|9780822968597|Poems| 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 human activity; the sense of intensity and purpose it generates; and its compositional recurrence through history and family history. Central to the collection is an examination of the process – often unconscious and involuntary – of an editing of memory that makes survival bearable despite its cognitive and spiritual costs….

|9780822968740|Poems| “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 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. Other 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…

|9780822968733|Poems| 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 meaning. Gorga understands both the power and the limits of language; these poems occupy the liminal space between speech and silence. In this her most minimalist style, Gorga’s spare, limpid poems rely on image and metaphor, and are often meditations on the process of poetic creation. They invite a…

|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,…

|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…