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Winner of the 23rd annual PoulinPrize, Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences,historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory thatcelebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.Riddled with the ghostly voices of family andfriends, Second Nature is fearless inits wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In thesepoems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglas have a conversation, Michael Brownmeditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings insonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a newgeneration.Through innovative re-imaginings of thesonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popularculture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form andcontent, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife,and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintainstructures of oppression.Interspersed with quotations and inspired bythe rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenodawho provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature isa testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we comefrom, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped bycommunity and country.­­­

Thiswinner of the 15th annual BOA Short Fiction Prize features linkedstories that indict the ultraconservative movement that emerged at the end ofthe Cold War and extends into present day. One strand of narratives follows a cohort of tea partyconservatives—a politician, a radioman, and atelevangelist—as their hyperbolic languageshapes the world around them and leads to episodes of time travel and bodyhorror. The second strand follows individuals victimized by conservativepolicy: their voices, their futures, their very bodies stripped from theirpossession. The final strand investigates the ways in which young conservativeshave adapted the nostalgic rhetoric of their forebears to carry on the twinprojects of minority oppression and environmental degradation—both of which they couch in the language of “freedom.” The book is set in the South and parodies the stereotypesthat are still so prevalent here. Although the characters are more than mereciphers, they move through their semi-speculative world to illustrate ideas inthe same way as Richard Wright and Ursala Le Guin’s characters. As income inequality soars, as industries become further mechanized, asthe populace cries out for some semblance of a social safety net andcorporations complain of too much regulation, we are long overdue for a strongdose of protest literature.

janan alexandra’s debut poetry collection, COME FROM,weaves from English to Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing andbelonging. Part love song for the speaker’s mother and part grief song forongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, underneath, andthrough language—feeling for its limits and possibilities. Drawingon both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a worldbristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake ofdislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker“back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parablesin the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers partsof her mother tongue—probing the gifts and wounds of language, invokingpersonal and communal histories marked with the long-durée of empire. This book searches forwhat might be possible if we dislodge our practices of belonging from the mythof wholeness, divest from nation and state, and instead turn deeply toward eachother. Here is a collection that pulses with warmth and vitality, heralding thearrival of a fresh and vibrant voice on the poetry scene. Clear and concise,accessible yet profound, COME FROM investigateswhat is deeply interior while reaching toward the world with tenderness andgenerous attention.

WINNER OF THE ISABELLA GARDNER AWARDThe daring and deeplysexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with theembodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual.Theseunforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost alwayscompromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernessesof unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not bywhat we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” Thesepoems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I”that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our liveswith.Inthis book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with thefetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and atothers self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of thedifficulties and joys of living in relation.

One of America’s most revered military veteran writers and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist—Bruce Weigl—brings readers face-to-face with our country’s legacy of violence, the suffering of combat PTSD, and what it means to be truly haunted.Taking its cue from James Wright’s goal to write “the poetry of a grown man,” the poems in Apostle of Desire juxtapose the peace and comfort offered by the natural world with the bruising intensity of manmade violence. These sudden tonal shifts express a vulnerability and extremity of feeling that strips audiences’ own emotions bare, leading readers to question their roles as bystanders and consumers of violent media.In sharing his intertwining feelings of love and shame for both country and self, Weigl places readers into the role of the watcher and opens a window into the traumas of the Vietnam War and life’s daily battles with PTSD. The honesty of Weigl’s poetry exposes the ghosts of pain while still witnessing the glories of love, nature, and his ongoing experiences with the rich daily life of contemporary Vietnam.Readers will face the solitude of regret and the hopeful pursuit of redemption—remembering the past and looking toward the future.

Inher second collection, JUMP THE GUN, Jennie Malboeuf digs deep into the hiddenrecesses of a life, exploring the stages and struggles of womanhood, the waysin which memory shapes us, and the continual fight against the darkundercurrents of grief and gun violence that shadow our daily lives in America.The speaker in thesepoems wrestles with the everyday fears and realities we often try to ignore:the complex expectationsplaced on young girls and mothers alike, the illusion of childhood innocence,and the very realconsequences of our environmental destruction.Split into twosections—with poems that layer blood-soaked images alongside close-ups of thebody and domestic life thatbloom with intimacy—this collection deftly illustrates the beauty that can befound in tragedy, thefragility of the natural world, and the resilience of the human relationshipsthat fill it.To read JUMP THE GUNis to witness yourself through the crosshairs. In Malboeuf’s words, “What hit you has become you. /Pieces of the bullet embedded / in your skin. Even / that which you come from / will never be thesame. / But from violence comes / the tides, the seasons.”

