A noteworthy member of the self-appointed Second New York School, Notley (For the Ride) takes the title of her expansive 50th book from a poem by Frank O’Hara: she is “reflected upon” by people and places witnessed and imagined during a 17-year period of loss, illness, and joyful remembering from 2000 to 2017. After the death of her second husband (“Doug—April 21, 2000”), Notley lives in Paris (“for the health care”), having undergone radiation treatments for cancer. There, she is delighted to be—through a club membership—“an international poet.” She visits her mother in Needles, Ariz., where she grew up: “she doesn’t want me there because I know she’s dying/ others don’t seem to then she wants me there again/ and I’m there and back here and there and then there again./ I hate people who listen to music on machines.” Interruptions in the form of dreams, flashbacks, Lucrezia Borgia, Ginsberg, an acid trip, her husbands and sons break the flow, though the poet’s stamina and humor are good company throughout, “Dream old pay phone ringing in hospital I pick up/ receiver voice says ‘The answer is awe.’ ” Notley offers an intriguing and spirited reflection on a life in poetry. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Impressively translated by Yang (Line and Light), this ambitious and capacious long poem from Dao spans the poet’s life in China and in exile abroad, interweaving reflections on history with personal recollections. Over 34 cantos, the poem places Dao’s disillusionment with the Communist Party (“all revolutions are ideals betrayed”) alongside warm encounters with friends and colleagues, including Gary Snyder and Eliot Weinberger. The sections quote Dao’s earlier work as well as other poets, touching on the lives of writers important to him, from Li Bai to Dylan Thomas to Mahmoud Darwish. Lucid metaphors address the impact of sweeping political change: “a row of classrooms hitched to a locomotive/ the new subject is class struggle” and “military troops reverse the spin of the Earth.” Elsewhere, statements of fact (“I will be immediately deported from China”) are interspersed with more abstract pronouncements: “horizon rehearses the winter overture.” For Dao, the act of writing poetry is life-defining, equivalent to “sending letters though tomorrow has no address.” Alternately gnomic and laconic, these poems of motion are a forceful accomplishment, yoking together lyric and epic to narrate one man’s journey and to propose an expansive idea of history. (May)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Martin’s avant-garde fifth volume (after Good Stock, Strange Blood) employs a fragmented form that invites readers to explore epicurean—and sometimes hedonistic—complexity and vulnerability. With wide-open daring, these poems address the poet’s relationship with past lovers, including the self. In the title entry, the speaker declares they “used to fuck almost any body out of starvation hunger that splits the one into many and leaves you/ arching toward a stinky mattress on a floor. It could be. I could have been. Times when the world/ dissolved.” In “The Wild Weed,” the reader is invited to ponder the possibility of transcending boundaries for the joy of artistic discovery: “What savagery disrobes inside order? What street fight made fragile in a hot/ face glow parted so that, so that/ all liquid is in retrieval.” Other poems offer a raw depiction of academic culture. In the “Winter,” the speaker asserts: “At the university, we/ exhausted a brand/ of racism and wanted another/ wanted whatever was wound by invisible wire/ our eyes blotted by stones.” This charismatic collection explores the phenomenological complexities of human connection. (May)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

Gullette’s precise debut features familial elegies alongside desert scenes, artisanal cocktails, and swimming pools: “We drink Fernet by ironic sculptures/ under misters that make our bangs damp” (“Palm Springs”). Booze, skin, and a series of Airbnbs with mid-century modern furnishings set the scene for the underlying unease: “is that freedom, this wandering?” Indeed, it seems more like avoidance, though the realities keep bubbling up: a lover with melanoma, resulting in the loss of an eye; a difficult brother who died young. The places passed through are similar: arid cities and resort areas that have been scrubbed of past dangers to accommodate childless gay couples . Like the evocative landscape, Gullete’s language is spare, at times bordering on flat, while his sex scenes are tender and deliciously sly, embedding joy in the delectable crustiness of a fish baked in sea salt or the look of a fruit: “I’ve never even held/ a pomegranate before;// its star-shaped mouth/ says that it lived.” These searching poems successfully capture mourning for both past and future deaths, as well as ancillary losses: “If my orchids don’t survive, then I’m not meant/ to raise a child.” Gullette delivers a nuanced, well-paced collection. (July)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink

This beautiful retrospective brings together selections from four of Blanco’s previous books—including his most recent, How to Love a Country—as well as vital new poems. Blanco contemplates identity, belonging, memory, and place as he writes about home, family, and love with a reverent and empathetic eye. In “Splintering,” he unflinchingly enacts the divide between body and soul, describing the moment when a child realizes what being is, as his mother tends to his wound: “I knew nothing of dying. Then she kissed/ the last bead of blood on my finger and said:/ I love you. Meaning what she’d love forever was more than my body, which suddenly split/ from me.” The new offerings powerfully bookend the collection, contextualizing Blanco’s expansive and impressive work. In “Become Me,” a poem written to his husband, the weight of love and death finds transcendence in a place that never dies: “Become my lungs,/ their last gap, nerves firing through/ every scene of our loving. Become the soil/ of my soul. There’s nothing more blessed/ than taking you with me into the ground.” Blanco’s expert command of craft and lyricism is evident in these pages as he offers readers a vision of the quintessential aspects that define humanity, even in the face of despair. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

