2015 Poetry Books We Love

From the Split This Rock Family:

So many spectacular books of poetry of provocation and witness are now appearing in print each year we can’t keep up. Some of those same books are winning the major prizes and being reviewed everywhere. It’s a stunning shift in the literary landscape and one Split This Rock is proud to have played a role in helping to bring about.

Rather than publish another list of Recommended Books that tries to take stock of the whole field, Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning asked a number of Splitistas to send her the titles of 2015 books they loved which haven’t received the attention their champions think they deserve. We are thrilled to put a spotlight on some gems. 

Special thanks to nominators Francisco Aragón, Lawrence-Minh Davis, Aracelis Girmay, Joseph O. Legaspi, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye, Melissa Tuckey, and Joshua Weiner.

(You can read Recommended Books Lists of 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011 on Blog This Rock.)

We urge you to buy from your local independent book store, directly from the publisher (we’ve linked to their websites below), or from Powells.com, a union shop. Remember books, an ancient artform, make great gifts year-round!

Here, Then: Spectacular Books of 2015

Trouble Sleeping, Abdul Ali (New Issues Press)

The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, William Archilla (Red Hen Press)

Ozone Journals, Peter Balakian (University of Chicago Press)

Chord, Rick Barot (Sarabande Books)

The Spectral Wilderness, Oliver Bendorf (Kent State University Press)

Bastards of the Reagan Era, Reginald Dwayne Betts (Four Way Books)

Ghost River, Trevino L. Brings Plenty (The Backwaters Press)

Redbone, Mahogany L. Browne (Willow Books)

Furious Dusk, David Campos (University of Notre Dame Press)

The Book of Silence: Manhood as a Pseudoscience, Rasheed Copeland (Sargent Press)

String Theory, Jenny Yang Cropp (Mongrel Empire Press)

Honest Engine, Kyle G. Dargan (University of Georgia Press)

Cornrows and Cornfields, celeste doaks (Wrecking Ball Press, UK)

Lilith’s Demons, Julie R. Enszer (A Midsummer Night’s Press)

The Gaffer, Celeste Gainey (Arktoi Book/Red Hen)

Toys Made of Rock, José B. González (Bilingual Review Press)

Life of the Garment, Deborah Gorlin (Bauhan Publishing) 

Lighting the Shadow, Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Four Way Books)

A Crown for Gumecindo, Laurie Ann Guerrero (Aztlan LibrePress)

Hemisphere, Ellen Hagan (Triquarterly)

The Diary of a K-Drama Villain, Min Kang (Coconut Books)

Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil (Nightboat Books)

Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist, Kirun Kapur (ElixirPress)

Steep Tea, Jee Leong Koh (Carcanet Press Ltd.)

Boy with Thorn, Rickey Laurentiis (University of Pittsburgh Press)

The Darkening Trapeze, Larry Levis (Graywolf)

Life In a Box is a Pretty Life, Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat Books)

Yearling, Lo Kwa Mei-en (Alice James Books)

Sand Opera, Philip Metres (Alice James Books)

The Pink Box, Yesenia Montilla (Willow Books)

The Open Eye, Lenard D. Moore (Mountains and Rivers Press, 30^th Anniversary Edition)

The Siren World, Juan J. Morales (Lithic Press)

My Seneca Village, Marilyn Nelson (Namelos)

Silent Anatomies, Monica Ong (Kore Press)

Beauty Is Our Spiritual Guernica, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, trans. Cole Heinowitz (Commune Editions)

The Same-Different, Hannah Sanghee Park (LSU Press)

She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, M. Nourbese Philip (Wesleyan University Press, rerelease of 1989 classic, with a foreword by Evie Shockley)

Radio Heart: Or, How Robots Fall Out of Love, Margaret Rhee (Finishing Line Press)

Twelve Stations, Tomasz Różycki, translated by Bill Johnston (Zephyr)

Le Animal & Other Creatures, Metta Sáma (MIEL)

Trafficke, Susan Tichy (Ahsahta Press)

The Yellow Door, Amy Uyematsu (Red Hen Press)

Farther Traveler, Ronaldo Wilson (Counterpath Press)

Crevasse, Nicholas Wong (Kaya Press)

Naturalism, Wendy Xu (Brooklyn Arts Press)

100 Chinese Silences, Timothy Yu (Les Figues Press)

Anthologies

The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Nate Marshall (Haymarket Books)

Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia, edited by Paul Nelson, George Stanley, Barry McKinnon, Nadine Maestas (Leaf Press)

Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer, Lynn Melnick (Viking)

Writing Down the Walls: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, edited by Helen Klonaris, Amir Rabiyah (Trans-Genre Press)

Critical Writings

Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries, Roberto Bonazzi (Wings Press)

I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays, D. Gilson (Sibling Rivalry Press)

Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie (Grand Concourse Press)

Split This Rock Recommended Poetry Books of 2014

Every year this list grows. Truly we are living in a golden age of American poetry of provocation and witness!

If you just want a taste of this kind of knock-out, necessary poetry that Split This Rock cultivates, teaches, and celebrates, check out the March 2014 issue of POETRY magazine: all poets who were featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival that month (including several with new books, below). You can read the whole thing online here or purchase a copy.

