Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon Press. 2020. 94 pages.
PHILIP METRES’S SHRAPNEL MAPS is an impressive work of listening, learning, and journeying into the trauma of…
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New York. New Press. 2020. 240 pages. NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O’S first venture into epic poetry is a triumph of the form, which resounds with the lyrical heartbeat of the Gĩkũyũ people in Ke…
New York. Penguin. 2020. 77 pages. DURING A 2019 INTERVIEW with Helena de Groot about the publication of What You Have Heard Is True, Carolyn Forché responded to a question a…
New Delhi. Speaking Tiger Books. 2019. 88 pages. CLASSICAL INDIAN LITERATURE (religious as well as secular, in Sanskrit but also Prakrit, Pali, and Tamil) continues to inspire contem…
Winston Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2020. 112 pages. KEEN OBSERVATION is expected of a poet, and Irish poet Frank Ormsby satisfies many times over in The…
Todmorden, United Kingdom. Arc. 2020. 133 pages. BORN IN GERMANY in 1952 to a Jewish mother who had survived the Holocaust in hiding, Esther Dischereit grew up in a haunted society, w…
Beaumont, Texas. Lamar University Literary Press. 2020. 286 pages. A REMARKABLE POETRY career is packaged in this collection. Jonas Zdanys has published poetry in English for fifty ye…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2020. 73 pages. IN LATER EMPERORS, Evan Jones’s learning is clearly displayed in his engagement with Roman history and in the breadth of his allusio…
Little Rock, Arkansas. Sibling Rivalry Press. 2019. 120 pages. The United States is a young country, yet few phenomena that occur here are new. The AIDS epidemic is one of the foremost among the hand…
New Delhi. HarperCollins India. 2019. 456 pages. Anisur Rahman, a former professor of English at Jamia Milia University in New Delhi, is a widely published scholar in the field of New Literatures in E…
Edmonton. Athabasca University Press. 2018. 108 pages. This book of translated poetry deserves strong reactions, and it both evokes and earns them. It is a complex if short work, and one’s responses m…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2019. 75 pages. What is it about Slovenian poets that continues to tickle American readers? The most famous of them, the late Tomaž Šalamun, was simply fun to rea…
Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2019. 94 pages. When faced with the term “country album,” I immediately think of songs from Nashville and Austin and the usual musical formula including a g…
Gainesville. University Press of Florida. 2019. 133 pages. Fernando Valverde, born in 1980 in Granada, is at the forefront of the “Poetry of Uncertainty,” which emerged in the early 2000s in Spain. T…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2019. 208 pages. For those readers somehow unfamiliar with Ciaran Carson’s poetry, these selected poems, chosen from thirteen books and pr…
Melbourne. Cordite Books. 2019. 73 pages. Before opening Nganajungu Yagu, readers see the image of an old-fashioned suitcase over which the author’s name and book’s title are superimposed. T…
New York. W.W. Norton. 2020. 112 pages. Major Jackson’s fifth book of poems is troubled by its own age. “The soil overruns with honey,” says the speaker in “I’ve Said Too Much,” a confession ripe with…
Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon Press. 2020. 64 pages. One morning last spring, the soil was thick with record-breaking rainfall. The rain itself had stopped hours before, but the ground was…
New York. Penguin. 2020. 160 pages. Despite disparities in time, space, and language, even in translation, Baudelaire’s address to the reader (“—Hypocrite reader,—My duplicate—My brother!”) has a par…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 112 pages. In his memoir He Held Radical Light, Christian Wiman beautifully illustrates his relinquishment of the ambition to write a poem that woul…
New York. Knopf. 2020. 128 pages. A new volume of poems by acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield is an event. After reading the poems in Ledger—a capacious, varied volume—it seems as if ordinary lif…
London. Chambers. 2019. 256 pages. Literature stands on the front lines, wherever noble human impulse confronts the void. Mass extinction of species, collapse of earth’s vital ecosystems, devastating…
New York. Nightboat Books. 2020. 104 pages. The contents of this posthumously published book of poems are presented in four long sequences in the form of notebook jottings, work-in-progress, stray th…
Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2019. 92 pages. The Hebrew language has a special term for the process of becoming less religious, which translates as “to revert to a mode of quest…
Cardigan, UK. Parthian Books. 2019. 115 pages. Haydar Ergülen, born in 1956, is from a stripe of contemporary living poets who have deftly streamed their peculiar national consciousness to the level…