A daughter abandoned by her father. A mexican American fascinator. At every step, deceit, sotelo’s poems seduce with history, and sensory detail―grilled meat, folklore, relationships, and burnt sugar―before delivering clear-eyed and eviscerating insights into power, golden habañeros, and ourselves.

These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity―of naiveté, how “far & wide, of careless abandon―before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women, / how dark & deep / this frigid female mind can go. A schoolgirl hopelessly in love. Blistering and gorgeous, Virgin is an audacious act of imaginative self-mythology from one of our most promising young poets.

And here is what it means to become an artist, of words and of the self. Selected by ross gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo’s debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman. A contemporary Ariadne with her monstrous Theseus. A writer with a penchant for metaphor and a character who thwarts her own best efforts.

Here is what it means to be cruel. A seeming innocent in a cherry-red cardigan, lurking at the margins of a Texas barbeque. Here is what it means to love someone without truly understanding them. In virgin, sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast.

The Carrying: Poems

From national book award and national Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying―her most powerful collection yet. Vulnerable, brave poems, acute, these are serious poems, tender, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance.

A daughter tends to aging parents. Fine then, / i’ll take it, ” she writes. A woman struggles with infertility―“what if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”―and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.

And still limón shows us, as ever, love, the persistence of hunger, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. I’ll take it all. In bright dead things, no, it knows, limón showed us a heart “giant with power, heavy with blood”―“the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, / it’s going to come in first.

In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display―even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.

Wade in the Water: Poems

Smith, the onesjangling handcuffs and keys, the poet laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love’s bladeSizing up the heart’s familiar meat?We watch and grieve. Here, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees.

These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice―inquisitive, a mother, and wry―turns over what it means to be a citizen, lyrical, men, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, and violence.

We sleep, stir, eat. Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean. Love: naked almost in the everlasting street, Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze. From “unrest in baton rouge”In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties america’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting.

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Eye Level: Poems

Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception―both to the tangible world and to “all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach. ”. 9 p. M. Hanoi’s old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine. The sensual worlds here―colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes―bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen.

Voices outside the door come to a soft boil. From “phnom penh diptych: dry season”jenny xie’s award-winning debut, to Phnom Penh, takes us far and near, and elsewhere, Corfu, Eye Level, New York, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, Hanoi, moving collection.

I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight, my overreactive motion sickness. As xie writes, “me? i’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size. Her taut, caught in between things and places, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, and never quite entirely at home.

Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse. Finalist for the national book award for poetrywinner of the walt whitman award of the academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe HerreraFor years now, I’ve been using the wrong palette.

Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin Penguin Poets

Inventive, hilarious, compassionate, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Finalist for the 2018 national book award in poetry one of the new york times critics' top Books of 2018A powerful, timely, Terrance Hayes, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, the National Book Award winning author of Lighthead"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America.

The new york timesin seventy poems bearing the same title, of assassin, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, and of love in the sonnet form.

Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems

I did notdie. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and―even in its unsparing brutality―full of love. I shaved my head. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, outcries, and loss into poems of many forms and voices―elegies, war, self-portraits, family, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, and memory.

Glass beneath my feet. One poem steps down the page like a slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, ” suggests illuminated texts, and destiny; and the near-title poem, defiance, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, discipline, “Register of Eliminated Villages, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq.

Until the hornsI knew were there were visible. Until the doorknob went silent. Mother said, Dance and the bells will sing with you. I slithered. From “100 bells”registers of illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Tarfia faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision.

Natasha TretheweySomebody is always singing.

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl: Poems

Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting. ”. In diane seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces―details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole.

Instead, the washed-up, the ugly, seuss invites in the alienated, and the freakish―the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Diane seuss’s brilliant follow-up to four-legged girl, a finalist for the pulitzer prize for poetrystill life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned DreamsicleStill life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinderStill life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeetStill life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of RevelationStill life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry ZingerStill life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face―from “American Still Lives”Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, violence, a dark emblem of femininity, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze.

With invention and irreverence, class, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, and luxury.

The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

She imagines a feminist Limbo where women run the show and create a space to navigate the difficulties endured in life. I’ll tell you you were good to me. Like dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. I’ll hold your hand in my own, ” one ghost says.

Bianca stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation's emerging pathology and sensibility. John ashbery a paris review staff pick and Most Anticipated Book of 2018 at NYLON, Autostraddle, Bustle, and more. The möbius strip club of grief is a collection of poems that take place in a burlesque purgatory where the living pay―dearly, with both money and conscience―to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: “$20 for five minutes.

. With a nod to her grandmother ruth stone’s poem “the mobius Strip of Grief, ” Stone creates a labyrinthine underworld as a way to confront and investigate complicated family relationships in the hopes of breaking the never-ending cycle of grief.

Not Here

Not here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

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Barbie Chang

With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric.

Her talent is conspicuous. Linda gregerson"Chang's voice is equal parts searing, vulnerable, and terrified. American Poets. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree: A Novel

In lush prose, rojas contreras has written a powerful testament to the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation. But petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction.

As both girls' families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal. One of the most dazzling and devastating novels I’ve read in a long time. Readers of fruit of the Drunken Tree will surely be transformed.

San francisco chronicle“Simultaneously propulsive and poetic, reminiscent of Isabel Allende. Listen to this new author’s voice — she has something powerful to say. Entertainment weeklya mesmerizing debut set in colombia at the height pablo escobar's violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them bothSeven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation.