Winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize Set against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, Julian Randall's Refuse documents a young biracial man's journey through the mythos of Blackness, Latinidad, family, sexuality and a hostile American landscape.  Mapping the relationship between father and son caught in a lineage of grief and inherited Black trauma, Randall conjures reflections from mythical figures such as Icarus, Narcissus and the absent Frank Ocean.  Not merely a story of the wound but the salve, Refuse  is a poetry debut that accepts that every song must end before walking confidently into the next music

    Its poems are populated by figures both familial and fabular: a prodigal brother and a relentless father; the Hermit, Dowager, and Major General; and, perhaps most strikingly, the Bandleader, embodiment of sexual, capitalistic, and political dominance. Mythic and musical, erogenous yet wide-eyed, this is a dazzling book by a space-age troubadour of American poetry.

    Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

    Traveling to Northern Ontario and across the Great Lakes, Passage is a poetic voyage through divorce, family violence, legacy of colonization, and the affirmation of a new sexuality and gender. Previously published as a man, Passage is the poet's first collection written as a transwoman. Striking and raw in sparse lines, the collection showcases a vital Two Spirited identity that transects borders of race, gender, and experience. In Passage, the poet seeks to reconcile herself to the land, the history of her ancestors, and her separation from her partner and family by invoking the beauty and power of her ancestral waterways. Building on the legacy of other ground-breaking Indigenous poets like Gregory Scofield and Queer poets like Tim Dlugos, Benaway's work is deeply personal and devastating in sharp, clear lines. Passage is a book burning with a beautiful intensity and reveals Benaway as one of the most powerful emerging poets writing in Indigenous poetics today.

    Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.

    Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. In Gender Outlaws, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers — new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected mainstream news sources. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.

    Using binary code and texts from classics of the English language such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Joshua Whitehead unravels the coded "I" to trace the formation of a colonized self and reclaim representations of Indigenous texts.Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of the Peguis First Nation.

    The debut poetry collection by Victoria University International Institute of Modern Letters graduate and Adam Foundation Prize winner Tayi Tibble.Cover by Xoë Hall

    Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death are the features of this collection of poetry, set amid the landscape of the South.

    The author of the critically acclaimed collections The Frost Fairs and Spacecraft, Brighton-based John McCullough pulls no punches in this latest - and his most powerful -collection. These are poems of skill, joy and quiet musicality that reflect the conflict and complexity of being.

    African American Studies. "Cameron Awkward-Rich's wintry collection is full of broken surfaces. Fists surge in bodies, blades cleave skin, but most recurrent, a boy dives into black water. Think of an anti-Narcissus who longs to break the liquid mirror, both fractalizing and multiplying his image. Yet the poet winds tight TRANSIT's shifting reflections of puncture and fracture into poems of great tonal discipline and grimly mordant observation, pushing us deeper into memory into myth into girl into bird into mouth into sex onto cars onto trains into your hands, reader. Open the book and get opened by it." Douglas Kearney"

    Whether the focus of the individual poems is musical, digital, or historical, the otherness implicit in being of more than one racial background guides Matejka's work to the inevitable conclusion that all things-no matter how disparate-are parts of the whole.

    THEORIES OF FALLING is the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Judge Marie Howe said of THEORIES OF FALLING, "I kept coming back to these poems--the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn't want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground." "Sandra Beasley slices her way down the page with precision and punch. Her haunting 'Allergy Girl' series will set off such an itch, I doubt you'll ever fully recover...This poet leaves us to smolder and ache in small kingdoms where 'even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.'"--Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

    This book shines light on those who identify as FTM (female to male) and also illuminates those whose gender is more fluid, proving that biology doesn’t control destiny.

    In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes “poetics statements”—reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism.Poets in Troubling the Line: Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Aimee Herman, Amir Rabiyah, Ari Banias, Ariel Goldberg, Bo Luengsuraswat, CAConrad, Ching-In Chen, Cole Krawitz, D’Lo, David Wolach, Dawn Lundy Martin, Drew Krewer, Duriel E. Harris, EC Crandall, Eileen Myles, Eli Clare, Ely Shipley, Emerson Whitney, Eric Karin, Fabian Romero, Gr Keer, HR Hegnauer, J. Rice, j/j hastain, Jaime Shearn Coan, Jake Pam Dick, Jen (Jay) Besemer, Jenny Johnson, John Wieners, Joy Ladin, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, kari edwards, Kit Yan, Laura Neuman, Lilith Latini, Lizz Bronson, Lori Selke, Max Wolf Valerio, Meg Day, Micha Cárdenas, Monica / Nico Peck, Natro, Oliver Bendorf, Reba Overkill, Samuel Ace, Stacey Waite, Stephen Burt, TC Tolbert, Tim Trace Peterson, Trish Salah, TT Jax, Y. Madrone, Yosmay del Mazo & Zoe Tuck. TC Tolbert, a genderqueer, feminist poet and teacher committed to social justice, is the author of territories of folding, spirare, and the forthcoming Gephyromania. Tolbert lives in Tucson.Tim Trace Peterson is a poet, critic, and editor. The author of Since I Moved In and Violet Speech, Peterson is co-editor of the forthcoming Gil Ott: Collected Writings and lives in Brooklyn.