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An energetic exploration of the expanse of language translated and otherwise transformed In Renditions Reginald Gibbons conducts an ensemble of poetic voices, using the works of a varied, international selection of writers as departure points for his translations and transformations. The collection poses the idea that all writing is, at least abstractly, an act of translation, whether said act "translates" observation into word or moves ideas from one language to another. Through these acts of transformation, Gibbons infuses the English language with stylistic aspects of other languages and poetic traditions. The resulting poems are imbued with a sense of homage that allows us to respectfully reimagine the borders of language and revel in the fellowship of idea sharing. In this tragicomedy of the human experience and investigation of humanity's effects, Gibbons identifies the "shared underthoughts that we can (all) sense: " desire, love, pain, and fervor.

An investigation, performed through storytelling, of the constructed beliefs of society and individuals In this his eighth collection of poetry (and fifth with Four Way Books), Prufer's career-spanning talent for estranging the familiar--and also for recording the unthinkable with eerie directness--recurs, enhanced and transformed by the collection's meta-level attention to the role of fiction in our civic lives. Prufer describes, often through personae, a near future, tracing there the political gambit of Fake News and the role of the imagination in our self-understanding (whether it's cogent or delusional). Via both satire and direct address (to the point of reader-squeamishness), Prufer aims to understand the ugly-casual atmosphere of our often racialized, pervasive distrust. The Art of Fiction fundamentally understands that fictions are deployed to divide us, and they work: they get under our skin. Prufer powerfully explores the roles of imagination and art in how we explain ourselves to ourselves.

Lyrically enacting the cognitive dissonance and embodied contradictions of our contemporary age, Hadara Bar-Nadav's The Animal Is Chemical collects innovative poems that straddle the frontiers of language and scientific knowledge. She brilliantly draws on her own experience as a medical editor and her family's history of Holocaust survival to write into the hybrid legacy of Western medicine: part clinical empiricism, part human fallibility and moral bankruptcy. Displaying a robust formal range, these poems move from feverish elegies to drug-pamphlet erasures, tangible articulations of Bar-Nadav's epigenetic, cultural, and memorial inheritance as a writer navigating chronic illness and pain. In these pages, Nazi medical experiments, pharmaceutical literature, and manifestations of intergenerational trauma collide in the lyrical archive of Bar-Nadav's latest collection, winner of the 2022 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Just as she illuminates the paradox of time -- that we may think of the past as something gone and yet always present in context and legacy -- Bar-Nadav proves the enduring ambivalence of pharmakon, that antidote which poisons us, the medicine that kills. This febrile, fierce book casts spells and confronts illusions, ignites grief and awe, and challenges our assumptions about what it means to heal our bodies, our families, and our shared histories. Perhaps this work fulfills the specious salvation it describes in its opening pages, performing an exorcism of truth-telling that harnesses the heat of a "myth in which a god sets us / on fire and then sets us free."

A stunning sophomore release, Linda Susan Jackson's newest poetry collection, Truth be Told, looks at the myriad treasures and complexities of Black womanhood by channeling an eclectic cast whose rich interactions testify to the timeless neglect of girlhood, the bond of long-term friendship and the responsibilities of authorship. Here Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist from The Bluest Eye, addresses herself directly to Toni Morrison and connects, over time and space, with Persephone, a girl herself, cycling always toward the seasons, caught between an overbearing mother, an incomprehensible father and a grooming god; Lot's wife sets the record straight about turning back; and our speaker writes to and through her lineage, memorializing her great-grandmother's distilled wisdom and others who have impacted her, such as when she writes to the great blues singer, Etta James. In a meticulous inventory of our world and its historical inheritance, Jackson makes an undaunted cartographer, mapping "here: rag-wicked IED" to "there: t-shaped IUD," from "here: the mother I longed for" to " there: the mother I had." If Jackson recognizes the distance between our ideals and our reality as a kind of tragedy, she also resists despair, enjoining us to close the gap with hope for the future and to: "Step here: light the fire/ Step there: fire the cannon." Every poem is a spark struck, a cannonade hailing the resilient and enigmatic joy of language. "After decades with no history," Jackson sagely celebrates, "That I sing at all is a mystery." A mystery, yes, but moreover -- a blessing for those of us enthralled by her song of love.

