Monday, December 30, 2013

"Bringing Communities Together": A Letter from Kit Bonson, Activist and Split This Rock Board Member



Dear Friend of Split This Rock,

At this time of year, many organizations ask for your donation by telling you how they excel above other groups in the community. But as a Board member of Split This Rock, I would like to ask for your support by telling you how we are bringing communities together, especially ones that are close to my heart.

When Split This Rock started five years ago, it was in part a powerful artistic and political response to the tragedy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, I was a peace activist in the DC area and had been busy since 9/11 organizing local and national antiwar marches.   

As we have come to expect, Splitistas turned out in droves to march alongside the peace community. And just as important, Split This Rock organized poetic gatherings that provided a cultural interpretation of our sadness and hope during those dark days. Without Split This Rock, the peace movement would have been missing a critical voice.

Split This Rock has also been consistent supporter of reproductive health, a longtime passion of mine as well. A few years ago, I approached Director Sarah Browning about the possibility of a poetry contest in conjunction with the Abortion Care Network, a national organization of independent providers and their supporters. 

She immediately agreed and we were pleased to see the large response. When the first-place winner read her poem about clinic escorting at the ACN annual conference, you could have heard a pin drop as meeting attendees were transported by the words. Now in its third year, the Annual Abortion Rights Poetry Contest is once again proudly cosponsored by Split This Rock. We are currently accepting submissions until January 10th -- so please send us your work! 

I'm pleased to say that everyone on the staff and Board of Split This Rock is similarly engaged in these and other activist struggles, through their poetry pursuits and through their own organizing. The broad range of issues includes multicultural diversity, GLBT pride, environmental justice, pushing beyond racial barriers, neighborhood development, empowering youth, and creating international partnerships.

Nothing epitomizes these community connections more than Split This Rock Poetry Festival, coming up again only 3 months from now! We invite you to join us March 27-30 four days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation where we celebrate the many ways poetry can act as an agent for social change. 

We know that you are already a strong supporter of this work. We would be very grateful if you would consider a year-end donation so our work in 2014 will be even stronger!

Please contribute today. You can send a check made out to Split This Rock to:   

1112 16th Street, NW
Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036

Or go online to donate here.

With gratitude and in solidarity,

Kit Bonson
Split This Rock Board Member




Friday, December 27, 2013

Poem of the Week: Wang Ping

  
Photo by Yu Jian          


Tsunami Chant

I'm not a singer, but please
let me sing of the peacemakers
on the streets and internet, your candles
in this darkest moment of night,
your bodies on the steps of government buildings,
your voices from the roots of grasses and trees,
from your pit of conscience.

I'm not a prayer, but please,
please give my voice to the children
in Baghdad, Basra, Afghanistan,
and every other bombed-out place on earth,
your crying out in pain and fear;
please give my hands to the mothers
raking through rubble for food, bodies;
my sight to the cities and fields in smoke;
my tears to the men and women who are brought
home in bags; and please give my ears
to those who refuse to hear the explosions,
who tune only to censored news, official words.

I'm not a citizen, but please
count my vote against the belief
that the American way is the only way,
count it against the blasphemy of freedom,
against a gang of thugs who donned crowns
on their own heads, who live for power
and power only, whose only route is
to deceive and loot, whose mouths move
only to crush, whose hands close
only into a grave.

I'm not a worshiper, but please
accept my faith in those
who refuse to believe in painted lies,
refuse to join this chorus of supreme hypocrisy,
refuse to sell out, to let their conscience sleep,
wither, die. Please accept my faith
in those who cross the bridge for peace,
only to be cursed and spat upon, but keep crossing
anyway, every Wednesday, in rain and snow,
and my faith in those who camp out night after night,
your blood thawing the frozen ground,
your tents flowers of hope in this bleak age.

I don't possess a bomb, don't know
how to shoot or thrust a sword.
All I have is a broken voice,
a heart immense with sorrow.
But please, please take them,
let them be part of this tsunami
of chanting, this chant of awakening.