We invite you to shop your local independent bookstore, Teaching for Change’s Busboys and Poets Bookstore, or Powells.com for gifts for yourself and 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 2014 books. Thank you!

Sarah Browning compiled the list this year.

This House, My Bones,  Elmaz Abinader (Aquarius Press)

“[This] new collection sings deep into the bone marrow of what we fear losing: our witness vein, the maps that help us recoup what we misplace in the forgetting, and the dead who carry our names.” – Willie Perdomo

Difficult Fruit, Lauren K. Alleyne (Peepal Tree Press)

“Alleyne’s poems are both sensual and spiritual and beautifully capture the narrator’s journey into womanhood and her struggle for self-knowledge.” – Gwarlingo

The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964-2013, Kofi Awoonor (University of Nebraska Press)

“[Awoonor’s] poetry is tender, intimate, and at times indignant… an invaluable collection.” – Portland Book Review

To Live in Autumn, Zeina Hashem Beck (The Backwaters Press)

“Zeina Hashem Beck crafts a multifaceted portrait of the people and the streets of Beirut.  Part love-letter, part elegy, Hashem Beck’s debut collection keeps the city from becoming ‘a shadow of a memory,/ the memory of a shadow.’” – John Hennessey

Wen Kroy, Sheila Black (Dream Horse Press)

“These poems speak expertly of desire, difference and danger. Wen Kroy captures 'all the motley messy details / of daily life' with spontaneity and verve.” - Jillian Weise

The New Testament, Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press)

“These poems offer an unlikely kind of hope: Brown's ambivalence is evidence of a fragile belief in the possibility of change, of the will that makes change possible.” - NPR

Split, Cathy Linh Che (Alice James Books)

“Che’s brave, rich, and poignant poems link the past and present while highlighting the pain of memory. Deceivingly simple, yet swelling with danger, they devastate the heart.” - diaCRITICS

Floating, Brilliant, Gone, Franny Choi (Write Bloody Publishing)

“Franny Choi writes with beauty, grace, and an ability to both console and cut you in the same piece. She is a force in the world of poetry.” – The Poetry Question

Day Unto Day, Martha Collins (Milkweed Editions)

“A book-length meditative lyric expedition into the landscape of love, dissolution, and hanging on, tenaciously, to the fraying shreds of our battered humanity.” - Mead 

Mexican Jenny and Other Poems, Barbara Brinson Curiel (Anhinga Press)

“Nothing is left unturned or unexplored by this poet, from fairytales to tamales, to a spoon, to a simmering pot of menudo; all is fair game for the poet to deconstruct--brick by brick--that bulwark separating the kitchen from the artist’s workshop; and history--those mutilated echoes of the past--from the voices of our own mothers.” –Letras Latinas Blog

Nothing More to Lose, Najwan Darwish, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (New York Review Books)

“A collection of very short poems — often no more than a page — speaking of love, sorrow, loss, hope and despair in a voice simultaneously so passionate and so matter-of-fact that it stops the breath.” – NPR

Thieves in the Afterlife, Kendra DeColo (Saturnalia Books)

“A lush, unabashed ode to female desire, pushing the boundaries of what women are allowed to say.” – Missouri Review

Seam, Tarfia Faizullah (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/Southern Illinois University Press)

“Why take brutality head-on, confronting the past where over two hundred thousand Bangladeshi women were raped in the liberation war? Faizullah’s fierce book of poems stands as the answer: because power lies in the telling.” – Blackbird

We Didn't Know Any Gangsters, Brian Gilmore (Cherry Castle Publishing)
“Navigates the streets of Washington DC as only a native can, recalling a community of proud men and troubled sons. He invokes the blues, the everyday working Joe, and a sense of hope, painted by the speaker’s survival.” – The Rumpus 

Saudades, José "Joe" Gouveia (Casa Mariposa Press)

“Gouveia turns the quotidian into the universal. A true poet each day brings the blood of a poem. He can work experience – of love, death, of family, of childhood, place, and of day-labor – into compelling song.” – The Barnstable Patriot

I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays From Contemporary Afghanistan, Eliza Griswold, translator (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“The book’s greatest strength is the complicated spectrum of voices that it allows these women, whom we wouldn’t otherwise know anything about. I Am the Beggar casts Pashtun women as vibrantly self-aware and autonomous.” – The Millions

Somewhere Near Defiance, Jeff Gundy (Anhinga Press)

“Like two of his poetic influences, William Blake and Walt Whitman (who each appear in several poems), Gundy is a poet of the people in that his poems examine everyday life in a way that elevates it to the sublime.” – Your Impossible Voice

Habitation: Collected Poems, Sam Hamill (Lost Horse Press)

“Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings—his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.” – Jane Hirshfield

Streaming, Allison Hedge Coke (Coffee House Press)

“Hedge Coke makes music from tornados and glyphs, from cranes spiraling overhead, and from the grumbling stomachs of hungry children. She sings these stories because she has to and because we need her to.” – Adrian Matejka