Captivated by the simultaneously routine and disruptive nature of violence and desire, Nowhere Was a Lake marks a luminous debut from poet Margaret Draft. "What do you do when a horse dies? / You hollow out the land, // you try to make enough space, / and when you think you have enough, // keep digging." In these poems, our own tenderness endangers us, and yet -- when faced with the enormity of our hunger, an appetite that proclaims both the bounty of nourishment and our capacity for loss -- Draft keeps digging. "He said this because // he himself had to enter the hole / with the horse and shovel, // shift the legs, reposition the head." The speaker here has an unflinching pragmatism, a characteristic that paradoxically makes her emotions all the more tangible. This is how you prospect a grave, she seems to say, but you'll be in it, too. You with your body among the other bodies. Draft rejects simple binaries, insisting that oblivion can be a place, that fidelity and betrayal can coexist in our most intimate relationships, that to live as a human animal means embodying both hunter and prey. Deft in its exploration of female sexuality, the emotional complexity of polyamory, and the distinction between freedom and abandonment, Nowhere Was a Lake mesmerizes with its erotic pastorals and frank prose poems. "Edge" interrogates "the dialectic of trust" structuring romantic relationships and negotiated through sexual physics: "It is not a question of whether you will / harm me, but whether you will / stick around long enough / to hold me when I am harmed." The risk and reward of such exploration is uncertainty: anything could happen, but anything could happen. "In no place, going someplace, I know. / There are so few things I can say I know definitively. // But this must be the definition of plenty. / The sun slowly setting over the valley." And, yes, love may wend through the field as we thresh it. And, yes, we are in the light as it goes down.

In How to Abandon Ship, Sasha West harnesses poetry as a vessel to ferry the inconceivable, to wreck upon the shores of what we've known thus far. Assessing the accelerating emergencies of climate change amid the West's self-cannibalizing capitalism, the speaker of these poems wrestles with the state of the world and its compounding catastrophes as a new parent. That fierce love becomes her grappling hook into the glut of information and epochal view of time and space we must scale to leave our children a habitable, equitable planet. To approach a perspective too vast for the individual mind, West cycles through personae which collectively metabolize the strands of the past, and the foundational myths of Western civilization, that constructed this looming future. West speaks as a contemporary mother and an ancient proxy, the unheeded Greek oracle Cassandra; gives voice to fossil fuels; and imagines grown children, real and mythological, surviving beyond a world our generation preemptively mourns. "I have taken / my voice past the threshold, past / the lintel," Cassandra addresses readers and, more broadly, a paralyzed and apathetic public. "I am speaking to you now from / inside the wildfire while it burns the hair / from my body: I don't expect you will listen." But while making space for climate grief, holding our faces up to the ever-expanding sinkhole of earthly loss, West liberates us unto joy, enjoining us to remake the narratives that drive our culture, our consumption, and our relationship to the non-human world. Cassandra's daughter rides the ship as it sinks, declaring, "I am being shaped / into something new, waiting, / listening to birds give out song / before / the songs give out." And Cassandra's granddaughter endures to remind us that, when the sails buckle, we need not drown if we choose to swim. "When you were still alive and apt to get weepy over what you saw as rubbled landscapes, I was impatient. Only a tourist fetishizes the ground where tragedy occurred.... What needs to be done, we do. We act in tiny increments." These splinters compose the timeless story of humanity: we love each other because we cannot help it; we fail, and fail repeatedly; we go on.

