Books

For half a century, people from Hawai’i have called Las Vegas “The Ninth Island.” First the product of relentless advertising from casinos and airlines, now a strange truth as so many have left the islands to make lives in the desert. The Ninth Island follows Yim’s family and ...

Colby Cotton’s haunting debut chronicles the aftermath of a childhood friend who dies by suicide and the community left in its wake. In dreamlike landscapes, Cotton estranges settings as varied as fields, rose gardens, snowy observatories, and a long line to enter the afterlife in poems that blur the ...

The collection draws on the genres of reportage, travelogue, family history, and a philosophical reflection on war’s ecstatic, frenzied humanity. Rather than focus on the familiar formula “war is hell,” it aims to capture a feeling of wonder at the resilience and persistence of war as a form of ...

“Sometimes it’s hard to know a miracle / is a miracle.” Book of Miracles, Kelle Groom’s fifth poetry collection, is devoted to seeing the miraculous in the everyday. Through anaphora and elegy, ekphrastic poems, list poems, litanies, prayers, fevers, and visions, Groom seeks commonplace or hidden miracles. These poems ...

This is a book with a soundtrack/playlist. The poems use a range of popular songs and music as a starting point for lyrical daydreams, serious narratives, personal and political reflections, as well as pop culture mash-ups that may seem random but in the end merge to create a performance-on-page ...

Gravity Archives, Revised and Expanded for North American Readers, is a Remarkable Contemplation of Departure and Return Andrew Motion’s new collection gives a moving account of the friction and interplay between past and present. In the opening elegies for friends and former versions of the self, and in the ...

A Dual-language Collection of Minimalist Poems that Shimmer with PresenceThe poems in Voyage to the Center, by the contemporary Catalan poet Gemma Gorga and lucidly translated by the American poet Sharon Dolin, are extreme acts of compression, which explore the ways a poem may use very few words to convey ...

This volume of poetry from Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of her most ambitious, ranging from laments and celebrations for a flawed world to meditations on art and artists, to a powerful exploration of illness and healing.

A bold, erotic,and spiritual collection of poetry from well-respected poet and critic Alicia Suskin Ostriker, whose previous two books were both National Book Award finalists.

Desire Path explores how everyday life, memory, history, and politics work against and toward each other across communities and national boundaries. This collection pleats numerous lives: a boy sent to the shops, a neighborhood thief, widows, gravediggers, debtors, and inheritors. There are multifoliate Englishes and silences, glimpses of music by ...

Winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry retrovirology oscillates between Queer childhood erasure and the AIDS epidemic, pulling from the ACT UP oral history project, informal interviews with survivors, and AIDS historians Sarah Schulman and David France. While some poems elegize key figures of AIDS history such as Larry ...

The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels ...

“Showcasing the poet’s ironic best, it’s a masterly volume about love, not merely abided, but embodied.”–Publishers Weekly Starred Review Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything—or anyone—behind. The origins ...

In her first collection in a decade, Beckian Fritz Goldberg returns with The Blue Eye of Earth, her tour de force of luminous, meditative poems that measure a secret distance between person and cosmos, memory and desire, beauty and grief. Whether standing at her neighbor’s fence of desert oleander, ...

Ms. Magazine Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026Rupture Anthem is a journey of severance, faith, and womanhood across continents. It follows an intricate, dazzling record of a Muslim girl’s becoming bracketed by the oil boom in the Arabian Gulf, the migrant abuse under the region’s restrictive kafala system that ...