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Tatiana Johnson-Boria's Nocturne in Joy is an exercise in Black vulnerability through poetry. Johnson-Boria commands poetic forms flawlessly and fluently, using the form to her advantage in poems like Another Death, where the spacing between sentence fragments replicates the short anapestic breathing before death. With an unwavering voice turned towards the reality of growing up in a difficult childhood, within a larger oppressive system fueled by racism, sexism, and violence; this staggering collection offers glasses for a sharp-edged glimpse into what it is to be raised from a Black girl into a Black woman, and the trauma and healing born in the process.

V. Ruiz's full-length collection, In Stories We Thunder, depicts the difficult and hopeful work of healing. Here, a bilingual mother writes letters of advice to their hija, balancing forgiveness and self-preservation in the face of the enormous obstacles of their world: sexual assault, racism, and drug addiction. The mother's family become ravens and jailbirds, winged creatures that are separated from them. Here we see the closeness among tíos and abuelas and we are drawn into this experience. In Stories We Thunder tracks the emotional and fraught path of a family discovering themselves while they build a life in a world filled with harshness they cannot escape. As the speaker explains to their hija, "a bird can be winged but flightless." As the hija and mother explore the freedom their ancestors did not have, they are also forced to reckon with the danger that comes with it. Nevertheless, Ruiz is relentless in their optimism. The tío finds forever peace, and hija dances a new dream for the family. This collection is forthright and concrete in its remembrance of trauma, yet perseverant in its search for joy and human goodness. The result is a collection that will leave readers awakened to the nuance of the lives of this family but not despondent, no, for there is hope contained herein.

"This stunning new poetry collection by Matthew E. Henry (MEH), the Colored page, is a visceral meditation on the multi-layered experience of a Black body in educational spaces. Sprawling with metaphors and allusions to both the contemporary and the historic, Henry brings us an intense narrative chronicle of the speaker's life as student, educator, and finally as a writer. At the center there is a reckoning with the racism written into the pages of America, and Henry leads us from the microaggressions of educational oversight, to the horror of blatant dehumanization. In pieces that directly call out those responsible-educators, institutions, and peers alike-the speaker moves via Henry's generously vivid poems through open letters, vignettes, and poetic narratives that uncover the realities of an educator's life's work in the "United" States today. Here we see the impact of ferocious racism and its brutal cousin, weaponized incompetence. In a world that so often seeks to minimize Black experiences, the Colored page does not inflate, but neither does it look away. Yet, too, there is joy in these pages. Henry invites us to love, but please don't touch, the beauty of Black hair, of Black lives, and of our Black students. For as much as he shines that telling Black light on the stains of the institutions he has spent his life within, Henry here evidences a life well-lived, a life spent studying, growing, and thriving despite the biased budgeting and the crude mishandling of student dignity. Henry asks us to look at the vile and call it out, but then we are tasked to shift our focus to the glory that is the student who triumphs. Henry invites us, ultimately, to a celebration"--

Jason B. Crawford's Year of the Unicorn Kidz beautifully explores existence on the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. Their profound navigation of identity, violence, and desire transcends boundaries and binaries. Vulnerability takes the centre stage as the speaker of these descriptive and passionate poems unburies old relationships and haunting memories. Year of the Unicorn Kidz reads like a coming-of-age story for marginalized youth in America, sketching the body in terms of disconnection, loss, and the explosive nature of desire. From burning rage to healing friendships to the thrill of forbidden encounters and the regrets that follow them, Crawford revisits the reckless elements of youth that capture the inner and outer conflicts of self-discovery. They bring incredible depth to their poetry with urgent and vivid storytelling that delicately reveals the complexity of reality, while also leaving room for readers to reflect on their own.

In Mouths of Garden, there is a distinct sense of both suffocation and symphony, as Barbara Fant describes resiliency, especially of Black people continuing to uplift communities ravaged by racism, illness, domestic abuse, police brutality, and toxic omission. A deep spatial awareness presents itself in Fant's work, as bodies mold to the shape of caskets, bullets, fossilized homes, and screams suffocate in the violence often ignored by surrounding eyes. Yet, by tracing the steadfast throats and backbones of Black women working to uproot the paralyzing scenes of missing Black girls and targeted Black boys, Fant's language is a reflective, echoing choir calling to transform the inexcusable stagnation in America's attempts to address longstanding discrimination. As the speaker recalls a long lineage of aunts, sisters, grandmothers, and mothers who have harnessed the power of a church piano or produced the tenderness of newly braided hair, she slowly discovers a potency blooming from the movements of her own body as she writes, "I found myself in a braid / crawled out of my own casket / made my way inside a mouth, / and grew another part of my body." Fant's poetry cultivates a garden where Black voices pry away the stale American soil to reclaim the sprouts of open mouths and honest words buried beneath.

