|9780822968719|Poems| 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 their years of displacement, from childhood homes to the far western edges of O’ahu, into the delirious heat of Southern Nevada. With humor, clear-eyed rage, and an abiding tenderness, Yim’s wandering poems craft makeshift homes across an unfamiliar American landscape. The book’s second movement speaks across time to the poet’s paternal…

|9780822968726|Poems|Colby Cotton’s 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 boundary between this world and the next. “I have only seen you in unordinary ways,” Cotton writes, and it’s true. Through stark poems of emotional depth, lyrical concision, and surprising humor, Steelhead is a meditation on loss and loneliness that speaks to a life lived in the wake of tragedy—the home we…

|9780822968597|Poems|The poems in Oksana Maksymchuk’s new collection explore how different forms of desire are thwarted by proximity to violence and catastrophe, and how they are intensified and enhanced by liminality and mortality. Can love reclaim the territory consumed by war? What does it mean to share in the suffering of others? Are playfulness, sensuality, and pursuit of beauty a cure for numbness, or merely a temporary escape? Nothing to Write Home About draws on the genres of reportage, travelogue, family history, and philosophical meditation to make sense of war’s ecstatic, frenzied humanity, the sense of purpose it generates, and the…

|9780822968740|Poems| “Sometimes it’s hard to know a miracle / is a miracle.” Book of Miracles, Kelle Groom’s fifth poetry collection seeks commonplace or hidden miracles. These poems are an exploration of mystery and longing. The speaker’s experience of alcoholism and recovery propels a desire for transformation. The natural world also opens to the miraculous. Some poems are whirls, almost dervish, in which the speaker transforms into something/someone else—another form, multiple selves, changeable states. While exploring the idea that if one pays attention, the unseen will reveal itself, the speaker is keenly aware of the time she lives in and the…

|9780822968757|Poems| Earth-Shattering News and Other Catastrophes Considered While Listening to the Genius of Love 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 mashups that merge to create a performance-on-page that is fundamentally punk in aim and attitude. Although musical themes and backgrounds are often involved, music works more as both creative constraint and catalyst, than as thematic guide for José Padua. Above all, music feeds Padua’s poetic practice, which is free-ranging, covering topics from…