"There is so much bottle-dark beauty here. Jake Skeets is a new, essential voice in poetry, in literature." --Tommy Orange

In his second collection, Christopher Kondrich navigates the link between what we see as our inner value and the external world that supplies it. Valuing's deeply personal poems explore faith, love, ethics, and mortality from a variety of angles and through a variety of poetic forms as a means of questioning the origination of one's own value system. Does it come from the belief in a god, from the love one gives or receives, or from the diminution...

Lindsay Bernal's What It Doesn't Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality. The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural...

Carlo Rovelli, Italian physicist, says that "the world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events." Poet Diane Louie thinks of prose poems as little events. They are happening and happenings. They draw on experience, image, metaphor, and all the properties of language to create little worlds-in-motion-in motion being the operative words: spinning while orbiting, actively shifting our point of view. More genus than hybrid species,...

Extinction Theory is a collection of pseudoscience poems that try to provide rationales for some of life's most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Kien Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. Lam exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning. At...

"Snapshots of youth, displayed with verve and sparkling clarity, in a new collection of poems that "dazzles with its linguistic sleight of hand" (Richard Blanco). From his earliest memories of letting go of Mother's hand, to later jaunts through bars and a first encounters with one's future life partner, Sands writes in turns autobiographically and imaginatively, drawing on voices from his private world and the public sphere to create a portrait of...

"Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between "seed" and "summit" of a life -- the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians -- and it does not let readers look away"--

"Poet, artist, filmmaker, and curator Heid E. Erdrich explores the indigenous experience in multifaceted ways-personal, familial, biological, cultural. These poems, written from the perspective of an Ojibwe woman, reveal what sustained harassment does to people, especially to women, children, and Native and Indigenous people, how it can lead to the oppression of others and even ourselves, and how experiencing misogyny and sexual abuse can make a person...