South Bend, Indiana. Action Books. 2019. 105 pages.
There is poetry that tries hard to be poetic, and there is poetry that tries hard not to be poetic. Kim Yideum’s poetry is the second sort. Yet poe…
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Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2019. 90 pages. Embattled Representative Ilhan Omar recently said of herself and her fellow freshman congresswomen of color, “We are not there to be quiet. We ar…
Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 64 pages. Huzaifa Pandit lives in Kashmir, India, a region under turmoil from two hostile nations that have kept this beautiful land locked in. Never a day goes by without sho…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2019. 76 pages. This book-length series of poems, Ilya Kaminsky’s second collection, is written as two progressively darkening acts of a play set in the imaginary town of…
Toronto, Ontario. Mawenzi House. 2018. 112 pages. Reading Sasenarine Persaud’s newest collection, Monsoon on the Fingers of God, is like stepping inside a clock and running a thumb along eac…
Washington, DC. Scarith. 2018. 92 pages. Panna Naik’s The Astrologer’s Sparrow is a sonorous collection of poems drawn from her eleven verse collections published between 1976 (The Beginn…
Hexham, United Kingdom. Bloodaxe Books (Distr. Dufour Editions). 2019. 128 pages. Days of Grace is an ascension, lifting the reader through three sections through silence into clouds and fin…
Fayetteville, New York. Bitter Oleander Press. 2018. 97 pages. Italian poet Franca Mancinelli’s The Little Book of Passage, with facing-page translation by John Taylor, exemplifies the best p…
Durham, North Carolina. Duke University Press. 2018. 242 pages. Consisting of a series of prose poems, The Blue Clerk attests to Dionne Brand’s keen social, aesthetic, and linguistic sensibi…
London. Unbound. 2018. 256 pages. Yahia Lababidi has done something at once anachronistic and deeply contemporary with Where Epics Fail, his wide-ranging collection of aphorisms. The book is…
Toronto. Mawenzi House. 2018. 72 pages. In her first English-translated collection, Assi Manifesto (see WLT, Jan. 2017), Natasha Kanapé Fontaine reached back into ancient tr…
Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2019. 128 pages. Whether a product of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or an ancient survival mechanism, it is exceedingly easy for us to cordon ourselves off from th…
Denver. 3: A Taos Press. 2018. 117 pages. Poet Lauren Camp takes us for a deep dive into the landscape and culture of New Mexico and its wealth of personality in her new book, Turquoise Door.…
Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. 120 pages. Ada Limón’s breathtaking new collection opens with “A Name,” a poem that asks whether Eve, when she named the animals, “ever wanted / them to speak bac…
Broome, Australia. Magabala Books. 2018. 179 pages. This discursively monumental collection asserts unwavering pressure on the idea of “Australia”; from within colonially bounded domains, where “One N…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 96 pages. This stunning new volume from Adam Zagajewski deserves to be read by anyone who has wondered how language can describe absence. It is a classic con…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2018. 73 pages. I was introduced to the riveting work of Tanella Boni, a critically acclaimed Ivorian poet and novelist, while reading A Rain of Words …
County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2018. 46 pages. Most of the poems in Ultima Ora are brief, sometimes epigrammatic, sometimes anecdotal. In the best of them, the brevit…
Manchester, United Kingdom. Carcanet Press. 2018. 96 pages. James Harpur’s The White Silhouette is a beautiful collection of poetry in three parts. “The White Silhouette” is a tour of faith a…
Normal, Illinois. Co•im•press. 2018. 288 pages. Recipient of the Cervantes Prize, Juan Gelman is best known for his activism, passion, and the tragic death of his son and daughter-in-law during Argent…
Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 88 pages. Blessed are the ones with attics in their homes. For an attic is a rare construct that serves as a repository of bits and pieces of memory, which in a hectic life are…
Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2018. 143 pages. It is not easy to select poems from twenty-five robust years of poetic output into one slim volume, especially for the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu. The Wild…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2018. 61 pages. The title of Conor O’Callaghan’s new book, Live Streaming, immediately poses an interpretive question. If “līve,”…
Manchester, United Kingdom. Carcanet Press. 2018. 110 pages. In 1909 anthropologist Arnold van Gennep introduced the concept of the “liminal period of ritual,” a transition located between separation…
New York. Akashic Books. 2018. 350 pages. The New-Generation African Poets book series is an ambitious program to publish together poets who have yet to publish full-length books. The 2018 ed…