Don't Call Us Dead by
Smith's unflinching poetry addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity. The collection opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved on earth. "Dear White America," which Smith performed at the 2014 Rustbelt Midwest Region Poetry Slam, has as strong an impact on the page as it did on the spoken word stage. Smith's courage and hope amidst the struggle for unity in America will humble and uplift you.
The Sun and Her Flowers by
A transcendent journey about growth and healing, ancestry and honoring one's roots and expatriation, and rising up to find a home within yourself.
To Make Room for the Sea by
To Make Room for the Sea is a collection of reflective poems about personal and environmental loss, and hope for the future
Virgin: Poems by
Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo's debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman. In Virgin, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity—of naiveté, of careless abandon—before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women
Cenzontle: Poems by
Also available as an eBook https://0-search.ebscohost.com.library.bennington.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1737624&site=eds-live
MyOTHER TONGUE by
[Alcalá] uses empty spaces, hesitations and semantic difficulties to address mothers and daughters, herself as mother and herself as daughter, and the messy emotions and miscommunications that move between languages (in her case, English and Spanish), as well as between and within female bodies.
Diorama by
Diorama is both a book of poems and a performance action by the poet Rocío Cerón, who guides the reader on a hallucinatory, spiraling journey through image, language, Mexican history, and soundscapes.
White Blood by
Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South
Whereas by
The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Din#65533;, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. --from "WHEREAS Statements" WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. "I am," she writes, "a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation--and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live." This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
100 Notes on Violence by
Carr, winner of the 2009 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, obsessively researches intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Whitman and Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs for answers. Do they lie in statistics, in statements by and about rapists and killers, in the capacity for cruelty that the poet herself admits to? This book is a dream-document both of light and innocence-babies and the urge to protect them-and of giving in to a wrenching darkness, where despair lies in the very fact that no single factor is to blame.
If They Come for Us by
From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
Citizen Illegal by
Poet José Olivarez explores the story, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, and gentrifying barrios. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by
In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Obit by
After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In 'Obit', Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.
Invasive Species by
In Invasive species, Marwa Helal's searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees--the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language.
Ignatz by
A collection of love poems based on George Herriman's comic strip characters Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat.
A Lesser Love by
Love poems and elegies for those who have fumbled and stumbled and disappointed. These are poems of love and departure for romantic partners, family members, even countries and communities. Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh has descibred her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things.
What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes? by
Arlene Kim confronts the ways in which language mythologizes memory and, thus, exiles us from our own true histories. Juxtaposing formal choices and dreamlike details, Kim explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration—the abandoned country known only through stories, the new country into which the immigrant family must wander ever deeper, and the numerous points where these narratives intertwine.
Anti-Humboldt by
In 2010 Hugo García Manríquez set out to work through the North American Free Trade Agreement in Spanish and English. The result is a bilingual artifact that interrupts and re- politicizes NAFTA's neoliberal language, becoming a space of transnational encounter that strangely falls on the same continuum as the work of 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—a continuum upon which the institutions of Law and Science dream of stabilizing the flux of contingency into the language of the market. No longer univocal in meaning, the remains in ANTI- HUMBOLDT resist being situated, makes evident the madness of language and rationality words that—to echo George Oppen—"have run mad / In the subways / And of course the institutions / And the banks."
A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness by
A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness features essays and poems by Cherríe L. Moraga, one of the most influential figures in Chicana/o, feminist, queer, and indigenous activism and scholarship. Combining moving personal stories with trenchant political and cultural critique, the writer, activist, teacher, dramatist, mother, daughter, comadre, and lesbian lover looks back on the first ten years of the twenty-first century.
Algaravias by
The fifth and most critically acclaimed volume of poetry by Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Salomão (1943-2003), ALGARAVIAS: ECHO CHAMBER takes its title from an entangled history, referenced in an etymological epigraph: "From al-garb, the West; that language of the Arabs considered corrupted, little understood by the Spanish. Also a name of a plant, given that name for the messiness of its branches." Its ruminations on passage, self-placement, virtual geography, human-electronic interaction, poetic consciousness, and mortality are inflected by Salomão's dual heritage; they also confront the isolating nature of the dictatorship he lived through as well as the aggressively optimistic discourse of post-dictatorship "modernization" efforts: the torrential influx of mass media and multinational corporations, and the sterile, touristic, and militarized landscapes of modern space and spectacle
Witch by
WITCH by Rebecca Tamás is a raw, strange book of poems that merges feminist exploration with occult expression and ecological language. At turns lyrical, philosophical and obscene, Tamáss astonishing debut evokes the sexual prowess of nature as an organism that swallows and consumes. These are poems that unsettle the reader, taking them to dark, magical places where earth and blood, politics and pornography, intermingle; they celebrate poetry as a small, bright, filthy song.
A visceral, unflinching and darkly witty first collection that introduces a major new voice in British poetry.
Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts by
Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts enlivens a personal archive of visual and verbal offerings written and organized by jaamil olawale kosoko. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, kosoko mixes personal history, biography, and mythology to tell a complex narrative rooted within a queer, Black, self-defined imagination.
Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride by
volume nc rdacarrier
Summary Fractured storytelling for a fractured world, Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride draws readers into a world that appears eerily familiar but unsettling as well. Fierce, visceral, sometimes funny, and wholly original, Hoahwah's poems will linger in a reader's dreams long after she's closed the book
When My Brother Was an Aztec by
In When My Brother Was An Aztec, Natalie Diaz examines memory's role in human identity. Each section filters memory through specific individuals and settings. The first concentrates on a diabetic grandmother without legs and the landscape, tangible and intangible, of a Native American reservation. The second engages a brother's strife with drug-use and his unraveling of the family, the home. The third grapples with war as a character and its tattering of individuals, families, and communities. Bigotry against Native Americans is confronted throughout the collection, and the speaker's wrestling with identity is carefully woven into each poem. Faithfulness to and departure from tradition and culture are ever-present. Each poem is stitched into the reservation's landscape, while many consider Christian identity. Natalie Diaz experiments with form, from couplets to parts, lists to prose poems, and explores the terrain of poetic predecessors, yet strikes out into new territory, demonstrating her adventurous spirit.
Cannibal by
Colliding with and confrontingThe Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems
The Galleons by
For almost twenty years, Rick Barot has been writing some of the most stunningly crafted lyric poems in America, paying careful, Rilkean attention to the layered world that surrounds us. In The Galleons, he widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American parents in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism. Here, Barot's poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of Brooklyn domestic workers on a weekday morning; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815. And so these ships come to represent both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides, explicitly connecting the public and the personal, the epic and the mundane. "Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history," Barot writes of his mother. "No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time." With nods toward Barot's poetic predecessors-including Frank O'Hara and John Donne-The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet's work, marrying "reckless" ambition and crafted "composure," in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, "incredible and true.
Notes from the Divided Country by
In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts a number of difficult subjects―colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, and love. She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile.
In settings from New York to San Francisco, from Scotland to Seoul, her poems question “what threads hold / our lives together” in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man’s-land between every “you” and “I,” her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past and hope for the future. Drawing upon a wide range of voices, styles, and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world.
Cape Verdean Blues by
The speaker in Cape Verdean Blues is an oracle walking down the street. Barbosa interrogates encounters and the weight of their space. Grounded in bodily experience and the phenomenology of femininity, this collection provides a sense of Cape Verdean identity. It uniquely captures the essence of “Sodade,” as it refers to the Cape Verdean American experience, and also the nostalgia and self-reflection one navigates through relationships lived, lost, and imagined.
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by 
Holding Company by
In these poems of broken unions and acute longing, Major Jackson explores art, literature, and music as seductive forces in our lives.
Good Stock Strange Blood by
From Good Stock Strange Blood: And, yet, each morning a fireheart grief in the body coming out of sleep. The listening to the smoke as if fills and weeps inside the chest, choking strength out hands weighted, dangling. We wonder where else it lives before it fills the body up. We assume it comes inside through the hole that promises invasion.
Still Another Day by
The first authorized English translation of Aun, considered among Neruda's finest long poems. More aware than ever of his imminent death, these 28 cantos--written during two intensely lyrical days--launch the poet on a personal expedition in search of his deepest roots. It is a soaring tribute to the Chilean people, their history and survival, that invokes the Araucanian Indians, the conquistadors who tried to enslave them, folklore, the people and places of his childhood, and the sights and smells of the marketplace. As in the best poetry, Neruda's particulars become profoundly universal. With an introduction by translator O'Daly.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by
A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty.
You Da One by
"Jennifer Tamayo's riotous new book, YOU DA ONE, alarms and entrances me. Alarms because of its take-no-prisoners exploration of how the logic and graphics of the internet, with all its distracting, capitalist garbage, interpenetrates our emotional lives; entrances because of its ENGLUSH, its defiant, often stunning provocations, rejoinders, and reclamations, its wild lunges from sincerity to melodrama to cynicism to 'shimmerwound.' Like it or not, the landscape of YOU DA ONE is where many of us now reckon with our families, beloveds, languages, heritages, desires, and self-images; Jennifer Tamayo here announces herself as a fearless, even reckless guide."—Maggie Nelson
Floaters by
From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief, and love. In this collection, Martín Espada bears witness to confrontation with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents playing soccer in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He knows that times of hate also call for poems of love--even in the voice of a Galápagos tortoise. Whether celebrating the visions of fallen dreamers and poets or condemning the devastation of Hurricane Maria and official negligence in his father's Puerto Rico, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits
Gentefication by
In his debut poetry collection Gentefication, Antonio Lopez adorns novelty with innovation by rendering the reader-in addition to the objective world-in surprising new ways. As if they were exorcising our demons or, less ominously, assigning us roles that break from the typecast routines of our daily lives, these poems call to the surface aspects of ourselves that we are rarely asked to engage. Poems tender and ironic, earnest and outraged display a mind abundant with knowledge yet desperate for answers. While so much American poetry asks of the reader only their passive attention, these poems work like personal trainers. They call for the kind of mental and spiritual absorption that can make prayer feel productive. Gregory Pardlo, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Black Unicorn Poems by 
The Tradition by
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction
Nature Poem by
Nature Poem follows Teebs--a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet--who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he's adamant--bratty, even--about his distaste for the word "natural," over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the "natural world," he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
