to triumphant love. And if “there’s nothing in this world more boring than heartbreak,” there are also poems like “WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD,” which respectfully infuses that too-famous work with the tragic lightness of Frank O’Hara. If “poetry is fake nostalgia,” might this be where it ends? Not for Bird, one hopes. These intense poems will keep readers laughing, for better or for worse. (June)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

In her excellent sophomore outing, Skillings (Fort Not) combines the brutal and acerbic honesty of confessionalism with the self-deprecating humor of the New York School to create an irresistibly original work. She excels at probing her own mind, bringing gravity to even seemingly banal or silly observations. In “The Duke’s Forest,” she interrogates the experience of being in nature, “ ‘Trees, and trees, more trees’/ is just the layered visual experience/ we all have in the forest, waiting/ to let ourselves take in the sign/ to turn back, go home/ and really hate someone.” In “Prelude: A Lump of Pure Sound,” she describes with comic dryness her path to a career in poetry, declaring that she chose her present method of artistic expression after realizing that dance was too difficult: “As a poet, you never had to be anything, since whatever you did was pretty much fine.” She goes on to describe the universal feeling of desperation induced by pretentious conversation: “At the faculty party, I walk away from the conversation about Mr. Heidegger, whom I do not understand, toward one about furniture, which I think about all day.” Full of vivid imagery and humorous barbs targeting both the self and the wider nonsensical world, this is unforgettable. (June)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

By turns bracing and delicate as gossamer, monet’s latest (after My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter) is a vulnerable exploration of love, loss, and the revolutionary spirit of community. Water is a central theme, which monet uses to craft vivid imagery and striking symbolism, from her declaration of awakening, “i dripped from my mother’s arms/ tiny tears of the wide-eyed cosmos,” to her evocation of “the rage of rivers dressed as comrades.” The collection centers on the poet’s decision to move to Florida to develop a relationship and community with a fellow activist, and many entries address the need for political action and love in increasingly fraught circumstances. In the prose poem “the foreshadowing furlough,” monet focuses on the Florida of her childhood, recalling a favorite uncle who was often in trouble with the law, fleeing an abusive stepfather with her mother and brother, and “church sundays with my aunt sabrina and the holy ghost like a janitor of souls.” Monet’s quietly insistent collection gracefully demonstrates that love can be the most radical political act, particularly for a marginalized person in a hostile environment. (June)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cole’s observant follow-up to Gravity and Center finds him living “a cautious, quiet life.” These are hopeful and gilded poems, managing to suggest the rich life of the mind but never abandoning the body. Many are the length of sonnets and possess an intense lyric quality. They are written in the voice of “a positive figure in unaffected light” who is multifaceted, alert, and the enemy of easy answers: “Lustful, moody, shy, I want to keep revising myself,/ like a protean creature, but in a smartphone-free,/ non-GMO space.” This desire is made explicit at times, in winningly forthright and epigrammatic utterances: “I don’t want to become a dignified man who says what is/ expected of him.” The collection reveals a new edge to Cole’s voice—composed, taut with nerves, but tempered with wisdom—that confers the poems an added layer of authority: “Since we don’t know if we live beyond this life,/ let’s give ourselves to loving.” These are exemplary lyrics of witness. (July)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

