Joaquin and Nayeli grew so close that one without the other began to feel like a disability. Not in the sense of being incomplete separately, but in the sense of being so for each other in oneness that distance feels like a severing of their combined hearts and souls. At first, love was a distraction. One that they both fought to keep away. Now, it’s the only thing they’re fighting to have remain. There’s just one problem – their lack of being completely honest with each other becomes the sever that may separate them completely and permanently. Will that be the case? Or will love find a way to reconnect their tattered souls and tie them to each other for eternity?

    Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure—all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.

    Continuing conversations begun by Citizen and Between the World and Me, Silencer sings out the dangers of unspoken taboos present on quiet Midwestern cul-de-sacs and in stifling professional settings, the dangers in closing the window on “a rainbow coalition of cops doing calisthenics around/a six-foot, three-hundred-fifty-pound man, choked back into the earth for what/looked a lot, to me, like sport.”Here, the language and cadences of hip-hop and academia meet prayer—these poems are crucibles, from which emerge profound allegories and subtle elegies, sharp humor and incisive critiques.

    Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.So, while I lead this choir, I still find thatI'm being led…I'm a missionarymending my faith in the midst of this flock…I toil in their fields of praise. When folks seethese freedmen stand and sing, they hear their Godspeak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

    She loved Je’Marcus Watford past his flaws and stayed loyal, even when he failed to put her first. She dove head first into their young love, allowing Je’Marcus to be her lifeline when her mother abandoned her to chase the street life, but when the smoke clears and those blinders come off, Aniqa finds herself living a heart-breaking nightmare. Hoping to give her baby girl, Essence, the world, Aniqa is faced with a tough decision: move on from Je’Marcus’ abusive love drought, or stay blindly committed to a disloyal dude. There’s just one problem, though: the only way Je’Marcus plans to let her go is through death. Linc Carmichael is a low key boss that wants no parts of the L word. Determined to take the family business to the next level, he plays it close to the chest when dealing with chicks. He sticks to chicks that don’t expect a commitment and has one main rule: no chicks with kids. That all goes out the window when he meets Aniqa; her natural beauty and heart of gold bring Linc to his knees, and he knows he has to have her—no matter who has to die in the process. Crushed is what you feel when love don’t love you back, but Linc just might be the one to renew Aniqa’s faith in love when she finds herself Crushin’ on a Boss....

    Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better."to the sea"great storage house, historyon which we rode, we touchedthe brief pulse of your flutteringpages, spelled with salt & life,your rage, your indifferenceyour gentleness washing our feet,all of you going onwhether or not we live,to you we bring our carnationsyellow & pink, how they floatlike bright sentences atopyour memory's dark hairAracelis Girmay is the author of three poetry collections, the black maria; Kingdom Animalia, which won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the NBCC Award; and Teeth. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome, Cave Canem, and Watson foundations, as well as Civitella Ranieri and the NEA. She currently teaches at Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University's low residency MFA program. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.

    The extraordinary sequence at the heart of this book taps into the radical power of the sonnet form, bending it into a kind of metaphysical and psychological outcry. Beginning in the cramped space of selfhood―in the bedroom, cluttered with doubts, and in the throes of marital loss―these poems edge toward the clarity of “what I can know and admit to knowing.” In song and in silence, Ford inhabits the rooms of anguish and redemption with scouring exactness. This is poetry that “can break open, // it can break your life, it will break you // until you remain.” If You Have to Go is Ford’s most luminous and moving collection.

    That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

     Sisters Hill, Haven and Hailo live a lavish life built off the wealth of other people. With the help of one man who is undoubtedly the reason the sisters aren't lost to the streets they embark on new capers. Andraco and Waikeem become the target of Hill and Hailo and the story begins. What was supposed to be a quick and easy lick becomes everything but that and the women find themselves torn between what they should do and what they have to do. Even with hearts as cold as ice the sisters really desire to be loved. When they come across men that connect with them on a level that reaches far beyond the physical they're left with the choice to choose love or loyalty.

    The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life.

    “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.

    In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present--titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art.Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, Voyage is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin--five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story?Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire--how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race--a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.From the Hardcover edition.

    Poems take on the voices of Evers's widow, Myrlie; his brother, Charles; his assassin, Byron De La Beckwith; and each of De La Beckwith's two wives. Except for the book's title,"Turn me loose," which were his final words, Evers remains in this collection silent. Yet the poems accumulate facets of the love and hate with which others saw this man, unghosting him in a way that only imagination makes possible.

    For years she’s given up on her dreams to keep peace within her family, but now she’s ready to pursue the life she wants. With one small window of opportunity she’s given room to do just that, however, not everyone is happy for her. Facing the repercussions of her decision from her family and a surprising diagnosis that’s threatening everything she’s been working for leaves Melanie wondering if her dreams were ever supposed to be anything more than a dream. Then enters Kamali James – a natural born nurturer and a man who has been a giver and lover all of his life… until he crosses paths with the beautiful Melanie Moore. Melanie doesn’t have time for a relationship, let alone the emotional strength to deal with everything she’s going through. Will she let Kamali in to be the rock that she needs and continue pursuing her dreams, or will she give up on everything... including him?

    Lorde published nine volumes of poetry which, in her words, detail "a linguistic and emotional tour through the conflicts, fears, and hopes of the world I have inhabited." Included here are Lorde's early, previously unavailable works: The First Cities, The New York Head Shop and Museum, Cables to Rage, and From a Land Where Other People Live.