Poet and essayist Christle’s observant latest (after The Crying Book) offers a microcosm of interiority, cocooning inside the mind until something takes flight: “I like it/ when it feels like my brain/ is being licked by the rough/ tongue of a stray cat.” Staring through a picture window into “complicated green,” Christle wanders through etymological associations (“About the hexagon there is/ I think something French. Thoughts such as these would/ each get rearranged. Or I could be conveyed briefly out/ of my life via pneumatic tube”), distractions (“Somehow/ I own like six nail clippers/ and I honestly can’t/ remember ever buying/ even one”), and the place where real and dream lives intersect (“a Venn diagram I will never draw: the circle/ of physical lovers and its slim overlap/ with the circle of lovers in dreams”). Motherhood is a central yet vaguely isolating subject for the speaker: “I wish that I knew more about/ Papua New Guinea or total grief.” Candid and attentive, these poems humorously and painstakingly chronicle the inner life of thought. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

In her blistering debut, DeSendi turns an unflinching eye on the experience of surviving sexual assault, as well as the patriarchal and nativist systemic violence that victimizes women and members of racialized communities in the United States. DeSendi’s speaker has been harmed and is “the goddess Kali—all sex & death/ in her garland of skulls.” Elsewhere, she invokes Herodias and her infamous revenge on John the Baptist: “Herodias, teach me not to feel/ regret, to like the sound a neck makes// when it breaks, the blade cleaving/ clean through bone.” With piercing clarity, DeSendi explores the psychological underpinnings of an eating disorder as a means of controlling the body for one who has been disembodied by sexual assault. The memory of the assault is inseparable from the speaker’s dehumanization by the state as a first-generation immigrant from Cuba. This parallel is established in the opening poem, in which the speaker recalls watching her grandmother cut a rooster’s throat, and being told to “be fearless & god-fearing/ as any white man.” The result is a monumental work of investigating and archiving the body and its will to survive and thrive in a hostile environment. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

A member of the Red River Métis tribe, Vermette (North End Love Songs) probes her family’s past and future in this ruminative if uneven outing. In the opening section, “Biindigen,” Vermette explores the relationship between writer, reader, and the broader world as it manifests in the space of the poem (“before/ anything else/ my spirit/ light/ greets yours”). The section’s last poem, “procession” (“you are only here/ to learn from those who came before/ and make space/ for those who come after”), serves as a bridge to the second section, “carry memory,” an extended meditation on photography as a social and family practice. Later sections offer narrative poems organized around childhood memories (“you can still feel this/ in your chest/ all these years later”) and lyric examinations of death, dreams, and the women in the speaker’s life (“my mother/ grandmother/ all their sisters/ openly talked about their dreams/ how in their dreams they would see/ the future”). A plainspoken voice yields gems of beauty and brilliance (“our mothers are/ our first mirrors”) alongside clichés (“twinkle-eyed and cocksure/ Uncle was a man/ who had the world by the balls” and self-help catchphrases (“live life/ as if/ you’ve chosen it”). It adds up to a tender yet somewhat haphazard offering. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Smith (Unshuttered) delivers a formidable volume of selected and previously uncollected poems. Performing the work of “desperate remembering,” Smith revels in Black joy even as she records the violence committed against Black bodies in the name of white supremacy: “We are the disappeared, desolate, and misplaced,/ dark magicians stronger than any root or conjure.” The poet’s uncanny ear and powerfully empathic imagination bring to life Black figures, from those who go unnamed in 19th-century photographs to Little Richard and the victims of Hurricane Katrina (“every woman begins as weather”). A bereaved child asks the poet to “undead” her mother, “Replacing the voice./ Stitching on the lost flesh.” An undertaker repairs the mutilated corpses of young Black men for the sake of their grieving families: “I have smoothed the angry edges/ of bullet holes. I have touched him in places/ no mother knows, and I have birthed his new face.” A pressing question throbs throughout the collection: “can poems save us?” At one point, Smith describes poems as being “only ways to layer music over hurting. Ways to say the quiet things out loud.” Elsewhere, she admits, “I really thought the words would grow to gospel in my hands.” Readers will find themselves forever changed by Smith’s spirited voice. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Women and the natural world take center stage in these precise and visionary poems by Parks (O’Nights). The collection interrogates interiority, motherhood, and the choices of famous female figures (among them, Persephone, Demeter, and Ann Bradstreet) alongside musings on matters closer to home, including the stranger who cuts the stray branch of bougainvillea poking out from the slats of Parks’s fence (a woman who takes something beautiful and cuts “it all down like a man/ in a poem about reaping written by a man”). Elsewhere, the poet carefully questions the symbols used to describe the metamorphosis of a woman who becomes a mother: “Which image of motherhood would she choose?/ Motherhood as water or/ bed, motherhood as the event/ or the shape it left?” A series of short and stunning rhyming poems not only have the cadence of nursery or hopscotch songs, but are grounded in the distracted and messy domestic space that motherhood inhabits: “Laurel, anthill, train horn blare,/ pecan shell shards on the stair.” “The Bat” opens with echoes of Goodnight Moon: “Goodbye oaks, dogwoods, ashes and elms./ Goodbye, caves. Goodbye, mines and the coal/ that lit up the night. Goodbye, night that the bats fly by.” As it progresses, the poem shifts toward calamity, with the bats left “indexing the distance between hawthorn and extinction.” Parks memorably evokes the textures and intricacies of life on earth. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