Dark. Sweet. New & Selected Poems, Linda Hogan (Coffee House Press)

“Despite the pain, loss, and frustration that percolate through her poetry, what’s so remarkable about Dark. Sweet. is the palpable optimism and unceasing call to change. This is a poet deeply in love with humanity and the natural world.” – Cleaver Magazine

Dark-Sky Society, Ailish Hopper (New Issue Poetry & Prose)

“[The poems] move like legs on a street, like a mind at work that calls you to ruminate with it. Because we can’t understand everything, we have to be comfortable in that space of being unsure.” – New Books in Poetry

Zion, TJ Jarrett (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/Southern Illinois University Press)

“These poems are shaped by a passionate desire to summon mercy and forgiveness in the face of terrible wrong, and they celebrate, without a trace of sentimentality, the sustaining power of love.” – Nashville Scene

Prelude to Bruise, Saeed Jones (Coffee House Press)

“There is a core melody threaded through the collection…, a theme: the story of Boy, a queer African-American child navigating family, gender and desire in the South. The result is a tight, complex, glittering work that pulls no punches and dims no light.” – NPR

Patter, Douglas Kearney (Red Hen Press)

“Douglas Kearney’s third book, Patter, uses fracture, fragment, textual abrasion, repetition, and form to cross-examine marriage, miscarriage, babies, and infertility. Endlessly inventive, Kearney’s work uses a couple’s anguish to cut, divide, vivisect, and re-imagine the text and the act of creation.” – The Rumpus

Hustle, David Tomas Martinez (Sarabande Books)
“In sidelong verses, [Martinez] compacts his childhood in the Meadowbrook Houses in San Diego, his teenage years running with a gang, his enlistment in the Navy, and then his eventual escape into the world of poetry… Perhaps there is no way to make grief into a diamond. But Martinez has made something rare, and living, and glittering nonetheless.” – NPR

The Heart of a Comet, Pages D. Matam (Write Bloody Publishing)

“Matam is not working on the revolution in this book, but on what comes after. He’s got witness, and complaint, and analysis -- he’s a master of his genre… [The Heart of a Comet] is a model of becoming the change you want to see, of living as if the revolution is over and a new world needs building -- now!” – Blog This Rock

The Iraqi Nights, Dunya Mikhail, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (New Directions)

“Although the pervasive pain of war on the street, home, and soul in this collection threaten grief and paralysis, the poet continuously weaves in visions of a future outside of violence, of a place where ‘every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun.’” – Poetry New York

Haiti Glass, Lenelle Moïse (City Lights)

“Her poetry embraces everything from her native Haiti, to the experience of an immigrant child, to Basquiat, to the loss of her uncle to AIDS. With brilliant control, Moïse pulls taut the wire that transforms pain into poetry.” – Lambda Literary Review

The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, Willie Perdomo (Penguin Books)

“As a Nuyorican poet who emerged on the scene in the 1990’s, Perdomo is comfortable in meshing a variety of elements that may have no business being together but come out clean and intelligible in the end. His book is a fusion of street culture, life in the halls of learning, dual languages, dual homes or no home that resulted in a multifaceted life.” – A Gathering of the Tribes

from unincorporated territory [guma'], Craig Santos Perez (Omnidawn)

“Though he’s a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), Perez has not lived there for two decades. He uses a range of arresting techniques, including presenting excerpts from official documents with interlinear commentary, to show the cost of historical and ongoing U.S. militarism and colonization on the island.” – Library Journal

CITIZEN, Claudia Rankine (Graywolf)

“Citizen is a major work of American poetry that… demands to be read and discussed now, in the current moment, when, in Ferguson and elsewhere, the daily struggles of black life are being thrown onto a background that is all too white.” – Flavorwire

[insert] Boy, Danez Smith (YesYes Books)

“The next time someone tells you spoken word poets can’t make poems come to life on the page, send them to Danez Smith’s [insert] boy, a remarkable debut collection that puts that tired notion to bed once and for all. In these poems, Smith opens the reader to a world of desire, longing, and deep mourning.” – Malicious Intent 

Nude Descending an Empire, Sam Taylor (Pitt Poetry Series)

“In the face of the American imperial project, the poems sing every song imaginable – dirge, praise song, ecstatic chant. The antidote to despair, then, is more – more of the body, heart, more mystery, fear.” – Sarah Browning

The Fateful Apple, Venus Thrash (Hawkins Publishing Group)

“Thrash plays out her own duality of self and history and takes the reader on a journey back to the center, the place we return to when no more is expected of us.” – New Books in Poetry

Ten Thousand Waves, Wang Ping (Wings Press)

“The scars of modern China’s land and people are unflinchingly reproduced on the page with a medical accuracy. The human and environmental costs of globalization are impossible to discount when presented with such elegance and artistry.” – Cloud City Press

Vermeer in Hell, Michael White (Persea Books)

“Rarely have I felt the ekphrastic to be as dramatic as in White’s tour through the portraits of Vermeer, with its history of fiery damages, wars and afflictions, but also its own depiction of ‘love’s face as it is.’” – David Baker

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 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 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.”

–NPR

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 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