First you must realize you're homesick for all the lives you're not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart. So begins Joy Sullivan's Instructions for Traveling West--a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us all: What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention?

The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter in early 20th century Chicago; a hobo during the Great Depression; an office girl in 1950s Manhattan; the young man reveling in 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends as the AIDS pandemic hits; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box-an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this work.

A profound and intersectional text, Song of My Softening is a queer, fat, love song of the interior. Poems study the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. This book is a window into what perseverance looks like, ungilded, a mirror for anyone born into a culture outside of their identity, who has survived alienation, violation, depression, and systematized oppression. Unspoken truths about the body and soul are mused with openness, candor, and tenderness.

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer” of violence across the nation’s cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

Jenny Xie's award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. 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. The sensual worlds here--colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes--bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, "Me? I'm just here in my traveler's clothes, trying on each passing town for size." Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. 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..

Kaveh Akbar's exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up to Calling a Wolf a Wolf... With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar's second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body's question, "what now shall I repair? " Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance-the infinite void of a loved one's absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation-teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.... Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell's linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives-resonant, revelatory, and holy.

A literary coming-of-age poetry collection, an ode to the places we call home, and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing. As a competitive spoken-word poet who draws large crowds of people, Jasmine Mans's collection is divided into six sections, each with a corresponding active telephone number where she has recorded excerpts of her poems. You can listen now, just dial! Using poetry to bring change to the world with positive agitation and hoping to prompt dialogue where there is normally fear, poet Jasmine Mans explores the intersection of race, feminism, and queer identity in her latest collection Black Girl, Call Home...

An ancient race of lycanthropes has survived to the present day, and its numbers are growing as the initiated convince L.A.'s down and out to join their pack. Paying no heed to moons, full or otherwise, they change from human to canine at will--and they're bent on domination at any cost. Caught in the middle are Anthony, a kind-hearted, besotted dogcatcher, and the girl he loves, a female werewolf who has abandoned her pack. Anthony has no idea that she's more than she seems, and she wants to keep it that way. But her efforts to protect her secret lead to murderous results.

Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness―how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.

In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.

From National Poetry Series winner Su Cho, chosen by Paige Lewis, a debut poetry collection about immigration, memory, and a family's lexicon. Language and lore are at the core of The Symmetry of Fish, a moving debut about coming-of-age in the middle of nowhere. With striking and tender insight, it seeks to give voice to those who have been denied their stories, and examines the way phrases and narratives are passed down through immigrant families-not diluted over time, but distilled into potency over generations. In this way, a family's language is not lost but continuously remade, hitched to new associations, and capable of blooming anew, with the power to cut across space and time to unearth buried memories. The poems in The Symmetry of Fish insist that language is first and foremost a bodily act; even if our minds can't recall a word or a definition, if we trust our mouths, expression will find us-though never quite in the forms we expect.

Charlotte tells the story of artist Charlotte Salomon--born in pre-World War II Berlin to a Jewish family traumatized by suicide. Obsessed with art, and with living, Charlotte attended school in Germany until it was too dangerous to remain, fled to France, and was interned in a bleak work camp from which she narrowly escaped. Newly free, she spent two years in almost total solitude, creating a series of autobiographical art―images, words, even musical scores--that together tell her life story. A pregnant Charlotte was killed in Auschwitz at the age of 26, but not before she entrusted her life's work to a friend, who kept it safe until peacetime.

Award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin was lauded by millions for her groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy novels, though she began her career as a poet. "I still kind of twitch and growl when I'm reduced to being the science fiction writer. I'm a novelist and increasingly a poet. And sometimes I wish they'd call me that," Le Guin said in a 2015 interview with NPR. In this clarifying and sublime collection--written shortly before her death in 2018--Le Guin immerses herself in the natural world, ruminating on the mysteries of dying, and considering the simple, redemptive lessons of the earth.

One of the most important and unique voices in American letters, distinguished poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller N. Scott Momaday was born into the Kiowa tribe and grew up on Indian reservations in the Southwest. The customs and traditions that influenced his upbringing--most notably the Native American oral tradition--are the centerpiece of his work. This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday's mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday's connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape. The title poem, "The Death of Sitting Bear" is a celebration of heritage and a memorial to the great Kiowa warrior and chief. "I feel his presence close by in my blood and imagination," Momaday writes, "and I sing him an honor song." Here, too, are meditations on mortality, love, and loss, as well as reflections on the incomparable and holy landscape of the Southwest. The Death of Sitting Bear evokes the essence of human experience and speaks to us all.