"Lynne Thompson's Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women - their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys - which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos - replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: "Say history. Claim. Say wild.""--

"In the stories of Exile in Guyville, probable futures and alternate realities take aim at unruly women, and show how we refuse to be ruled. With a speculative and surreal style, Lillard's prize-winning collection explores a living museum of women from across time; a life app that forces women to comply with beauty standards; a future internment camp with a literal race for survival; and a former band of middle-aged Riot Grrrls, taking vengeance with a new power. With humor, rage, and a razor-sharp eye for detail, Exile in Guyville renders the invisible as seen, and the powerless as empowered"--

"An exploration of memory, mourning, and humanity's precarious relationship to the Anthropocene, Christopher Kennedy's The Strange God Who Makes Us documents our fragile relationship with time and the imperfect ways in which we document our lives. These prose poems written by one of the form's masters, serve both as attempts to preserve and honor the past and as a call to action to ensure an inhabitable planet for future generations"--

"When tensions veer between hope and despair, the ensuing fracture can swing like a scythe and cut a ragged seam between past and present. In One Wild Word Away, Geffrey Davis weaves a deft set of poems about illness, family, loss, and rebirth. The luxurious sonics and crisp descriptions in each line are haunted by grief and buoyed by love as the speaker confronts generational trauma and the loss of a loved one while in the process of raising his own son"--

"In Every Hard Sweetness, Carter-Jones chronicles Civil Rights' era atrocities through the story of her family's experience with an all-too-common practice in which Black men were wrongfully incarcerated in institutions for the criminally insane. The result is a stunning work reflecting on race, criminalization, and the devastating consequences of a Black father's incarceration on his psyche and family, specifically his Black daughter. Told through a mixture of photography, ekphrasis, and erasure, Carter-Jones' powerful collection creates an extraordinary record of her family's life at a time of great suffering and upheaval"--

"Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. The speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of ruptured relationships and trauma on his nascent identity. Grounded, lyrical, and deeply psychological, these poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative relationships - familial, communal and ancestral - as the speaker searches for a communion with himself, and how not to "make a life out of pain.""--

"In his twentieth book, most of which was first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty brings us a memoir-like prose sequence reflecting on disability, chronic illness, addiction, survival, love, and parenthood"--

"Awakening to histories personal and social, Conversation Among Stones is a meditation on memory and identity"--

"In Joe Baumann's newest collection Where Can I Take You When There's Nowhere to Go, queer men explore their sense of who they are and what they want, often in worlds that are tilted askew from what we might expect"--

"Consumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied"--

"Take the body and split it wide open. Fill it with light. See the multiple interiors, the layered death, the familial mythology, the throb and splendor of being, the shedding of the body altogether: this is fox woman get out!"--

"Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon's Isabella Garder Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020"--

"Through a lens simultaneously historical and political, Mahtem Shiferraw attends to personal and collective experiences of migration, motherhood, and immigration's complicated notions of home. In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and state. Through a decolonial poetics, giving name to everything in her path from the Italian colonization of Eritrea (and failure to colonize Ethiopia) to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors past, present, and future. Shiferraw writes unapologetically against erasure, against invisibility, instead creating a space that holds grief lovingly, that can tend to the wounds held and held in the endlessly-traveling body. Brilliant with abundance and texture, Shiferraw's poems dismantle the empire's sterility of language, both historical and present. In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Mahtem Shiferraw builds a home within her poems, attentively naming those who exist within them out of invisibility and into the radiant light: "We walk in unison too: our backs bending at once,/ our arms breaking, our abdomens kicked into silence, thighs bleeding. Through this I ask; am I still lit? And they, again...what else would you be-""