National Book Award finalist Young (Stones) offers an impressionistic and potent collection of sequence poems written over 16 years. Rich with epigrammatic flare (“It’s like a language,/ loss—/ can be// learnt only/ by living—there—”), Young’s work sensitively examines inheritance in poems detailing his family history in Louisiana; a sequence spoken by Millie and Christine McCoy, the conjoined African American “Carolina Twins” displayed in P.T. Barnum’s circus; and a cycle inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Throughout, Young’s language sings: “A wolf in silhouette—/ that whistle. The coyote/ in the quiet.// The hour of our hunger/ is his, only longer.” Highlights include his Dante cycle, which features unforgettable moments of existential insight: “We are born/ with all our grief/ already in us, like teeth,// & time works it out/ of us—our mouths—pain/ for a spell & then there// grief sits, a lifetime, shiny/ lucky” (“VI. Underworld (Circle Three)”). Young’s poems candidly and vividly trace the woven threads of loss and admiration, death and reemergence: “away from gravity/ & the cherry trees/ blooming early// before I was even ready / to believe again/ in beauty.” This elegant volume deepens the body of work by a significant American poet. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

The drama of consciousness comes alive in Poitrasson’s inventive English-language debut, which is divided into 11 sections of prose poems. The speaker narrates their internal experiences after the death of someone close to them, and the subsequent opening of “a void, troublesome in its thickness.” At times, the speaker experiences a dissolution of self: “Nothing stops the loss, the exile from myself, I am therefore I leak, and I flow to the right, left, in front, back, deep down and head-on, nothing left in the middle.” At others, the speaker’s gaze falls keenly on objects (“I must learn to identify familiar objects, for they are changeless and bear my print”) and the routines of daily life (“I empty the trash, pick myself up. A pile, residue. I sweep, vacuum. Feel the void”). An agile style supports the speaker’s inquisition into the porous borders between things, drawing fluid connections between unlike objects (“My legs are heavy, they pull me down, as if the bed had become a pond”). The cumulative effect of so much grief and self-reflective contemplation can feel cramped and claustrophobic, but the collection brims with moments of uncanny observation and epiphany. This is worth a look. (July)

This review has been updated.

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

This definitive retrospective gathers the work of an allusive, musical, and stylish writer and introduces nine new poems to his oeuvre. As in Plumly’s Selected Poems, the entries are presented in reverse chronology, helping to highlight the evolution of the poet’s voice, his turn towards a longer, more narrative line, and the connecting thread of his lyric sensibility. These selections are populated by other poets, especially his beloved Keats. They are sensuous poems of desire and love of nature, particularly bird life, and are haunted by memory and its replaying, particularly of his family (there are countless visions of his parents). His father looms especially large, at some points “the man standing before his children with nothing,” and at others a more complicated, violently tender figure who becomes a guide after his early death: “the floor waxed white, into my father’s/ arms, who lifts me, like a discovery, out of this life.” “Language is a darkness pulled out of us,” Plumly notes. Elegant, stately, and immersed in literary history, this is a grand summation of the poet’s life. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Through accounts of chronic illness, generational trauma, and holding out hope for the future, the yearning third volume from Sebree (Field Study) traces a desire to understand one’s origins. Moving from histories of hereditary disease to questions surrounding the creation of the universe, these poems wrestle with the cosmic without losing sight of the personal. “I feel furthest from where I’ve come/ when womb wreckage comes in clumps—” begins an early entry titled “Hiraeth” (Welsh for a mournful kind of longing for home) about the speaker’s inherited menorrhagia, which serves as a painful link to her own beginnings while also setting up her desire for a child. The creative act becomes a way for the speaker to hold off death and decay through a focus on perpetual renewal: “In poems, I return to water like a baptismal font. Here, I can Big Bang myself—begin again ad nauseam.” A highlight of the final section is a crown of sonnets addressed to an unborn child, imagining motherhood as chance to break cycles of generational trauma and raise the child in an Edenic environment: “In our garden,/ you will choose from which trees to eat—.” Wistful yet undaunted, this collection forges new beginnings out of elegy. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Girmay (the black maria) offers a nuanced meditation on loss and motherhood in her expansive and reflective fourth collection. Grappling with the death of her father, Girmay scavenges memory and family history to make sense of grief. In “Perception Milk,” she writes: “There was a time I/ thought everything/ could be known.” By contrast, these poems embrace a state of not knowing, approaching the world with a relentless curiosity even in the face of hardship. In a world in which “our dead/ are arriving,” Girmay searches for a language to commune with the deceased, turning time on its head: “I am looking back/ from the future,” she writes in “Washing the Mirror.” The poems are formally inventive, drawing on a range of forms including diagrams and scripts. The speaker manages to find moments of relief and beauty by cataloging the lush imagery of the natural world: “—i am learning to lift—my voice—like a flower—in/ —a field of flowers.” These are moving and beautiful poems. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink