Beijing. Tai Hai. 2023. 288 pages.
Poet Wang Jibing is one of the representative figures in China’s contemporary new workers’ literature (see WLT, Spring 2021, 28). Initially an ordin…
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New York. NYRB Poets. 2023. 184 pages. It is quite possible that with the title Sweet Shop, the Western reader may visualize Amit Chaudhuri luring them into a Western candy shop with…
Burlington, Vermont. Fomite Press. 2023. 168 pages. In these days of seconds-long sound bites and granular social media posts, the impression one gets reading through Yahia Lababidi’…
Beacon, New York. NYQ Books. 2023. 73 pages. I do not know of a word that encompasses the feelings of grief, anxiety, and utter calmness in one collected idea, but Lauren Camp has cre…
Ringwood, Oklahoma. Turning Plow Press. 2023. 142 pages. Poems that draw on rural scenes and nature are not the flavor of the day. The poems gathered in Come Before Winter, Ken Hada’s…
Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2024. 224 pages. In How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, poet and writer Mikeas Sánchez explores themes of identity, family, religion, and the natu…
Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. 2023. 106 pages. In his brief translator’s note to Julia Fiedorczuk’s Psalms, Bill Johnston recounts the 2020 interview in which he asked Fiedo…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2023. 96 pages. Saltwater Demands a Psalm is the song at a child’s naming ceremony, the elegy at their death, and the soundtrack that marks important par…
Leeds, UK. Peepal Tree. 2023. 149 pages. Kwame Dawes traces both his literal return to Sturge Town, perhaps the most famous of the free towns established for postemancipation Jamaica…
Boston. Beacon Press. 2023. 202 pages. In Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems, Cuban American poet Richard Blanco, like many authors who live on the hyphen, w…
Richmond, Virginia. Diode Editions. 2023. 68 pages. Rosanna Young Oh’s debut collection, The Corrected Version, is multiheaded in its origins and reflections. These poems descend with…
Rugby, UK. Nine Arches Press. 2023. 72 pages. As one goes through this collection of “post-apocalyptic” verses or hyperobject ballads, which are also “eco-themic,” one is seized with…
Gurugram, India. Vintage. 2023. 119 pages. Varavara Rao (b. 1940) is considered the foremost twentieth-century poet of Telugu, spoken by approximately ninety-six million people. A maj…
New York. HarperCollins. 2023. 559 pages. Words are medicine. Medicine is breath. I cure with language, nothing more. —María Sabina Ambitious, audacious, and teeming with talent, Daug…
Liberty Lake, Washington. Lost Horse Press. 2023. 215 pages. Dmytro Kremin’s A Violin from the Other Riverside arrives in a dual-language edition at a critical time in Ukrainian history and the Ukrain…
London. Seagull Press. 2023. 72 pages. Translators Nancy Naomi Carlson and Esperanza Hope Snyder struggled to find a term that would capture the complexity of Cuban-born Wendy Guerra’…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2023. 136 pages. Thomas Kinsella’s final collection, Last Poems, combines the five pamphlets of Peppercanister poems (that were first presented in 2013 as a…
Kolkata. BookWryter. 2023. 87 pages. Exit Noire is a passionately imaginative collection of verse. The many masks of the poet create a story of lovelorn life, painting it opaquely. Th…
Santa Barbara, California. Gunpowder Press. 2023. 76 pages. Gary Soto’s most recent collection of poems, the fourth in Gunpowder Press’s California Poets series, might be regarded as…
Beijing. Beijing Publishing House. 2023. A versatile genius—a poet, novelist, short-story writer, and scholar—Gu Yan once described what readers might find in her poems: “difficulties…
Boston. Game Over Books. 2023. 72 pages. The sensitive and finely wrought poems of Emily Stoddard’s Divination with a Human Heart Attached investigate the concept of “mystery” as well…
Frankfort, Kentucky. Broadstone Books. 2022. 101 pages. The title of Tim Hunt’s fifth full-length collection of poems—Voice to Voice in the Dark—connotes an image of an intimate, past…
Denver, Colorado. Elixir Press. 2023. 116 pages. It is an immensely personal thing to make a literary debut. Rooja Mohassessy embraces the vulnerability of this journey with a beautif…
Boston. Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. 2023. 288 pages. In September 1941, over the space of two days, Nazis executed 33,771 Kyivan Jews by machine gun at a ravine near Babyn Y…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet Press. 2023. 80 pages. As the title would suggest, Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello is an examination of the poet’s person, rendered alongside—…