We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On showcases Matthew Lippman's characteristic humor, strangeness, and honesty at the peak of his lyrical powers. These poems embrace mess as an inevitability of authentic living and human interconnection. Lippman gathers us into a bouquet. Picked from the garden and stems trimmed with the kitchen shears, maybe, but flowers all the same. In "The Big White American Segregation Machine," Lippman narrates the moment when the partitions that maintain white cognitive dissonance collapse. He says to a friend, "Private education sucks," but reflexive commiseration turns his gaze inward. "Then I realized I was a teacher. / Not that I was a teacher. / That I was a teacher in a private school." He confronts, even as he does not solve, the way the collective delusion of the American Dream alienates us from sustainable living. "At some point in my life I wanted to be a firefighter," Lippman reminisces. "So did the person next door and the stock broker / and the kid who punched the other kid on the playground. / I am sure of it." Why such insistence? "It has to be true / because wanting to be a firefighter / is the only thing that keeps the world / from not being torn asunder / by flame, and ash, and an impossible, raging / heat." In delineating the psychology of nostalgia, Lippman brilliantly reveals the fear of destruction and myopic sense of self-preservation that prevent us from leveraging goodness, from allowing combustion to clear the way for something better. "How does one change the culture, the mind culture, the heart culture?" he asks. "How does that happen? / More flowers? / More iced tea? / More ballet and modern dance? / Maybe more oboe and piano." In the end, the strength of Lippman's poems comes from the sincerity of their questioning and his willingness to muster an answer despite the world's surplus of doubt and despair. "Hello kindness," this poet tries again. "I am here and I want to hold your velvet hand / through the dark movie theater with the sticky, crunchy floors." If that is all there is, it is mercifully enough.

"Pinion, Monica Rico Four Way Books 2024"--

How does art mirror and shape our lives? Can it transcend the boundaries of time, wealth, and circumstance? Debra Spark--whose previous work the Washington Post described as "richly imaginative" and "real world magic"--explores these themes in her new novel Discipline. With a trio of important paintings missing, the book weaves together three narratives that span almost a century. From an inhumane boarding school in Maine in the late 1970s to a contemporary Boston art appraiser struggling with raising a teen to the long-lost love letters between a painter and his wife, Discipline is a propulsive literary mystery about family strife and devotion, ambition and authorship, and the abiding and mysterious power of art. Inspired by the life and family of Walt Kuhn (the painter responsible for the 1913 Armory Show that introduced Americans to modernism) and the scandal-ridden Elan boarding school that was forced to shut down in 2011, this richly drawn, suspenseful novel shows Spark at her most masterful.

About Andrea Cohen's poems, Christian Wiman has said: "One is caught off guard by their cumulative force. This is work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul." In The Sorrow Apartments, Cohen's eighth collection, those signature gifts are front and center, along with sly humor, relentless economy, and the hairpin curves of gut-punch wisdom. How quickly Cohen takes us so far: Bunker What would I > up after > had evaporated? > I were water. The Sorrow Apartments is home to spare and uncanny lyricism--as well as leaping narratives of mystery and loss and wonder. These poems race at once into the past and the possible. And yet, instead of holding things up to the light for a better view, Cohen lifts them to the dark and light, as in "Acapulco," where an unlikely companion points out, "as men tend to, / the stars comprising Orion's belt -- / as if it were the lustrous sparks and not / the leveling dark that connects us." For a poet who has been called unfashionable from the get-go, unfashionable never looked so good.

