There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.

    It still startles, and is just as iconoclastic as ever.These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple, universal. Clear, direct, wry, unrelenting -- Atwood's poetic powers are honed to perfection in this important early work.

    A collection in five parts, Susan Howe’s electrifying new book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths’ inspirations: the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, and early American writings; and in it she also addresses memory’s threads and galaxies, “the rule of remoteness,” and “the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal.”Following the preface are four sections of poetry: “Titian Air Vent,” “Tom Tit Tot” (her newest collage poems), “Periscope,” and “Debths.”  As always with Howe, Debths brings “a not-being-in-the-no.”

    Animals populate its pages—owl, groundhog, fox, each with its own inimitable survival skills—and the poet who so meticulously observes their behaviors has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of skills herself: she too has survived. The power of these extraordinary poems lies in their recognition that all our experience is ultimately useless—that human beings are at every moment beginners, facing the earth as if for the first time. "Don’t you think I’m doing better," asks the first poem. "You got sick you got well you got sick," says the last.Eschewing punctuation, forgoing every symmetry, the poems hurl themselves forward, driven by an urgent need to speak. Headwaters is a book of wisdom that refuses to be wise, a book of fresh beginnings by an American poet writing at the height of her powers.

    Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

    A work of rare beauty and lyric grace, The Ground is an entire world, drawn and revealed through contemplation of the post-9/11 landscape. With musicality and precision of thought, Phillips’s poems limn the troubadour’s journey in an increasingly surreal modern world (“I plugged my poem into a manhole cover / That flamed into the first guitar”). The origin of mankind, the origin of the self, the self’s development in the sensuous world, and––in both a literal and a figurative sense––the end of all things sing through Phillips’s supple and idiosyncratic poems. The poet’s subtle formal sophistication—toggling between flair and restraint—and sense of lyric possibility bring together the hard glint of the contemporary world and the eroded permanence of the archaic one via remixes, underground sessions, Spenserian stanzas, myths, and revamped translations. These are poems of fiery intelligence, inescapable music, and metaphysical splendor that concern themselves with both lived life and the life of the imagination—equally vivid and true––as they lay the framework for Phillips’s meditations on our connection to and estrangement from the natural world.

    Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents' bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.In Su Hwang's rich lyrical and narrative poetics, the bodega and its surrounding neighborhoods are cast not as mere setting, but as an ecosystem of human interactions where a dollar passed from one stranger to another is an act of peaceful revolution, and desperate acts of violence are "the price / of doing business in the projects where we / were trapped inside human cages--binding us / in a strange circus where atoms of haves / and have-nots always forcefully collide." These poems also reveal stark contrasts in the domestic lives of immigrants, as the speaker's own family must navigate the many personal, cultural, and generational chasms that arise from having to assume a hyphenated identity--lending a voice to the traumatic toll invisibility, assimilation, and sacrifice take on so many pursuing the American Dream."We each suffer alone in / tandem," Hwang declares, but in Bodega, she has written an antidote to this solitary hurt--an incisive poetic debut that acknowledges and gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, suggesting frameworks for how we might collectively move forward with awareness and compassion.

    At once melancholic and jubilant, Jackson considers the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination. From “The Absurd Man at Fourteen”He punched her again, a woman called the house,some yelling then us out the door leavingthe kitchen phone cord swinging.

    The debut collection from the vibrant voice of Roxane Gay is a unique blend of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all interwoven to represent the Haitian diaspora experience.

    These new poems are powerful meditations born on the joineries of life and death, union and separation, memory and dream, where lovers speak to each other across the centuries, and daughters wander into their mothers' childhoods. As much about loss as they are about reclamation, Doshi's poems guide us through an 'underworld of longing and deliverance', making the exhilarating claim that through the act of vanishing, we may be shaped into existence again. Everything Begins Elsewhere was followed by her third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, in 2018.

    Teare provides us with poems that insist on the simultaneous physical embodiment of tactile pleasure—that which is found in the textures of thought and language—as well as the action of syntax. Partly informed by an ecological imagination that leads him back to Emerson and Thoreau, Teare's method and fragmented style are nevertheless up to the moment. Remarkable in its range, Sight Map serves at once as a cross-country travelogue, a pilgrim's gnostic progress, an improvised field guide, and a postmodern "pillowbook," recording the erotic conflation of lover and beloved, deity and doubter.

    . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category. --Mark Doty, from the ForewordBest Poetry Book of 2014— Entropy Magazine30 Must-Read Poetry Debuts from 2015 — LithubSpectacular Books of 2015 — Split This Rock“Bendorf’s poems give us all we have ever wanted, to wake up and feel that the body we are in is ours, that the hands on the ends of our wrists—our body’s gates of tenderness—are large enough to hold in them all the things we have desired.” —Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother Was An Aztec“Astonishing.” —The Literary Review“Oliver Bendorf’s poems draw unflinching attention to the process of making… Bendorf strips a poem to its scaffold with an honesty that is at once funny and unbearably sad.” —Blackbird“Bendorf’s collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wilderness is an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because ‘what we used to be matters’ in the way that language matters— however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be.” —Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography“What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. ‘Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,’ he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wilderness is a wonderful book.” —Ross Gay, author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down“The Spectral Wilderness is full of beautiful little bodies, written into being (into becoming) by a maker from whom we’ll continue to be amazed and enchanted.” —Lambda Literary

    Throughout, poetry is discovered to be among our most effective tools to examine the delirium of making contact."Hot":The sexiest thing a woman has ever doneto or with or for me—while wearing the loose breezeof a dress or standing inside its red zero on the floor—while bending over and pulling her shorts downon a racquetball court or to reach the watershutoff valve behind the fridge—as Satiewhispers against our thighs or hummingher brain's native tune as we touchthe smudged glass protecting extinct beetlesin a museum—with her lips swaddling my tongueor finger up my ass—is tell the truth—which makes my wife the hottest womanI've ever known—her mouth erotic every timeshe speaks—she is an animal when it comes to sexand love—comes to us—in that she doesn't primpin front of the mirror of what she thinks I wanther to say or be—the only real flesh—only nakedthat matters––how she looks at meBob Hicok's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the American Poetry Review. His books have been awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and named a "Notable Book of the Year" by Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator. He is currently teaching at Purdue University.

    It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother’s hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what we’re up against."In her poems, love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in. Politics demands feeling rather than denuding it."  —Los Angeles Review of Books"Geography, economics, ecology, hydrology, local and international history; repetition, flat limited diction, lengthy chant; intersections of incompatible discourses, such as a field biologist’s checklist plus memoir, medical record plus ode, incantation plus site report: Spahr draws on these resources and procedures to make poems that feel like bizarre, careful essays, and essays that feel like sad, extended poems."  —The Nation"...a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority."  —Publisher’s WeeklyExcerpt: It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution. About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Perhaps about Non-Revolution’s body. I am sure I am not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies, Non-Revolution’s is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked. Still something about Non-Revolution’s smell and body had gotten into me.

    No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's knack for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"), among other curious topics. Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join in on her journey of discovering herself and the world around her. It's an honest and powerful collection.