The penetrating latest from Byas (I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times) addresses the conflict between the observer and the observed. Through poems, essays, and other hybrid forms that engage with photography, painting, film, and television, Byas explores the power of the image to restrict and control Black women. In “Essay on Shuttering,” the speaker describes the gendered dynamics of a photo shoot in eerie, mechanical terms: “He who holds the camera has the say. The photographer says smile and I obey. He motions how he wants me to shift my body and my body follows. Under the bright studio lights of the photo shoot, I begin to sweat—my body’s only rebellion.” Other entries consider the consequences of a society that silently condones the objectification of the Black female body. In “Sculpture Study #1,” a man sexually assaults a woman on her way to the subway, prompting the speaker to ask, “What are we allowed to really be when we hurt in public: human or statue?” An aura of unease permeates these poems as they ruminate on the false fixity of the image: “I still couldn’t become myself.” This astute and ingenious collection shines. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Malech’s moving fifth collection (after Flourish) is a meditation on motherhood and loss in perilous times. Impressive in their attention to language, Malech’s poems interrogate “our moment’s um,” musically considering the complexities of the moment while reflecting on the challenges of writing itself. Rooted in close observation, these poems offer a practice that proves fraught: “wherever I look is looking away,” Malech writes. The collection grapples with the pandemic and a world in which “our list of what is gone goes on.” The speaker is acutely aware of the myriad dangers around them, of how “those mouths of ours that now—still/ now—are even deadly when we sing.” Despite the crises looming in the background, Malech finds room for tenderness and hope. In “For My Friend Who Is Tired of Children in Poems,” she writes: “let’s be sick of the sweetness of this world.” Malech stares into the void with wit and defiance, reminding the reader that “that roar you hear/ is just eternity.” It’s an inventive and gripping work. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bashir (Field Theories) presents a multimedia experience that captures the fractured contemporary moment in dynamic poems of wit, clarity, rage, and sorrow. In her characteristic conversational tone, the poet explores the defiance of creative expression in a ruthlessly capitalist world and the apocalyptic flavor of 21st-century life. Her musings on mortality are especially moving: “I fear I feel/ I fear I’ve sunk too deep deep/ like neck-deep ya know?... I wonder how quickly through death’s door/ one laughs at absurd earthly cares.” The long poem “Letter from Exile” powerfully details Bashir’s experience in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which she traveled between Italy, New York, and Massachusetts. She draws connections between her appointment as the first Black Rome Prize fellow and the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests: “The thing about twenty-first century Negro Firsting(™) is that racism—the/ distraction of it as Morrison warned—is just so boring... Most days America screams to anyone who’ll listen how it hates me so much/ it would rather kill us all than let me live.” The collection’s multimedia elements (including photographs, large block text, sheet music, and etchings) amplify the stakes of the text. This stirring volume deserves a wide audience. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

The joyfully inventive debut by Colgate honors the disabled community. Complete with an access guide and legend denoting options for the reader to interact with the poems on their own terms, Colgate radically reenvisions how a text might support its reader. A poem about the speaker’s partner finding creative ways to convince the speaker to take his antipsychotic medication begins with the universal access symbol for “Access Support Worker”—a figure assisting another figure in a wheelchair—and includes the lines, “he slips the pills into the shredded mango salad,/ pinches a handful into my mouth.” Many entries draw connections between the disabled community and queer conceptions of the body centered on care and friendship, such as “Ode to Pissing,” which reformulates the speaker assisting a disabled friend into a casual acknowledgment of their shared humanity: “The song of piss on porcelain. Lorraine and I talk dreams of bathhouse raves,/ disabled teachers, careers in porn. I ask how she became so comfortable/ with friends wiping her and she shrugs, lifts her shoulders, checks if she’s done.” Colgate’s generous and perceptive poems make an impact. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

This beautiful and meditative compilation of Argentine poet Ponce’s work presents ethereal scenes that seem self-contained in the poetic world (“The body exits and enters./ The horizon awaits the shock of the stones.// And kisses glide on the blood,/ from your lips, kisses”). Ponce, who began publishing in Spanish in the 1970s, writes in a patient, philosophical voice that roams widely between subjects, from a child learning language (“House as Kingdom”) to the tangle of eye, ear, and hand at play in a Chinese calligraphy workshop (“Fudekara”). As Ponce guides the reader through her experiment of “writing as an analogy—and not as expression: to construct another nature without morals, without biomes... at once empty of reference, empty of explications, isolated from ideas,” the mind’s intense presence in the world opens to radical possibilities, even as it ostensibly turns away from the raucous and politically charged Argentine poetry world that translator Shea capably outlines in his introduction. Readers will savor this. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

The marvelous, shape-shifting latest from Ravinthiran (after The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here) features poems of relocation and dislocation, cataloging the struggle to acclimatize while refusing bland truisms. A blending of cultures and landscapes—British, Sri Lankan, North American—creates moments of imagistic fusion in lines full of nuance about the complications of experience: “otherness is something/ they’ll never get their heads around.” These poems are also suffused with the speaker’s self-accusation and refusal to seem more valiant than necessary, even when “Fancying himself/ an action hero walking in slow-motion.” Instead, they seek to capture a life beset by hyper-alertness: “I stayed behind// with my wrongdoing and the exordium/ to this dire this everlasting vigilance.” Ravinthiran writes about his son—“I can’t be still/ the centre of the universe/ how do I make it/ all about him?”—while admitting the geopolitical ruptures and cataclysms he is unwilling to ignore: “between one/ set of murderers and another,/ a shot mother/ dropped her baby/ in the lagoon.” History and the domestic clash within an expansive literary heritage: “from our kitchen the time-travelling smell/ of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.” Allusive, musical, studied yet tender, this is a wonder. (June)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink