Winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from the 2023 AWP Award Series.

Classic and new work by poet and jazz writer A. B. Spellman/>/>A.

Inventive poetry explores Jewish identity in America/>/>"How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?" "America, whose death / didn't you come from?" These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor. A dybbuk is a restless spirit who inhabits another's body, and as a possessing spirit the dybbuk is often treated as a demonic force, but it can be read as merely trying to climb the ladder of the afterlife. In other words, a kind of striver. Enacting the idea of competing selves in one body, Dybbuk Americana plays with form via a series of text boxes that create a multi-channel effect on the page. The body of the poem can be read with surrounding and intercutting text boxes to generate multiple interpretations. This innovative poetic technique maintains a dialogue with Jewish literary lineages: Talmudic commentary and interpretation of the oral law, as well as the fragmented nature of geniza, a place where Jews store sacred documents when they fall out of use. Dybbuk Americana weaves together the father-son arc within a larger socio-political commentary and historical narrative. Poems move deftly between the ironic and the mystic, from aphoristic questioning and inventive narratives, to interview, oral history, and archival materials. In these lines, "the angels./ They get as close as they can." Witty, curious, warm, and searching, Dybbuk Americana signals a fresh voice in Jewish-American poetry./>/>[sample text]/>/>CHAIN MIGRATION/>/>It took ten men/>to make a minyan,/>/>but only one name/>of G-d for us to share,/>/>so we settled on/>America, one by one,/>/>we settled on America,/>man and woman./>/>My grandfather/>earned his way over/>/>shoveling coal/>in the hold of a boat./>/>Grandmother sewed/>gold into her coat. In secret/>/>they sewed, they sold,/>they glowed. I dream of/>/>gold. G-d's name in gold/>milked and honeyed/>/>in the dust/>beneath our boots—/>/>our dust. And when they made/>a minyan and didn't/>/>realize it? And when/>they married in/>/>and didn't realize it?/>No matter: they sewed,/>/>they sold, they glowed./>Yes, they sold/>/>their solid gold, sold gold/>into gold, sewed gold/>/>together into dust./>When I was born/>/>they gave me/>a dead man's name./>/>But that's true/>for everyone.

Winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2023 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

A new collection of poetry from Jan Beatty, author of Body Wars.

A chapbook of love poems from Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa/>/>I Said That Love Heals From Inside: Love Poems is a small treasure featuring five decades of love poems by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Komunyakaa is a poet whose work aches with a longing that is rarely easily resolved but rather burns fiercely in each line. Every poem in this collection longs for life, for passion, for a different history, a past long lost, and ultimately to love and to be loved. This selection of poems captures a broad understanding of the love poetry category–there is love and the lack of it everywhere: in the bedroom and on the basketball court in the Jazz club and on the battlefield. As Komunyakaa writes, "Hard love, it's hard love."

New poetry by the author of acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need faces the complexities of life on a swiftly heating earth./>/>Idra Novey's first collection in a decade, since Patricia Smith chose Exit, Civilian for the National Poetry Series, brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days with children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey's spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda./>/>Other poems return to the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where Novey revisits the roads and creeks of her childhood: "Maybe we knew we only appeared/to be floating, but soon and wholly/we'd go under" Like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson, Novey draws from the well of her work translating myriad authors, from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, and from her own award-winning novels. These are deeply lived poems, evoking both a singular life and the shared urgencies of our time, a collection of great inventiveness and wit, conjuring our "bit part in the history of the future."/>/>[sample text]/>/>The Duck Shit at Clarion Creek/>/>We liked to stick it in a BB gun and shoot it./>/>We tattooed with it./>/>We said Hallelujah, the poor man's tanning lotion./>/>Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die./>/>We got funny at Clarion, flung each other's underwear into the trees./>/>Why was it we got naked there like nowhere else?/>/>Maybe we knew we were getting rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water./>/>Maybe we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we'd go under, get sucked to the bottom./>/>We'd sink and become creek bed; its deep mud would claim us, hold us hard and close.

A lyrically and formally innovative exploration of desire and its cost/>/>DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse's 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me! , this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn't always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms—from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun—DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it./>/>[sample text]/>/>from Etymythology/>/>I'm clocked by etymology,/>/>by the way even stilettos take their name/>from a knife. The way a knife, well-honed,/>can strip anything to the bone. Bear/>/>with me, sometimes even the myths grow/>blurry in the distance. The root of Artemis,/>goddess of the hunt, is still unknown,/>/>but likely comes from artamos—butcher./>Let's call this a kind of etymythology,/>post hoc history; let's call Artemis/>/>the root. For her wild heart. Her failed/>femininity. Goddess of gender-fucked/>girls. Crooked prayer. The word worship/>/>is shaped from two shards—meaning worth/>& its giving. A mouth gives faith shape/>like clay. I mean that to pray is to god/>/>a God. To be butch & butcher/>the myth of a son, was to make/>a goddess of myself.

Keen, pithy meditations on a world that continues to surprise us/>/>The poems in Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout's new book are concerned with "this ongoing attempt/ to catalog the world" in a time of escalating disasters. From the bird who "check-marks morning/once more//like someone who gets up/to make sure// the door is locked" to bat-faced orchids, raising petals like light sails as if about to take flight, these poems make keen visual and psychological observations. The title Go Figure speaks to the book's focus on the unexpected, the strange, and the seemingly incredible so that: "We name things/ to know where we are. " Moving with the deliberate precision that is a hallmark of Armantrout's work, they limn and refract, questioning how we make sense of the world, and ultimately showing how our experience of reality is exquisitely enfolded in words. "It's true things fall apart." Armantrout writes. 'Still, by thinking/we heat ourselves up."/>/>Sample Text/>/>HYPER-VIGILANCE/>/>Hilarious,/>/>the way a crab's slender/>eye-stalks/>stand straight up/>/>from its scuttling/>carapace—/>/>the way vigilance/>takes many forms?/>/> */>/>That bird check-marks morning/>once more/>/>like someone who gets up/>to make sure/>/>the door is locked./>/> */>/>I sound/>like I know/>what I'm talking about./>/>I sound like a comedian.

Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye maps the cultural legacies we cherish against those we reject. Playful and wrenching by turns, with lines inflected by the spoken music of their Arabic, Oshiwambo, Xhosa, and Italian contexts, these profound poems explore a life where displacement is the norm. From choosing not to have children to wrestling with a left-hand stick shift in Johannesburg traffic to braising a camel loin for friends in Damascus, V. Penelope Pelizzon’s poems transport us into unexpected depths of feeling with language that is scintillant, luxurious, and wise.

New poetry by John Paul Davis.

Written during the last five years of the poet’s father’s life, Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can’t be said by finding connection with other life forms: hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses, ravens, squid. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation.

In Parachutes Descending follows the speaker’s decision to leave her Bostonian husband for Jane, a San Franciscan artist, while charting the sensual consequences of our bodily entanglements. These poems capture personal desires fermenting among current earthly cataclysms, including climate change and global capitalism. In doing so, this collection asks us to think inclusively about the ways we become with all humans and nonhumans, all of us—past, present, and future—intimately entwined with others.

Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on the life and work of this complex, groundbreaking figure in American poetry.

Incantation and elegy shine through one another in this extraordinary poetic memoirWhen poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother's tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief's syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the book's center glows a more localized light: the voice of the poet as she reflects, with ceremonial patience, on the bioluminescence of the human body, language's relationship to lineage, her mother's journals written during years of estrangement from her daughter, and the healing potential of poetry. A mesmerizing elegy infused with studies of epigenetic theory and biophotonics, A Library of Light shows that to language is to take part in transmission, transmutation of energy, and sonic (re)patterning of biological light.[sample poem]When we are. When we are there, we lay togetherand cover ourselves with our voices. When we areten, we are also twenty-one. We speak of breathing,but this is a thing we cannot do. When we areseven, we are also eighteen. When we are eighteen,we begin our bodies. But we are unmappable,unhinged. A resynchronization of codes, thecrystalline frequencies of stars, seeds, vowels, lyingdormant within you. We are the oldest dialect. Asound the voice cannot make but makes.