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

This spare and arresting collection from Howe (Concordance) comprises four series poems that address aging, history, and the afterlives of texts and language. The eponymous opening section is a long, elegiac prose poem studded with references to religious texts, Roman history, and intriguing glimpses into the poet’s research process. It moves effortlessly from blunt representations of emotion (“I have wept away all my brain”) to esoteric mysticism (“Marguerite Porete says she cannot have what God wills she should/ will. For her, will is nothing compared to the fullness she will never/ be given, and this is the will of God”). In the second section, “Sterling Park in the Dark,” Howe pulls from scans of works by John Donne, Goethe, Henry James, and others to create typographically innovative mini-poems. The third section, “The Deserted Shelf,” is an associative meditation on memory and reading that thrums with loss: “You can’t return to the deserted shelf in your soul across/ miles of brown blanket bog and sand.” The final section, “Chipping Sparrow,” consists of one shorter poem that distills the volume’s themes into a quiet but transfixing sequence on mortality. Howe reaffirms her position as a poet of the archives, bringing a new and enduring life to historical texts. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

The surreal and humorous poems of Hill’s latest (after Men Who Feed Pigeons) include 10 sequences mining the links between people, animals, and the urban and natural world. A series of “Self-Portraits” succeed to varying degrees, many sounding like sketches for poems or the punch line of a joke, as in “Self-portrait with a Hornet” (“My sister was terrified of hornets./ I made a sign: HORNETS WELCOME HERE!”) or “And Another Question” (“He always says I ask/ ‘too many questions’ –/ but how many questions/ are ‘too many’ questions?”). Others appear like statements of fact, as in “Self-Portrait with a Mosquito”: “It reappears/ and stabs me in the cheek// although I have done nothing./ Just lain here.” Some moments are genuinely droll, like when the speaker in “The Spider” remarks, “Don’t worry about it, he says irritably. But I’m not worried about it. On the contrary, I enjoy being stared at from behind the mugs.” “Rich and Famous” delivers a satiric blow with great economy: “Rich and famous,/ floating on his yacht,// just him/ and his incontinence pad.” Readers may find it challenging to grasp a greater arc or meaning, as many of these brief entries seem to deliberately avoid deeper reading. However, enthusiasts of pithy poems should proceed with confidence. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

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