Evanston, Illinois. TriQuarterly. 2021.184 pages.
STRUCTURED IN THREE movements—Overture, Performance, Postlude—The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse is…
VERSE
New York. W. W. Norton. 2021. 240 pages. LIVING NATIONS, LIVING WORDS is a project conceived of and curated by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and sponsored by the Library of Cong…
Eugene, Oregon. Resource Publications. 2020. 188 pages. I SUPPOSE IN A BOOK REVIEW one should not be overtly polemical or even intrusive, supposing a reader’s viewpoint. Yet, in a tim…
Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2020. 88 pages. THE OPENING POEMS of Bill Manhire’s new verse collection, Wow, suggest an ecological theme. The first poem, “Huia,” is about an exti…
Zagreb. Fraktura. 2020. 128 pages. EVELINA RUDAN (b. 1971) is an awarded and translated Croatian poet and scholar. She has published several poetry books, some of whi…
Brooklyn. The Operating System. 2019. 106 pages. BIZHAN ELAHI (1945–2010) was not a prominent voice in Iranian poetry during his own lifetime. His relative obscurity might explain why…
Columbia, South Carolina. Alliteratïon. 2020. 213 pages. “POETRY IS THAT WHICH is worth translating,” says Eliot Weinberger in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, his 1987 treati…
Kolkata. Seagull Books. 2021. 200 pages. THROUGH NANCY NAOMI CARLSON’S translation of the French original, anglophone readers finally have access to Khal Torabully’s groundbreaking po…
Todmorden. Arc. 2020. 77 pages. THE VILLANELLE OCCUPIES an unstable canonical history. Jean Passerat’s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” (written in 1574, published in 1606) is the only exa…
New York. Penguin Random House. 2020. 112 pages. SLIPPERINESS IN LANGUAGE, often invoked as a postmodern outcome of oppositional poetry, could mean, in some parts of the world, slippe…
Cincinatti. Hebrew Union College Press. 2020. 188 pages. THE POET TUVIA RUEBNER left this world just months before the arrival of a pandemic that has since shaken it. For a life shape…
New York. NYRB. 2021. 144 pages. IN NAJWAN DARWISH‘S unflinching new collection of poems, Exhausted on the Cross, we witness a poet in conflict with his calling, conversing w…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2019. 120 pages. IN THE PREFACE to Liking in Silence, eminent Korean poet Kim Sa-in tells his readers that “[growing] up through an era o…
New York. Black Spruce Press. 2020. 80 pages. BLACK ICE IS A forceful confrontation with the elements, with the fates, with the self-deceptive possibilities of all human life…
Selected Poems, 1968–1996 New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 174 pages. Less Than One New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020 (©1986). 501 pages. On Grief and Reason…
Szczecin, Poland. Forma. 2020. 64 pages. CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ CALLED Anna Frajlich’s poems cantilenas; Stanisław Gliwa said, “You use the keyboard of Polish language so elegantly and with s…
Montreal. Metonymy Press. 2020. 104 pages. AS THE FIRST POETRY collection by a self-identifying queer/trans Mauritian artist, ZOM-FAM is a milestone in Mauritian literature.…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2020. 204 pages. THE ITALIAN WORD allegria does not have a true equivalent in English, which makes Allegria a sensible choice for the ti…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 112 pages. VALZHYNA MORT’S VOICE FEELS as if it survived a poetic conflagration. There is an imprint of crushed existence—charred bones and…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2020. 112 pages. AN ATLAS IS A BOOK of maps and charts. But what would a “fugitive atlas” look like? In his fifth full-length collection of poems, MacArth…
New Delhi. Yoda Press. 2019. 106 pages. THE IRISH HELD a distinctive position in the British Empire. They were colonized by Britain but were also its accessory to empire in India—to t…
Nacogdoches, Texas. Stephen F. Austin University Press. 2020. 112 pages. ENJOYABLE AND INSIGHTFUL, Fred Dings’s The Four Rings consists of striking images that accompany bot…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2020. 111 pages. NANCY MOREJÓN HAS LONG been synonymous with Cuban poetry (see WLT, Summer 2002, Autumn 2019). In this succinct collecti…
Edinburgh, UK. Hybrid Press. 2020. 95 pages. OISÍN BREEN’S Flowers, All Sorts in Blossom, Figs, Berries, and Fruits Forgotten is an unrestrained book of free-form poetry that…
Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Eulalia Books. 2019. 168 pages. BORN AND RAISED IN ARTIGAS, a town in northern Uruguay across a river from Brazil, Fabián Severo writes in Portuñol, a regional…