"Another Land of My Body Rodney Terich Leonard Four Way Books 2024"--

"Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? Cyrus Cassells Four Way Books 2024"--

As John Gallaher prefaces this book, "It should have been an easy story to sort out, but it took fifty years." My Life in Brutalist Architecture confronts the truth of the author's adoption after a lifetime of concealment and deceptions with lucid candor, startling humor, and implacable grief. Approaching identity and family history as a deliberate architecture, Gallaher's poems illuminate how a simple exterior can obscure the structural bricolage and emotional complexity of its inner rooms. This collection explores -- and mourns -- the kaleidoscopic iterations of potential selves as prismed through our understanding of the past, a shifting light parsed by facts, memories, and a family's own mythology. The agonizing beauty of My Life in Brutalist Architecture is its full embrace of doubt, a jack that makes space for repair even as it wrenches one apart. After his daughter's birth, the author considers the only picture of himself before the adoption, captioned "Marty, nine mos." In legal documentation, in the photographic archive, this child no longer exists. "I appear next as John, three-and- a-half," Gallaher writes, "and Marty disappears, a ghost name." "And so, then, what does the self consist of?" he asks. The answer is, necessarily, no answer. "The theme is time. The theme is unspooling," Gallaher summarizes, testifying to a story's inability to recover the past or isolate its meaning. Equal parts reckoning and apologia, Gallaher's latest work disrupts the notion that what you don't know can't hurt you, attesting to the irrevocable harm of silence, while offering mercy in its recognition of our guardians as deeply flawed conduits of care. Referencing Vitruvius's foundational elements of architecture (firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, or solidity, usefulness, and beauty), Gallaher fuses an elegy and an ode to family when he writes "that in the third principle of architecture, / they bathe you and feed you. You won't remember. // And they know this." Gallaher's lyricism encapsulates this, humanity's consummate tragedy and profoundest grace -- that love, even when forgotten, persists.

"Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah," reads the first line of Jessica Jacobs' unalone. By the end of this opening poem, however, Jacobs has defined her engagement with religious texts as an act of devotion to living fully in the world's complexity: "Here, love, is fruit with the sun still inside it. Let me // thumb the juice from your chin. Let us honor what we love / by taking it in." Structured around the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis, the trajectory of unalone parallels immersion in Jewish teachings with the contemporary world. Whether conversing with the sacred texts she reads or writing from her subjects' perspectives, Jacobs navigates an abundance of experiences: growing up queer, embracing one's sexuality, reversing roles as the adult child of aging parents, wrestling with religious history and the imposed roles of womanhood, exploring how the past foreshadows our current climate crisis, and revisiting the blush of new love while cataloging the profound, though more familiar, joys of a long relationship. Deeply personal and yet universal in its truths, unalone draws on the Book of Genesis as a living document whose stories, wisdom, and ethical knots can engage us more fully with our own lives -- whatever your religious tradition or spiritual beliefs. In this stunning and ambitious book, Jacobs reminds us that all poetry serves as a kind of prayer - a recognition of beauty, a spoken bid for connection, a yearning toward an understanding that might better guide us through our days. When you "dive / from the twin heights of your eyes," "that tiny pool below" isn't God. "Well, not exactly," Jacobs comforts us. "It's you. One breath deeper than you've / ever been, one breath closer to the heeded, heedful world."

Creature is a complex poetics of vitality, and it immaculately cleaves: even as it underscores how living in an inherently inhospitable environment will dispossess us of the world and one another, making animal of man, it sutures the rent evolutionary tree, glorifying the interdependence of each extant thing. Michael Dumanis expertly cultivates the multiplicity of language and makes of "creature" a marvelous contronym; we are a creature as in a beast, debased, beholden to nature, and we are creature as in an extension of creation, improbably sentient, mortal, here. In "Autobiography," the speaker attests to the contradiction at the root of cognizance: "Am, as an animal, // anxious. Appendages always aflutter, / am an amazing accident: alive." How does the human mammal embody both and neither -- communal and itinerant, leaving home to approach it, as an immigrant and a geographic nomad, as someone's child and another's parent, as being and thing? How do we negotiate our ouroboric identities while attuned to not just our own fragility, but an impending global extinction event? The answer is the absence of answer. "In the beginning, I thought a great deal / about death and sunlight, et cetera," Dumanis admits in "Squalor," but "The Double Dream of Spring" absolves us of outsmarting impermanence. "O what a ball I had, spending the days." And what should we do in this vernal brevity but exhaust it? We each only have so long to trace our hand "over the stony bones / that, fused together, hold [our] only face."