"Against a constellation of solar weather events and evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey's Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster. Gailey deftly juxtaposes odd solar and weather events with the medical disasters occurring inside her own brain and body- we follow her through a false-alarm terminal cancer diagnosis, a real diagnosis of MS, and finally the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The solar flare and corona of an eclipse becomes the neural lesions in her own personal "flare," which she probes with both honesty and humor. While the collection features harbingers of calamity, visitations of wolves, blood moons, apocalypses, and plagues, at the center of it all are the poet's attempts to navigate a fraught medical system, dealing with a series of challenging medical revelations, some of which are mirages and others that are all too real. In Flare, Corona, Jeannine Hall Gailey is incandescent and tender-hearted, gracefully insistent on teaching us all of the ways that we can live, all of the ways in which we can refuse to do anything but to brilliantly and stubbornly survive"--

"Dripping with Southern gothic flavors, [these short stories gaze] at the holy and the obscene while plumbing gritty secrets of the human heart. With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike"--

"Margaret Ray is pulling back the curtains on our societal performance of culture, guiding an exposing light to the daily performance that is life in a woman's body. Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Margaret Ray's Good Grief, the Ground interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted unto women through personal, political, and national lenses. Moving between adolescence and adulthood, Ray alternates between dark humor and heart-wrenching honesty to explore grief, anxiety, queer longing, girlhood, escape from an abusive relationship, and the dangers of lending language to a thing. With stunning wit and precision and attention, we see Ray show us what it is to be human: the mess of tenderness and darkness and animosity. Out of the heavy Florida dusk, out of peach juice and late-night swimming pool break-ins and grocery store aisles comes these completely captivating poems. In the words of Stephanie Burt: "Come and see. Take care. Dive in.""--

"Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain's Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political identity with intersectional awareness. These poems interrogate our collective complicity in late-stage capitalism, drone warfare, the election of Donald Trump, environmental degradation, mental health crises, and the dawn of Covid-19 through the lens of gay poetic lineage, regionalism, and familial kinships structures"--

Kang Dean's poems creatively explore the various noun and verb meanings of the word "precipitate."

Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms.Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts our country’s obsession with guns to explore America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in Wyoming, this collection of poems interrogates our country’s history of gun violence, asking questions about our fetishization of weapons, how mass shootings and the killing of unarmed civilians by police have become normalized, and the multitudinous ways in which firearms are ingrained in our country’s culture. Much like the poet himself, Donovan’s poems are dynamic and constantly in motion as he explores the ways in which capitalism and its relentless stream of content have led to a collective desensitization in the face of violence. In turns harrowing, elegiac, and ironic, set in locations ranging from Cody to Chicago, from Las Vegas to Sandy Hook, The Dug-Up Gun Museum probes America’s failures, bizarre infatuations, and innumerable tragedies linked to guns.

A baby that keeps losing its brain, a cow in a wedding gown, a woman whose chest is a radio — bizarre and whimsical figures populate this collection of dreamlike prose poems from Russell Edson (1935-2014), with a Foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic.A seminal voice in American prose poetry from the sixties onward, Edson’s whole career is surveyed in a single volume edited for our times, presenting a new and contemporary view of a poet of startling imagination and strangeness. Craig Morgan Teicher calls us to witness Edson’s obsessions with the curious, the absurd, and the peculiar, and the ways in which they can haunt our daily lives. The prose poems in this collection mold our everyday into something extraordinary and unsettling. Edson’s poems are surreal fables in which his characters experience all that life throws at them— marriage, parenthood, technological advances, aging, dying, the afterlife— through irreverent dialogue and vivid imagery in turns both humorous and grotesque. Russell Edson is a vital and ever-contemporary poet with a unique moral and comedic vision, whose literary career quietly yet definitively shaped the prose poetry subgenre as we know it now.

Nestled against the backdrop of Seattle's flora, fauna, and cityscape, Luther Hughes' debut poetry collection wrestles with the interior and exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death through love and desire.Hughes draws readers into a Seattle that is heavily entrenched in violent anti-Blackness, and full of vulnerable and personal encounters from both the speaker’s past and present. With reverent and careful imagery, Hughes fashions deeply saturated, tender vignettes that reckon relationships between family and friends, lovers, nature, and the police-state.A Shiver in the Leaves is stunningly cinematic in its layered portrayal of the never-ending dualities of a queer Black poet’s life in the city. Hughes's interrogation of selfhood renders a sharply intimate and viscerally powerful reimagining of what it means to be alive in a body, and what it can mean to live.

The first US edition of rising world-poetry star Ales Steger's most acclaimed book. The most prominent Slovenian poet of his generation.

Timely and necessary poems investigate the historical and current realities of blackness in America, elegizing and celebrating human life.