Summer J. Hart is a revelation. What Came Down in the Smoke is a lucid and lyrical account of family and its secrets, love and its losses. These are poems that will steal your breath and stay in your mind.
—Anahid Nersessian
ISBN: 978-1956907988
Brett Hanley’s debut collection I Was Your Bird is a smart and beautiful meditation on history–what happened, where things went wrong, what changed. Hanley situates struggles of class, gender, and place in an embodied, curious world. Finding epiphanic wisdom from dinosaurs, a mortician, ancestral poets, and tough childhood memories, Hanley places the reader at the threshold where the past and the deep past meet. A thrill to witness.
—K. Iver
ISBN: 978-1956907995
Genevieve DeGuzman’s debut is a vibrating intergalactic vision in a state of emergency that ricochets from shedding skins to dancing it out. Her lines float through shifting spaces with spiky charm and tenacious heart. The speaker honors her late mother by rebooting and remixing the past into a multiverse of cosmic existence and chosen futures, with mesmerizing tenderness.
—Shelley Wong
ISBN: 978-1956907247
Maureen Seaton’s Undersea makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into Florida just by turning the page. Maureen Seaton may be gone, but she’s still alive in these poems—how lucky we were to have her on this planet writing, how lucky we are to have these poems. She writes: as if someone might read this / someday so maybe I should write something good enough for / someone to read and enjoy—and she did throughout this collection—over and over again.
—Kelli Russell Agodon
ISBN: 978-1956907292
These fine lyrics thrive at the intersection of mystery and modernity, creating “a carriage of
entanglements” and ever-deepening questions around collective notions of goodness, beauty, and the divine. This is fierce and delicate work from one of our keenest poets.
—Kiki Petrosino
ISBN: 978-1956907209
Cassandra Whitaker's Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf is indulgent, showing us that everything is connected. Through its use of contrapuntal, the metaphor of a wolf, portraiture, song, repetition, and fragmentation, it cycles through thoughts—about family, gender-based violence, transformation, emptiness—to refine those thoughts and invites readers to do the same. Through this book, I've come to know more about the wolf inside the speaker, their mom, dad, lovers, and myself. Through reading this, I've relearned what it means to be an active participant—in the act of poetry and life.
—KB Brookins
ISBN: 978-1956907186
The Book of Echoesis a song not easily sung. “I’m alive and live in my failure to live,” David Welch writes, the imperative clanging against his deft and lyrical restraint. Through captivating accounts of Tourette syndrome, Welch’s language mirrors repeated movements and sounds, embodying Auden’s vision of poetry as “a way of happening, a mouth.” “Look,” he writes, “I cannot move the way you hope I do, a blanket / in the breeze of its own control.” David Welch’s poems celebrate and transform the body’s limits in this intoxicating, unforgettable collection.
—Jenny Molberg
ISBN: 978-1956907230
Rivka Clifton’s debut poetry collection, Muzzle, teaches us to wrap fear around our shoulders like a haunted shawl. To our delight, this keeps us warm, as even the most innocuous things—leaves on a lawn, a stray hair, even the moon and stars in various iterations—become sinister and foreboding. Clifton’s poetry thins the threshold between human and beast, nightmare and joyful epiphany.
—Mary Biddinger
ISBN: 9781-956907148
Past Lives is mysterious and alchemical, it is the seaside floating away while eating a plate of mussels in the evening and listening to the shells drop one by one into “deep yellow bowls.” The speaker of these poems is sophisticated, funny, sensual, and bewildered in a way reminiscent of John Ashbery. There is something gorgeous about the way Adams’s “crystal bullet eyes” aren’t just taking in the world, but capturing the world in flux, each moment brimming with imaginative excess. This book reminds us that our past lives are evershifting “ghostly canopies,” that glisten when we give them language.
—Sandra Simonds
ISBN: 9781956907100
Karen Rigby writes with "fingers cocked like a gun." Deliciously inventive in its linguistic unfurlings, Fabulosa fibrillates with "noir and glitz" in these strange, seductive poems that are in conversation with a range of players from Dior to Endeavour Morse to Hieronymus Bosch. Shimmering with diamond-cut precision, Fabulosa underscores Rigby's observation that "I never write / without measuring, each line / hooking a quicksilver hunger." There is no bloat in this book; it is exquisitely hewn. Underpinning the collection is a keen interest in cinema, fashion, feminism, transformation, and textuality (from ars poeticas to portmanteaus to ekphrastics). Seamed with goldshine and darkness, we find in these fireball poems a "wilderness / glanced through the bull's eye." As the title suggests, Fabulosa is indeed absolutely fabulous!
―Simone Muench
ISBN: 9781956907094
In this elegiac collection fittingly titled Everyone I’ve Danced With Is Dead, Mamie Morgan’s poems are exquisitely stitched as they offer up lamentation for, and salutation to, the dead. These are dedicatory jeremiads against loss that flame with anger, anguish, feminism, and, yes, even humor. And though they are underscored in a bladed nostalgia, they are never sentimental; instead, they are “finding new ways to feel” while “flinging every street-facing window open.” Swirling in the poetic spaces of this book, are caribou, witches, and chickens as well as cameos by Amy Poehler, Mary Oliver, and Iphigenia; but, most importantly, ascending from the book’s foundation is Morgan’s incantation for the living and the dead—the clear and sustaining phrase, “I want you alive.”
―Simone Muench
ISBN: 9781956907070
In the universe of Melissa Studdard's poems, both the speaker and the audience will always have their cake and eat it too. After all, "Life's never dull when your name's Melissa," and oh my goddess, does Dear Selection Committee serve hard as a brilliant 21st-century take and critique of the epistolary, filled with infinite heart and infinite humor and infinite neon signs that point towards the larger-than-life nature of poetry. This is excess. This is extravagance. This is the definition of sensuality. Studdard has the tremendous gift of finding the center of every poem, giving us the whole damn thing.
―Dorothy Chan
ISBN: 9781737513414
Not only a meeting of minds, but also a meeting of hearts, lives, and imaginations links Mary Shelley and Jessica Cuello. Urgent and original, gripping and shocking, thoroughly research-based and deeply intuitive: surely this captivating collection of illuminating epistolary strangeness is exactly what Shelley might have wished a poet of our time to write about her.
—Annie Finch, Spells
ISBN: 9781737513438
In Suzanne Frischkorn’s intoxicating Fixed Star, content and form mirror and echo each other, twin and twine. From the opening line in the first of a sequence of sonnets that generates the book’s architecture, we learn that the subject is separation, from first language, landscape, and heritage, a loss, a violence, a thievery carried by and negotiated within the body, which becomes, itself, a translation. So what, then, can poetry be? In Frischkorn’s hands, it is—well—everything. It is the cry and the answering cry, the body’s disappearance and revolution, history and tangled myth and the site of self-creation, honoring the fragments while languaging them into something greater, more songful than a whole....Fixed Star cannot be reduced to anything but itself. I am in genuine awe. ─Diane Seuss
ISBN: 9781737513476