"Mary Slechta, Mulberry Street Stories, Four Way Books, September 2023"--

"A.H. Jerriod Avant--Muscadine Four Way Books, September 2023"--

A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins' oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience. These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states. Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict. If marriage "was a rope across a twilight abyss (an abscess)," if aging brings the hateful labels "OUT OF ORDER / & LATE FEE," every disappointment uncovers rejuvenating clarity. "Bereavement status" engenders both heartbreak and hope, somehow, as "then you lose your losses." Blevins triumphs in her reclamation of the spectacular in the mundane. "America is a flub. // A hack. A crime! America, fuck you for making // despondent bandits of us -- / for blinding & hooding // & chaining & gagging us." Even perched on shifting tectonic plates, Blevins wins the last word: "You don't seem to know it, // but there are foxes / crossing meadows // out there fast as disco lights. There are loons on your lakes." Amen.

In this stunning novel, Cynthia Cruz administers an IV drip of capitalist entropy that keeps us rapt: Steady Diet of Nothing compels readers to consume it in one headlong sitting. Charting the dissolution of an adolescent runaway community, the book follows a teenage girl, Candy, after her arrival at the Blue House -- an abandoned home inhabited by other children seeking shelter from the world. Here, she falls in love with Toby, a boy from elsewhere whose companionship interrupts the perpetual alienation of the status quo. "He didn't explain, but I knew," Candy says. "I knew as soon as he'd started talking, that we'd come from the same place." Beyond their den's walls, the market reigns, and the societal structure of infinite calculation and infinite exchange has rendered contemporary life meaningless. As Toby and Candy separately descend into drug addiction and prostitution, they find their efforts to defy the American economic superstructure futile, and Candy, again, is alone. "I'm going to die in here, I say, to no one." The transcription of a mute prayer, Steady Diet of Nothing is a stark, vital work that requires our attention. "I'm awake or else I'm dreaming," Candy narrates. "There's a knock on the door. The phone rings forever but I can't put the receiver down." It keeps the line open as long as it can.

"For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue," recounts Rajiv Mohabir's speaker in "Boy with Baleen for Teeth." As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters. Undersea, whales call to one another through their marine music, and, using the documented structure of humpback vocalizations, Mohabir translates the syntax of their songs into poetry. In our search for meaning, in our call and response, kinship resonates; "the echo is amniotic." "Once you immerse yourself in unending strains / the tones will haunt you: // ghosts spouting sohars you've called / since childhood." Fluid and inexorable as the ocean, Whale Aria articulates the confluence of ecological fate and human history. In "Why Whales Are Back in New York City," Mohabir notes the coincidence of current events: humpback migration returns to Queens for the first time in a century while the state expedites deportations of undocumented people in the same burrough. The language shared by human and marine creatures in these poems, however, promise that the tides will turn. "Our songs will pierce the dark / fathoms," Mohabir underscores the eternity of water. "Behold the miracle: // what was once lost / now leaps before you."

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Cynthia Cruz reevaluates the paradox of the death drive in her eighth collection of poetry, Back to the Woods. Could it be that in ceaselessly snuffing ourselves out we are, in fact, trying to survive? In "Shine," Cruz's speaker attests that "if [she] had a home, it would be // a still in a film / where the sound / got jammed." This book inhabits the silence of the empty orchestra pit, facing "dread, and its many / instruments of sorrow." The quiet asks, "Did you love this world / and did this world / not love you?" We return to the site of our suffering, we perform the symphony of all our old injuries, to master what has broken us. To make possible the future, we retreat into the past. "I don't know / the ending. // I don't know anything," our speaker insists, but she follows the wind's off-kilter song of "winter / in the pines" and "the dissonance / of siskins." Cruz heeds the urgency of our wandering, the mandate that we must get back to the woods, not simply for the forest to devour us -- she recognizes in the oblivion "flooding out / from its spiral branches" an impossible promise. At the tree line, we might vanish to begin again.