In Something Dark to Shine In, trauma manifests in body horror. Skin strips away from flesh; blood stains floorboards; and teeth fall out to become toys. Death and religion hover constantly in the background of this haunting and haunted collection, even as the speaker reminds herself, "I am not dead yet." Faced with the alienation and the horror of sexual violence, these poems resist the impulse to romanticize. Here, rot is marked by "a black wool of flies," soil is laced with "chips of plates or lead paint," and feral wolf-women refuse to be tamed. The classically beautiful becomes frightening such that a bee's sweet honey is a reminder of the pain of their sting, and a golden crucifix is a symbol only of a calvary's violence. Something Dark to Shine In refuses to look away from pain, from violence, yet to read these poems in a world where such atrocities become banal and commonplace, is to witness a profound refusal to die, a wish to find beauty, and even hope, in one's own terror.

"In the stunning and imaginative NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators From Around the World, we are presented with visions, invocations, foretellings, and bold harbingers. NOMBONO, drawing from the Zulu word for 'visionary,' brings together mystical dreams and possibilities that are at times both striking and devastating. This anthology asks: are we on a bright threshold or at the edge of a dark precipice? Are we about to take flight and evolve or plummet into cataclysm? Around each corner in this book there may be a hyena man, salmon women, Mananggal, prayers, or curses. There is steady, unbroken eye contact, and there is fierce joy and fury. Here we have the limitless, boundless exploration of resplendent worlds." - back cove

"Kimberly Ann Priest's debut full-length collection Slaughter the One Bird is a haunting and incisive meditation on the enduring effects of childhood sexual abuse. Reflecting on the impact of trauma on her memories and role as a mother, Priest intertwines past and present in a series of lyrical confessions and meditations on power and grief. In poems addressed to the nameless "pedophile," as well as a series of vignettes on everyday life ranging from subjects as varied as the preparation of breakfast to the migration of deer, she deconstructs the history of abuse spanning from childhood to her adult life in which she finds herself trapped in a relationship with a violent partner. Religious legalism and shame play a strong role in the power dynamics between perpetrator and victim. Vivid and moving, these poems offer a highly personal glimpse into the poet's journey through disempowerment and grief toward healing"--Amazon.com.

Sometimes with softness, sometimes with teeth, this book of poems will startle you with glimpses into the life of someone who has been smothered with emptiness after loss. Donna Vorreyer's To Everything There Is unplugs every gaping hole inside the body to confront the inner turmoils, aches of desire, and tangles of sin simmering inside.

What does it mean for a poet to love a dog-especially knowing it will never outlive them? The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry catapults readers into the marrows of living and feeling alongside our mysterious canines: a species that often teaches us about what it means to be human.

Bury Me in Thunder, the full-length debut by syan jay, is an eviscerating collection, suffused with nature, ceremony, and pain/ Delivering an unflinching look into the consumption of Indigenous people, this collection sheds new light on the colonization of North America and how trauma is carried through intergenerational memory.

Ruth Foley's Dead Man's Float is an ode to the sea, the earth, and the body. This is a collection of estuary poems: wooded and mossed over, burying all the things we'd like to forget in the deepest of forests, the wettest of mud, the farthest depths of the ocean.

"Zoèe Estelle Hitzel's Gender Flytrap is an authentic portrayal of the constant hurt that a trans experience in a toxic, hegemonic culture entails. Hitzel's collection delves into the multifaceted nature of prejudice from the gendered stereotypes instilled at a young age to a broken healthcare system to the realization that everything-including transness-is filtered through a cisnormative lens. In this world, trauma is inherent to the trans existence. To see and be seen begets presumption and therefore is an act of violence, a violence that dictates how a person should look, act, and even perceive the world around them. In this collection, bodies are their own entities-moldering temples furnished by others that forsake those locked inside. Here, trans identity is rejected by a world that weaponizes bodies to reinforce a binary of gender. These gripping poems explore the pain of confronting what could have been, how a rush of hormones in the womb determines the fate of a person. Here, we can ruminate on the suffering delivered at the hands of those who abide a prefabricated notion of sex and, absurdly, circumscribe what is possible for the person inhabiting a gendered body"--

Aaron Graham's debut full-length collection is a haunting, unprecedented example of contemporary trench poetry. Set in Iraq during the mid-2000's, Blood Stripes delves into the complexity and trauma of modern conflict. Through the eyes of a marine, these poems illustrate the intimacy of violence with candid brutality. Beyond the innate bonds formed between comrades, a strange communion develops across enemy lines as those charged with destroying each other do so with a kind of tenderness. Through inflicting atrocities, the speaker forges human connection--connections that cannot be replicated outside the battle. In these poems, violence is a new creature, one that is concurrently loathsome yet addictive and sensual. Amid the shrapnel and the sand wet with bits of lung, this violence is perhaps born of a love of the struggle. While the marine unwittingly volunteers to be a harbinger of death, it is a role of eternal confinement. These poems reveal the moral ambiguity of the causal sequence of war, as at home the marine is haunted by trauma while still craving it. The side effects of conflict cannot be outlived--despite quickclot being applied to a ruptured artery--some bleeding cannot be stopped. -- Publisher website.

Arabilis integrates the ordeal of othering into the fundamental uncertainty of life to produce a collection that is honest in its pain, confusion, and joy. Beautiful and desolate as a rural upbringing, these poems delve into the complex relationship between the self and the indifferent world it inhabits.