Subject: Poetry / General

Subject: Poetry / General

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retrovirology

|9780822968351|Poems| 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 Kramer and Gaëton Dugas, others operate as ekphrasis against the creative artwork of ACT UP’s direct actions. Combining reinterpretations of formal elements such as the concrete poem, the abecedarian, and the villanelle, post-confessional poems converse with a docupoetic history through an arc that examines what it meant to…

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Abider

|9780822968375|Poems| “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 of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it was also good-wild, conducive to a reckless freedom she can’t help grieving, even as she falls in love at sixteen and marries hard. Meanwhile, other, electric connections are painfully delimited by heteronormative expectations,…

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The Decadent Movement

|9780822968368|Poems| 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 at death’s near-identical twin – that infinite period of nonexistence that precedes each new life. From the opening poem “Afterword,” each dated poem slides backward in time, with the poem “Hinge” at the manuscript’s midpoint spoken from the moment of childbirth. This unraveling of a predicament by playing it…

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The Blue Eye of Earth

|9780822968382|Poems|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, or birdwatching with her mother, or flipping through late-night TV, or going out to watch the moon again, Fritz Goldberg never fails to attend the romance of a world we are sure to lose. This is a lyricist unafraid of the ordinary predicament of the night sky, a place where historical…

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Rupture Anthem

|9780822968405|Poems| 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 built its shining new cities, and the flowering of erotic desire against the backdrop of strict religious mores. The speaker of this stunning book journeys across countries, cultures, and languages in search of belonging and freedom. Against America’s War on Terror, its ghostly afterlives in her country, she navigates urban…

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