From award-winning poet Daniel Tobin comes The Mansions, an epic trilogy of book-length poems which examines exemplary 20th-Century figures Georges Lemaître, Simone Weil, and Teilhard de Chardin, all at the crossroads of science, history, and religion. Capacious in their philosophical explorations, immaculate in their form, stirring in their alchemy of faith and empiricism, each complete section works both autonomously and as part of the whole, building a house that contains many mansions, simulating the dynamic enormity of creation itself -- always already entire and yet unfinished, borderless, infinite. Immersed in a time when cataclysmic geopolitical events coincided with revolutionary scientific progress, The Mansions charts a Dantean journey as it confronts the exigencies and contingencies which define modernity: history, religion, our planet's fate, and the purpose of humankind. A fractal symphony of voices, Tobin's tripartite collection represents a staggering literary achievement -- a lyric narrative that can hold the totality of the divine and of godlessness, that harmonizes time as change and as eternity, that sees "pendant grapes" as "embodied wine." Its music is the harvest "cutting free the perfectly nurtured bruise-colored fruit, hour / by hour," and its wisdom embraces the transience of all things as well as the transfiguration of the self, that everlasting impermanence: "'I see the landscape as it is when I'm not there.'"

Cintia Santana's virtuoso debut collection, The Disordered Alphabet, reckons with the emotional anarchy of our lives, baring the difficulty of wrestling experience into language. She surveys a cosmic crossroads, "the sluices of heaven wording as we [stand] in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning." These poems pay homage to inherited forms while fashioning their own shapes -- Santana writes in alliterative verse, in footnotes, in epistles to consonants and vowels, in ekphrasis, in thrall. Ranging from A to Z in style, subject, and mood, Santana's poetic encyclopedia chronicles life's ubiquitous elegies alongside the world's innumerable wonders -- true to jumbled experience, they arrive in no particular order, or in the particular order of all the time and all at once. If "let there be" enabled light, it released every other sublime liquid, for then also "there was lie. // Lapse. And lake. Luck and leap. Little by little. Letter by letter. And it was late. / And there was bloom."

Retrospective of a long life and already inimitable career in poetry, Sydney Lea's What Shines asserts and asks in equal measure. In older age, Lea affirms the luster of fruit long labored for: a resilient and happy marriage; the rewards of parenthood and, later, grandchildren; a profound intimacy with northern New England -- the environment, the seasons, the people, home, time. But he also transmits the escalating urgency of answering the fundamental question: at this late hour, what light do we have to see by? What light will outlast us? In "1949," Lea revisits old photographs: one of his parents "both grinning straight at the Kodak, / an elm, not yet blighted to death, at their backs," another of his mother standing beside a bucket of sunfish. "With what I've known, you'd think there'd be chapter on chapter," he says, everything habitual, familiar. Still he stumbles upon revelation, the visceral novelty of experience, and Lea's brilliant shock glimmers in the golden hour. "I shouldn't be," he disclaims, "and yet somehow I'm stunned: / Even the fish in that yellowed photo are young." Despite the accelerating onset of autumn, consolations line the path "at the edge / of our late-shorn meadow," where there lie blackberries that "should have vanished by now." And so what if a handful will not disarm winter? "Though tiny and poor, it's sweet, / the fruit, even more so / than when I found more." If we receive this allotment of days once and only once, Lea's consummate collection urges us to remember the spirit of the lyric itself: although we couldn't keep it all forever, when we had it, my God, so much of it was sweet.

