Subject: Poetry / American / General

Subject: Poetry / American / General

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2000 Blacks

|9780822967309|Poems| Finalist, 2025 Walcott Prize | Winner, 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize | Gold Medal, 2024 Florida Book Awards in Poetry | Finalist, 2024 Julie Suk Award 2000 Blacks probes the complexity of economic and politically motivated migration from Africa, which has been referred to as “African Brain Drain.” In the first sequence of poems, Ajibola Tolase explores Africa’s history and encounters with the Western world, providing poetic insight into the economic instability precipitated by the transatlantic slave trade and exploitation of mineral resources. Moving inward, the second sequence plumbs the poet’s complex relationship with his father, connecting his emotional…

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Querida

|9780822948377|Poems| Winner, 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize | Finalist, 2025 California Book Awards | Finalist, 2025 Norma Faber First Book Award Querida offers a place-based lyrical meditation on the poet’s immigrant parents, collective memory, language, and family in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles, California. Through a constellation of interweaving persona poems, confessional reflections, imagistic portraits of people and places, and decolonial poetic rituals—braided with a crown of sonnets—a choir of speakers navigate the fraught inheritance of memory frayed by the generational trauma of migration, coloniality, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism. Swaying between maximalist and carnivalesque…

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Absent Here

|9780822967286|Poems| Winner, 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry | Named an Anchorage Daily News Favorite Book of 2024 | Longlist, 2024 Julie Suk Award Landscape and language drive the poems in Absent Here, which explore loss, community, the changing environment, and whiteness of skin and scenery against the backdrop of the Alaskan North Slope of the author’s youth. More than mere background, the land and water become characters in their own right, guiding syntactic forms and flowing reflections. Bret Shepard merges cultural experiences with meditative moments, ensuring that the voices and stories of this community are not lost to time,…

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The Selected Shepherd

|9780822948216|Poems| A New York Times Best Poetry Book 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 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….

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OCTOBERS

|9780822967088|Poems| 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 of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language—as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home”…

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