-Wang Ping 


Used by permission.
From The Magic Whip (Coffee House Press, 2003)  

Wang Ping was born in Shanghai and came to USA in 1986. She is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project, which builds a sense of kinship among the people who live along the Mississippi and Yangtze Rivers through exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance and food. Publications include short story collections, novels, and the poetry collections Of Flesh and Spirit and The Magic Whip, as well as Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian, co-translated with Ron Padgett. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. Wang Ping has had many multi-media exhibitions and collaborated with the British filmmaker Isaac Julien on Ten Thousand Waves, a film installation about the illegal Chinese immigration in London. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Poem of the Week: Dunya Mikhail

  
Photo by Michael Smith          




excerpt from Part One of
Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea
 

 


Through your eye

history enters

and punctured helmets pour out.



Frequent tremors occur in your land

as if invisible hands shake your trees day and night.



They blockaded you and banished the oxygen from your water,

leaving the hydrogen atoms to quarrel with one another.



Shouldn't the nations be disturbed by the face of a child

who shuts her mouth and eyes

in surrender to UN resolutions?

But they only opened their own mouths slightly,

smaller than a bud,

as if yawning or smiling.


We made room in our day for every star,

and our dead remained without graves.



We wrote the names of each flower on the walls

and we, the sheep, drew the grass

--our favorite meal--

and we stood with our arms open to the air

so we looked like trees.

All this to change the fences into gardens.

A naïve bee was tricked and smashed into a wall,

flying toward what it thought was a flower.

Shouldn't the bee be able to fly over the fence-tops?



Long lines are in front of us.

Standing, we count flasks of flour on our fingers

and divide the sun among the communicating vessels.



We sleep standing in line

and the experts think up plans for vertical tombs

because we will die standing.





-Dunya Mikhail

translated by Elizabeth Winslow


Used by permission.

From Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (New Directions, 2009)  



Dunya Miikhail is an Iraqi-American poet, born in Baghdad in 1965, who left Iraq for the US (Michigan) in the mid-1990s. She has worked as a journalist for The Baghdad Observer and her work was found "subversive." She was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing in 2001, and her translator, Elizabeth Winslow, won a 2004 Pen Translation Fund Award. Her first book in English, The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005, Carcanet, 2006) was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and was named one of the 25 books to remember in 2005 by the New York Public Library. It was also translated into Italian by Elena Chiti and published by Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani (Rome, 2011). Mikhail's Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea (New Directions, NY, 2009) won the 2010 Arab American Book Award. A new book of poetry, The Iraqi Nights, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2014.



Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!



If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.

Friday, December 13, 2013

Poem of the Week: David Keplinger

  
Photo by Jake Adam York             


Wave


Lincoln, leaving Springfield, 1861,
Boards a train with a salute: but it is weak.
To correct it, he slides his hand away
From his face as if waving, as if brushing
The snows of childhood from his eyes.

The train is coming East. In the window
Lincoln watches his face. You'll grow old
The moment you arrive, he says to this face.
But you will never reach great age. The train
Speeds like the cortical pressure wave

In the left lateral sinus, say, a bullet
In the skull. Then he will have his salute.
Then they will love him. Then eternity will slow, fall
Like snow. Then the treaty with huge silence
Which he, his face exhausted, must sign.


-David Keplinger
  
Used by permission.
From Academy of American Poets "Poem-a-Day"  

David Keplinger is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Most Natural Thing (New Issues, 2013). He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University and is at work on a book about his great-great grandfather, a Civil War veteran falsely accused of desertion and incarcerated in Washington for nearly a year during the war.   

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Registration for Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014 is Now Open!

We're thrilled to announce that registration is now open for Split This Rock Poetry Festival, March 27-30, 2014.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2014 invites poets, writers, activists, and dreamers to Washington, DC for four days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation. 

Featuring readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, parties, and activism, the festival offers opportunities to speak out for justice, build connection and community, and celebrate the many ways poetry can act as an agent for social change.

The fourth biennial festival will take place March 27-30, 2014, in Washington, DC. Click here to register today. Only $85 if you register by Februrary 1. And only $45 for students.

We know it's going to be an extraordinary four days. More information is below and on the website. We hope you'll consider making a donation when you register, too, to help others attend. You'll be prompted on the registration page

Finally, please help us spread the word - scroll down for ways you can help.

Thank you! We can't wait to see you in March!

Split This Rock 
Top 10 Reasons to Join Us for 
Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014:
  
  
  1. Passionate voices for justice & peace - Where else are you going to hear readings by 16 of the most artistically vibrant and important poets writing today (Pulitzer Prize winners, slam champions, Yale Younger poets...) all on the same stage? See video from 2012 here
  2. OK, here they are - Sheila Black, Franny Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Gayle Danley, Natalie Diaz, Joy Harjo, Maria Melendez Kelson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dunya Mikhail, Shailja Patel, Wang Ping, Claudia Rankine, Tim Seibles, Myra Sklarew, Danez Smith, and Anne Waldman. Read their bios here
  3. Compelling conversations - Panels this year on rethinking the city, publishing in Spanish, poetry & the environmental crisis, classroom politics, and lots more essential topics.
  4. Workshops for your mind, body & spirit - Make poetry broadsides, stretch your body and mind, write about race and across race, learn strategies for strengthening your craft and your social justice practice. Read about them all here.
  5. Group readings! - Themed group readings by women veterans, Vietnamese American poets, Latinos living in the Heartland, and many more.
  6. Voices of the future - Youth poets will read, lead writing workshops, teach participants how to nurture youth voices in their own communities, and generally school the grownups on kicking ass and taking names.
  7. Poetry in the streets - With our world crying out for equity and justice, poets will take to the streets with the imaginative and transformative power of poetry. Watch video of previous street action here.
  8. Only $85! - That's right, all this for the early-bird rate of only $85. Register today! On February 1 the rate goes up to $120. Click here to save today.
  9. Students are only $45 - And scholarships and group rates are available. We want everyone to be able to attend, regardless of ability to pay. Details are here.
  10. New locations! - This year the festival will be clustered in the Farragut Square neighborhood of downtown DC, the heart of the capital's social justice community - events will be at the headquarters of major labor unions and organizations working for peace, justice, and environmental change. All within very easy walking distance of one another and the Metro and bus lines.
So many more reasons, too - Meet up with old friends, make new connections in poetry and activist circles, explore and celebrate the ways that poetry can be an agent for change, read and perform at open mics... Four days of transformative events in our nation's capital!

Help Spread the Word!
TT7  
  • Post this announcement to your Facebook, Twitter, or blog.
  • Send post cards to your friends and colleagues and/or leave stacks at libraries, cafes, and bookstores. Contact Camisha Jones to get a stack: camisha@splitthisrock.org
  • Teach? A student? Have your institution sponsor a group of students for a special group rate. Contact Camisha at the email above or 202-787-5210.
  • Want to sponsor? It's a great way to support the festival and get lots of visibility with leaders in the literary and social justice worlds. Contact Sarah Browning at browning@splitthisrock.org for more information.
  • Other ideas? Contact Camisha or Sarah - we'd love your help!

Poetry Magazine 
Split This Rock Collaborate

Split This Rock and Poetry magazine announce a collaboration: A special portfolio in the March 2014 issue of Poetry, with new poems by poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014.

Timed to coincide with Split This Rock's fourth biennial national festival, the portfolio will be co-edited by Poetry editor Don Share and Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning, with an introduction by Browning. The portfolio will also be the focus of the magazine's monthly podcast.

Poetry, founded in 1912, is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Subscribe to the magazine here.

Split This Rock Recommended Poetry Books of 2013

2013 was an extraordinary year for poetry! Choosing books for Split This Rock's fourth annual "recommended" list was harder than ever -- an embarrassment of riches to choose from. Poets are writing daring, innovative, gorgeous books that challenge the status quo and remind us of the power of language to wake us up, to give us strength.

Over the course of the past year we have felt immensely lucky to read and treasure new books of poetry of provocation and witness, and we're delighted to be able to recommend the following list to you today. We invite you to shop your local independent bookstore, Teaching for Change’s Busboys and Poets Bookstore, or Powells.com for all your poetry-loving (and soon-to-be-poetry-loving) family and friends.

We also know this list is by no means comprehensive. Please "comment" below to help build the e-library of essential 2013 books. Thank you!

Yvette Neisser Moreno and Sarah Browning compiled the list this year.

Split This Rock Recommended Poetry Books of 2013

Calling Home: Praise Songs and IncantationsCalling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations, Naomi Ayala (Bilingual Review Press)
“Ayala does the best that poetry can do. She is the poet to whom things speak, no matter how they are called. . . . Simply put, Calling Home is the best book of poetry you’ll read in a long time, by a Latina or any other.” –Lorna Dee Cervantes
The Switching/Yard, Jan Beatty (University of Pittsburgh Press)
“One of Pittsburgh’s most dynamic poets ‘juxtaposes lyricism with brutality’ as she navigates the human heart. … Beatty mixes the real and the unreal in her portraits of life in Pittsburgh, her search for her birth family, and her musing on the gods that guide and torment us." –Hester Kamin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
What We Ask of Flesh, Remica Bingham (Etruscan Press)
“[F]ew crimes are as consequential as those committed to our bodies, and this is the great weight of Remica L. Bingham’s powerful new book What We Ask of Flesh. Bingham profiles many women and girls, all victims of rape or other physical abuses, to revive them (and her audience, I suspect) to consciousness.” -Marianne Kunkel, Prairie Schooner
Star of David, Rick Black (Poetica Magazine Chapbook Contest Winner, Poetica)
“Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.” - Kwame Dawes
Icarus in Love, Antoinette Brim (Main Street Rag)
“Antoinette Brim's Icarus in Love is a stellar collection full of the mythology of living. Utilizing vibrant, recurring images that braid their way through our hearts and memories, Brim raises hard questions of survival and offers hope to us all.” -Jacqueline Jones LaMon
After This We Go Dark, Theresa Davis  (Sibling Rivalry Press)
“I felt like this book was written for me. [Davis] tackles everything I process as a Queer Black single mother dealing in love, politics, transitioned loved ones, sensuality, missed opportunities, and reclaimed empowerment.” -Wise Edits
\blak\ \al-fe bet\: Poems, Mitchell L. H. Douglas (Persea)
“Haunted by questions of contemporary blackness, this second book by Douglas is packed with risk and conflict, but also beauty.” -Publishers Weekly
Unpeopled EdenUnpeopled Eden, Rigoberto González (Four Way Books)
“The latest from the energetic and versatile Gonzalez (Black Blossoms) has a tight focus with potentially a broad appeal: its four long poems look hard at the victims and the antiheroes of the U.S.–Mexico border troubles … He also never limits himself to one subject, working hard to let in all the readers he can.” –Publishers Weekly

Autogeography, Reginald Harris (Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize Winner)
“In Autogeography, Harris gives us the gift of quickening the treasure of black culture in poems that touch the enduring spirit of black people. … The poet celebrates black life and the way it connects to humanity, the bright woven cloth of all our lives.” –Afaa Michael Weaver
Hemming the Water, Yona Harvey (Four Way Books)
“There is no rest in this extraordinary debut book by Yona Harvey. It is a book in which the devastation is still very much alive. … We are taken to dizzying uncertainties, a place between what’s real and what isn’t, what’s intimate and what’s strange, between evil and good.”
–Toi Derricotte
Kohl and Chalk, Shadab Zeest Hashmi (Poetic Matrix Press)
“The bride who contemplates her half paralyzed face on the eve of marriage … is emblematic of the larger story of Pakistan: an ancient culture fractured by new and divergent identities. The poet, like the bride whose face is divided into ‘lit’ and ‘dim’ halves, gazes into the mirrors of history and politics to make sense of the disjunctive parts that refuse to come together as a whole.” (Publisher’s synopsis)
Senegal Taxi, Juan Felipe Herrera  (University of Arizona Press)
“This [is a] startling new collection of poems in prose and verse in which [Herrera] adopts the voices of those suffering through or perpetrating the violence that has racked Sudan.  … Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be.” –NPR
Pitch Dark Anarchy, Randall Horton (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press)
“These are poems of breakage and re-assemblage, dislocation and re-affirmation… I admire the verve and the intellect, a voice poised on the edge of a precipice, speaking what is new.”
Mead Magazine
The Only Thing That Matters, Kim Jensen (Syracuse University Press)
“In a time when the ordinary and the predictable prevail in poetry, this collection by Kim Jensen gives us a truly original poetry of witness. … Finely crafted and marvelously inventive, these poems sing and hiss and howl. They enliven and push and love.” –Naomi Ayala
Darktown Follies, Amaud Jamaul Johnson (Tupelo Press)
“Poses as a kind of mock minstrel show, one that records the ways in which blackness and black Americans have been exploited for the sake of entertainment.” – Slate
Render, Collin Kelley (Sibling Rivalry Press)
“An autobiography in verse, Render ... is one of the best, if not the best, poetry book I have read this year.  ... [T]he poems in Render give readers a good idea of what it is like to grow up gay in America.” –Helen Losse, Wild Goose Poetry Review
Black Stars, Ngo Tu Lap, trans. from Vietnamese by Martha Collins (Milkweed)
“Reading Ngo Tu Lap’s poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me— nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I’ve loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. … I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems.” –Maxine Hong Kingston
The Big Smoke, Adrian Matekja (National Book Award Finalist, Penguin)
“Jack Johnson, the first African-American world heavyweight champion, is a figure of mythological proportions; in this new collection, poet Adrian Matejka gives the boxer a voice that's wholly human. The poet examines race and racism from Johnson's singular perspective.”
Hum, Jamaal May (Beatrice Hawley Award Winner, Alice James Books)
“Linguistically acrobatic, these poems render the violence of a body’s undoing—by war, by drugs—and the mind’s in ways that are beautifully crafted … This book relentlessly explores power and forgiveness, love and fear.” -Publishers Weekly
SHE HAS A NAME, Kamilah Aisha MoonShe Has a Name, Kamilah Aisha Moon (Four Way Books)
“The opening pages of She Has a Name identify the collection as a ‘biomythography,’ a term created by Audre Lorde to describe a narrative based on myth and history, fact and fiction. Kamilah Aisha Moon’s biomythography tells the story of a young woman with autism from multiple points of view.” (Publisher’s synopsis)
The Light of the Storm/La luz de la tormenta, Carlos Parada Ayala (Zozobra Publishing)
“Carlos Parada Ayala’s inventive and even startling language makes new the immigrant tale, the worker’s struggle, the lover’s terror. I would follow this poet anywhere.” – Sarah Browning
Kind, Gretchen Primack (Post Traumatic Press)
“Everything is intentional in the landscape of this well-structured volume. For Primack, the rights of animals are human rights, and vice versa.” - Pank
Gospel of Dust, Joseph Ross (Main Street Rag)
“As with all burnt offerings, in Joseph Ross’ poems something is also rising. We are offered again the stark choice: ashes or bread?” - Rose Marie Berger
Calendars of Fire, Lee Sharkey (Tupelo Press)
“An extended elegy whose grief is political as well as personal. Across barriers of tribe, history, and mortality, her poems carry us home with their music to a dwelling place in our own resonant bodies.” Common Good Books

The Forage House, Tess Taylor (Red Hen Press)
“Every so often there is a book of poetry that reminds us how well verse can speak history.  Taylor, a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson … patches quotations, blanks, and context into a carefully tessellated structure.” – Oxford American


Tenuous Chapel, Melissa Tuckey (Winner of the ABZ Press First Book Contest)
 “Tuckey is a pacifist poet who has given the world she'd like to save the gift of beauty. The poems of Tenuous Chapel exist in order that our existence might become a little more humane and a touch more tender as we reflect on the meaning of our brief stay on earth.” The Journal


Speaking Wiri Wiri, Dan Vera (Winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Poetry Prize)
“Full of longing and bittersweet humor, these poems are lyrical, narrative, poignant, and always powerful. In his own search for who and what he really is, Vera has given us a true portrait of the confused and often contradictory place that is modern America.” Linda Rodriguez Writes

No, Ocean Vuong (YesYes Books)
“Honest, intimate, and brimming with lyric intensity, these stunning poems come of age with a fifth of vodka and an afternoon in an attic, with a record stuck on please, with starlight on a falling bomb.” Traci Brimhall

Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, Frank X. Walker (University of Georgia Press)
“In these beautifully crafted poems, Walker conducts an unusual choir. This choir sings history, sadness, hatred, and hope…These voices skillfully offer the reader a picture of Mississippi’s culture of racial hatred.” Joseph Ross

The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish, Joshua Weiner (University of Chicago)
“Explores how consciousness can be consumed by war, illness, and work… Weiner, in cataloguing what 'the pastoral cannot contain,' uncovers the sharpest lyrics in this masterful book, at once poised and relentless.” Publishers Weekly

Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, Ghassan Zaqtan, trans. from Arabic by Fady Joudah (Griffin Poetry Prize winner, Yale University Press)
“[Zaqtan’s] poetry awakens the spirits buried deep in the garden, in our hearts, in the past, present and future. His singing reminds us why we live and how, in the midst of war, despair, global changes.” – Griffin Prize Judges’ Citation


Anthologies:
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, ed. Deborah Ager and M.E. Silverman (Bloomsbury)
“It is fascinating to see just how our younger poets make their way through language and history, their own heritage, a digital world that has changed all of us in how we communicate, and has condensed history in ways that are new. Let us learn from them.” –Myra Sklarew

Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, ed. Regie Cabico and Brittany Fonte (Lowbrow Press)
“We sometimes can browse the world but sometimes we need detail. We need to know the ugly why and the beautiful why. The poetic Queer why is often neglected. I believe this anthology will go some way to uncover and decorate our eclectic and diverse wheres and whys.”
–Gerry Potter
This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on Teaching, ed. Megan Volpert (Sibling Rivalry Press)
“[T]hese poetic works serve as a beacon, a lighthouse of sorts, not just for the LGBTIQ community but for anyone who has ever been seen as ‘other.’” –Shellie McCullough, World Literature Today


Some 2014 books we eagerly anticipate:
Difficult Fruit, Lauren K. Alleyne
Shadow Play: A Novella in Verse, Jody Bolz
Split, Cathy Linh Che
The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry, Wanda Coleman & Austin Straus
Day Unto Day, Martha Collins
Mexican Jenny and Other Poems, Barbara Brinson Curiel
Thieves in the Afterlife, Kendra DeColo
Seam, Tarfia Faizullah
We Didn't Know Any Gangsters, Brian Gilmore
I Am the Beggar of the World, Eliza Griswold, ed.
Zion, TJ Jarrett
Prelude to Bruise, Saeed Jones
Patter, Douglas Kearney
Hustle, David Tomas Martinez
The Heart of a Comet, Pages Matam
Haiti Glass, Lenelle Moïse
Once, Then, Andrea Scarpino
Nude Descending an Empire, Sam Taylor
The Fateful Apple, Venus Thrash
Comprehending Forever, Rich Villar
Abide, Jake Adam York
Day of the Border Guards, Katherine E. Young