Crackling with the hypervigilance of parenthood, Childcare explores the paradox at the root of raising kids: the joy of new life accompanies an awareness of potential loss. Rob Schlegel's fourth collection observes the tangled emotions of fatherhood; even as he wonders at the strange intelligence of youth, he elegizes the present moment. The longitudinal wisdom of this collection appears in the choreography of its leaps -- how it moves from the aside "[My son] needs my love the most when he least deserves it / Is something I read" to the reflection that "Death / Names my shape. I keep my clothes / From dust and ghosts and time. / I'm angry at my father for aging." From Schlegel's relentless curiosity and keen observations, the artistic crisis driving the book emerges: does poetry memorialize the ephemeral moment, saving something for us, or does it remove us from experience? The duality of language's role -- that it, ultimately, has the capacity to do both -- doubles the significance of "childcare" in this collection, which comes to represent not just the work of child rearing but the dutiful care by adult children for their parents. Perhaps nothing can convey the scope and quality of family life like the concatenated dependencies of "(Un)conditional," which terminate here: "If the cut draws blood / If life ends in desire // If it begins in love."

"To the Boy Who Was Night collects the poetry published by Rigoberto Gonzâalez since 1999, including selections from five previous books as well as new work. Mirroring Gonzâalez's personal trajectory, the arc of this work articulates the course of a life: these poems recall leaving a beloved homeland, confront masculinity and sexuality in new adulthood, imagine the earth devoid of human inhabitants, descend into the realm of ghosts, and return to arrive at Dispatches from the Broken World. This latest section ventures into foreign terrain -- an autobiographical confrontation with isolation and the aging body."--Publisher marketing.

In this electrifying debut, lyric works to untangle slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent's suicide. "When my father finally / died," Vyas writes, "we [...] burned, / like an effigy, the voiceless body." Grief returns us to elemental silence, where "the wind is a muted vowel in the brush of pine / branches" across American landscapes. These poems extend formal experimentation, caesurae, and enjambment to reach into the emptiness and fractures that remain. This language listens as much as it sings, asking: can we recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy, and caste hierarchies? Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive? A monument to yesterday and a missive to tomorrow, When I Reach for Your Pulse reminds us of both the burden and the promise of inheritance. "[T]he wail outlasts / the dream," but time falls like water and so "the stream survives its source."

Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt's So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. "Soon," she says, "we'll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow." In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt's speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling "in their sweat-resistant fabrics," "so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time"; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers "no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare." It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title's idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, "& look at how lucky I've been, for so long."

Jennifer Franklin reimagines an Antigone for our times in her third collection, If Some God Shakes Your House, where filial devotion and ossified roles of gendered labor become the engine of her defiance. Franklin's Antigone is ferocious, feeling, and unafraid of the consequences of speaking the truth to power about the political atrocities she has witnessed and personal traumas she has withstood. With a sensitivity that equally elevates the quotidian and the classical, and an attention that moves from the ancient ruins of Pompeii to the right of bodily autonomy and agency stripped away by our own Supreme Court, Franklin reveals the high stakes of our moment where "the one who does the judging judges things all wrong." Franklin's Antigone has embraced the sacrifice of self for something greater--a dual devotion to her disabled daughter and to her art. "For twenty years, I have been disappearing," she writes in the book's final poem, yet she continues to sing.

James Allen Hall returns to poetry with Romantic Comedy, a sophomore collection sounding the parameters of genre to subvert cultural notions of literary value and artistic legitimacy. What realities do stories authorize, and which remain untold? "This story," they profess in "Biography," "is mine: there was / a wound, then a world." Rather than playing into the attention economy's appetite for sensationalism, Hall's poems resist the formulaic while paying homage to the oeuvre, a formal balancing act that celebrates queer life.The poems create liberatory narratives that break constraints or speak through them. Hall parses music from the blizzard -- as when "one year / [they] watched the snow / pile to [their] door / all December, all / January," "the year [they] wanted / to die," and, faced with winter's architecture, "learned / another song. Sang / another way." Whether grieving the death of their father, documenting the survival of sexual assault, interrogating the scripts of addiction, or revisiting an '80s crime thriller, Hall's second collection constantly affirms the ingenuity of self-definition as a technology of survival.