Books

The Law of Truly Large Numbers is a book about coming to terms with loss and the arrival of unexpected, perhaps undeserved, love. Based on the statistical principle that in a truly large sample set anything outrageous is likely to happen, this book explores not only the outrageous things that ...

When her mother agrees to enter a Rhode Island nursing home in December of 2019, Denise Duhamel promises she’ll visit at least once a month. By March of 2020, everyone is in lockdown. The elegies in Pink Lady explore the resiliency of her elderly mother and nurses on the frontline, as ...

In Climbing a Burning Rope, John Paul Davis focuses his peculiar imagination, philosophical lyricism, and misfit spiritual outlook on life in the hypercapitalist twenty-first century where the inscrutable logic of algorithms haunts our constantly connected selves. Celebrating the weird and wild, lamenting wounds and weariness, Davis’s poems carve out ...

Longlist, 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry 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 ...

Co-winner, The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2024 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Lynn Emanuel’s sixth collection of poetry is not sequential or straightforward. It has no conventional chronology, no master narrative. Instead, it is a life story, with all the chaos and messiness entailed therein. Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing is a commotion of grief and wit, audacious images, ...

Longlist Finalist, 2023 Julie Suk Award Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. ...

In Auction, her first poetry collection in eight years, the poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry travels the globe in her signature quest into the existential nature of experience. These poems explore the inner landscapes of both the human and animal realms, revealing them to be points along the same ...

Translated by Andrew Wachtel Amid the din of Russia’s patriotic sentiments and Instagram instants, is there any room left for the voice of a poet? Despite the many entertainments and distractions of modern life, Anzhelina Polonskaya’s spare but cutting poems in Take Me to Stavanger declare a wholehearted “...

Finalist, 2024 The Writers League of Texas Award for Poetry | Finalist, 2024 The Burdine C. Johnson Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language ...

Longlist Finalist, 2023 Julie Suk Award OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth ...

Finalist, 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry | Honoree, 2024 Midland Authors Award in Poetry Elton Glaser’s ninth book of poems is haunted by the loss of his wife, each April bringing back the memory of her death. The opening line confesses the struggle to find a language for this grief: “I’...

That Ship Has Sailed synthesizes the serious and comic to address sex, love, loss, death, belief, the afterlife, and the past. The poems are honest and direct without sacrificing “the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts” that Keats singles out in his notion of “negative capability,” alluded to in the title poem. ...