Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain's Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political identity with intersectional awareness. These poems interrogate our collective...

Wayne Koestenbaum knows how to drop the language in the blender of the imagination and hit frappe! The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet's present home and various events from his childhood. Modulating a voice that is urbane and ribald, melancholic and wry, Koestenbaum puts a memorable spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements. Wayne Koestenbaum holds a Ph. D. in English from...

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G. C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third "voice" emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own. The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture...

This debut collection by Cave Canem fellow Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the...

Charles Rafferty's latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, distilling each moment to its essence and grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside. With a knowing nod to the passage of time-day to day, year...

Naomi Shihab Nye focuses on ordinary people and ordinary situations, which, when rendered through the poems in Fuel, become remarkable. The poet imagines the border families of southern Texas, small ferns and forgotten books, Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. Nye has written, "Lives unlike mine, you save me."

Theophobia is the latest volume in Bruce Beasley's ongoing spiritual meditation which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. Theophobia is structured around a series of poems called "Pilgrim's Deviations" and forms a deviant and deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley seeks the...

Diamonds presents a woman in midlife on the edge. In hilarious and heartbreaking poems, Camille Guthrie writes about the trials and surprises of divorce, parenting, country life, and the difficulties and delights of being alone, looking at art, and falling in love. Witty resilience abounds in these irreverent poems about grief and desire, in which the poet meditates upon gender roles, history, pop culture, and academia. Guthrie subverts and teases...

Selected by Richard Blanco as winner of the 2019 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Justin Jannise turns the self-help manual on its head in How to be Better by Being Worse. These poems flout, subvert, question, and ignore the rules with exploratory energy. Queer experiences are celebrated-from crushing on long-dead, sad-eyed poets to drag divas dancing at Halloween parties-gender constructs are questioned, and familial transgressions are laid bare for...

Slope of the Child Everlasting sustains the lyric and imagistic sensibility of Laurie Kutchins' previous poetry collection, The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997), while expanding on its exploration of the archetypes that anchor the heart and mind of her poetry. The characters in these poems evoke chaos and regression, as well as song, wonder, and the tenacity of the imagination. Laurie Kutchins is an associate professor of English at James Madison University...