Sámi Swedish writer Axelsson makes her memorable American debut with a verse novel that spans generations of two Sámi families, addressing themes of migration and colonial suffering through short-lined, atmospheric poems. The epigraphs of these untitled, numbered entries situate the reader. The opener, “Night camp at Lake Gobmejávri, near to where Sweden, Finland, and Norway meet. Early spring 1913,” paints a scenic, ruminative portrait that is characteristic of Axelsson: “A rangeland runs/ from the forest snow to/ the windswept shore// There my herd scrapes/ and leads us/ land to land/ prying me from/ your arms// Alone / among the lichen.” She captures domestic moments with the same eye, providing glimpses into private settings: “In the morning/ we wake early/ drink strong coffee// Hear Uncle Ernst/ treading around in/ the apartment below us// Before he turns/ the key/ tramps into the stairwell// Then he knocks awhile/ on our door// Some article in Flamman/ has probably upset him// and now he needs to/ discuss it// But we don’t/ want to be home// we disappear/ under the covers.” Spanning 100 years, this sensitive, beautiful, quietly rendered epic tells an impactful tale of community and survival. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

The impressive sophomore collection from Johnson (after the Lambda Award–winning Slingshot) wrestles with history, identity, and belonging in poems that showcase the poet’s formal dexterity and invention. Taking its title from the African American holiday commemorating former slaves’ gathering on New Year’s Eve 1862 to await the official commencement of the Emancipation Proclamation the following day, the volume explores the legacies of an America still struggling to deliver on the promise of liberation. Johnson has a gift for collapsing time through his use of form, as in “Now Let the Weeping Cease,” which is both a sonnet and a duplex (a form invented by poet Jericho Brown) and captures a haunted present: “My death is a shade that hums back at me./ My ghost hums back across time’s night-vast gap.” The bulk of the book is a long, terrifyingly prescient poem in prose blocks that envisions an utterly broken commons: “Each crisis punctuated by a crisis. North Jersey’s factories blank as dead faces. Ports with no dockers. An unshakable aura of shortage and lack. The softest erosions ferried us to this shore. Our we fragmented, atomized, and blown away.” Urgent and wise, these poems look back to envision a precarious future. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

The thoughtful and powerful debut collection from Morgan vividly depicts the American Southwest, with a focus on the sensory experience of deserts: “Now in coming between one desert/ and another, I recognize the edges, parting and clear.... Only deserts witness the slow and complete life of water.// A story of chassis. And foraged box springs.// The one sound offered wandering night without horizon.// Each exceeds its genre while remaining truly intact” (“Dearth-Light”). Elsewhere, anecdotal moments foreground the collection’s reflections on language, militarism, and the environment: “My dad shared this story.// He arrived, an Army recruiter, to pick up a new enlistee. A Native kid outside Albuquerque. Everyone in the house began to cry. More people arrived, filling the tight space, and they cried too. Before long my dad was crying with them.// I asked him what had he been crying for. And he looked at me like I was a fool.” Morgan skillfully weaves together landscapes, nuanced reflections on Black and queer identity, and social and ecological commentary in these stirring pages. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

Winner of the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize, Ok in her refreshing debut uses language to push against the staid edges of the status quo, exposing the tenuous and often contradictory beliefs that seemingly undergird reality. With their capacious perspective, these verses bear witness to the hypocrisies of convention on the personal and global scale. A concrete poem titled “Before DMZ” takes the shape of the Korean peninsula before its split into North and South, formally echoing that geopolitical bifurcation in the piece’s two halves, while also exploring the speaker’s complex family ties and calling into question the forces continuing to ensure such a split: “My/ moth-/er sent/ a photo of/ the federal build-/ ing she was/ being naturalized in,/ writing Boring I/ love you. That winter,/ her father revealed he left/ behind a first wife, two kids, north/ before the war.” Ok regularly makes startling connections that invite readers to reexamine their circumstances: “My country is broken, is estranged, is trying, we write,/ as though there is such a material as a country, as/ though the landlord doesn’t charge rent for life lived/ outside the house.” Ok’s brave and idiosyncratic debut challenges institutionalized reality as it gestures toward the possibility of freedom. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

This remarkable volume gathers essential work from Williams (1936–2015; Falling Ill), highlighting his ranging thought and moral intensity as well as his transformations as a poet. In the introduction, Alan Shapiro describes how Williams’s shift to long lines in his later work allowed the poet to expand his ethical concerns into new territory: “In his hands, the long line itself becomes a remarkably flexible instrument, accommodating almost any kind of subject or experience.” Shorter, imagistic lines of early poems—“The twilight rots./ Over the greasy bridges and factories,/ it dissolves/ and the clouds swamp in its rose/ to nothing”—give way to Williams’s characteristic longer lines as he continues to search for answers that don’t easily come, as in this haunting realization from “The Shade”: “If this were the last morning of the world, if time had finally moved inside us and erupted/... I think I’d still be here,/ afraid or not enough afraid, silently howling the names of death over the grass and asphalt.” In “The World,” Williams’s late voice retains his concern for truth but trades anxiety for awe: “reality has put itself so solidly before me/ there’s little need for mystery... Except for us, for how we take the world/ to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.” Sensitive and humane, this dazzles. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/22/2024 | Details & Permalink