"Blue in Green" is a book that is equal parts subtle intelligence and generosity of heart. In it, Chiyuma Elliott creates a unique voice that returns again and again to the question of what we expect from one another, and how that question is transformed instead into a question of what we owe each other. This notion of reversal plays out in the construction of the poems where, unlike so many of her contemporaries who come to poetry through prose techniques, Elliott's voice emerges through a complex shifting of phrase and syntax between lines or in mid-phrase. We don't, for example, get a straight-forward story of what caused the trauma of, say, cancer or abuse; rather, we hear impressions, half-formed ideas that rise and fall in the speaker's voice as it moves through the nature of the trauma, and experience the effects of the disorder that is the center of our everyday relationships through speech. Put another way: when a crisis overshadows the ordinary, disrupting the collective labor that we pursue together in love, friendship, and work, the hardship itself, in a kind of role-reversal, becomes a collaborator, necessitating new conceptions of relationships and proposing new modes of engagement, different rules of exchange. The book's forms also reflect this transformed idea of reciprocity: ekphrastic poems, normally reserved for visual artworks, instead describe modern jazz songs (including the title poem); letters and letter fragments are written to no one in particular, to the planet, to the universe; and highly allusive free verse poems defy convention with troubled, wildly variable line lengths. The phrase "When I was a wave" recurs throughout the book in unpredictable places, sometimes as a title, sometimes in the middle of a poem, each time telling a different story about expectation, intimacy, and the risk inherent in any relationship. "Blue in Green" is a graceful, tough-minded, beautifully crafted collection, full of wit and elegance.

In Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unjust policing of certain bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy, against hate spreading like a virus. He grieves for children in cages and those slain in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. But pulsing amid Borzutzky's outrage over our era's tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice. Borzutzky's strident language juxtaposes the horror of consumer-culture violence with its absurdity, and he masterfully shifts between shock and heartbreak over the course of the collection. Bleak but not hopeless, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 is an unflinching poetic reckoning with the twenty-first century.

The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. In this fresh, authoritative version--the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman--this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, this engrossing translation matches the number of lines in the Greek original, thus striding at Homer's sprightly pace and singing with a voice that echoes Homer's music. Wilson's Odyssey captures the beauty and enchantment of this ancient poem as well as the suspense and drama of its narrative.

Deaf Republic opens in a time of political unrest in an occupied territory. Though the setting is uncertain, we recognize ourselves--our time and our country--in these harrowing events. This ... parable in poems unfolds episodically, its narrative provoked by a tragic opening scene: while breaking up a protest, a soldier shoots and kills a young deaf boy--and the gunshot renders the entire town deaf. In the prevailing silence and against the soldiers' brutal crackdown, the citizens coordinate their dissent with sign language, illustrated across the book ... At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Deaf Republic stands as a warning and a powerful questioning of our own collective silence in the face of our time's atrocities.

This collection, 39 poems written between 1987 and 1992, is the final volume by Audre Lorde, "a major American poet whose concerns are international, and whose words have left their mark on many lives, " in the words of Adrienne Rich. Audre Lorde was a poet of the city of her birth, New York, as well as of other urban landscapes. She spoke of the Caribbean, Africa, Europe. She brought to all these places a true cosmopolitan vision, one dissatisfied with the usual description of things, one eager for truth-telling, for change. She spoke of her hopes for this, her final offering to the world she traveled: "Beyond the penchant for easy definitions, false exactitudes, we share a hunger for enduring value, relationship beyond hierarchy and outside reproach, a hunger for life measures, complex, direct, and flexible ... I want this book to be filled with shards of light thrown off from the shifting tensions between the dissimilar, for that is the real stuff of creation and growth."

Rajiv Mohabir's Cutlish uses history to interrogate the word "home" and all that it might mean to those who thrive in spite of homophobia, stereotype, and xenophobia. These poems are grounded in definite time and space in a voice that refuses to be silenced, "They are vexed you survive; that you/rise up from the pavement..." But what I love most is read a poet as disciplined and committed as Mohabir as he transforms and reinvents himself in tone, in subject, and in line: "Let's get one thing queer-I'm no Sabu-like sidekick,/I'm the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam//on the street. I don't speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian,/can't control minds, have no psychic powers." Jericho Brown Cutlish, Rajiv Mohabir's stunning new collection, asks urgent questions about queer identities, diaspora and silence. Deeply grounded in 1838, the year the first ships brought indentured servants from India to Guyana, Cutlish reckons with the relationship between language and violence. These poems challenge the colonizer's English through Creole, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani and Chutney songs, dazzling us at every turn: "May each face who ever said, Speak English / find their own tongue fettered and split, / my mixed blood blackening their faces." The book's title evokes the violence of a cutlass, and everywhere here we see language as knife and blade but also as solace. Cutlish is a luminous, beautiful book. Rajiv Mohabir is one of the most important poets writing today.

A young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache decides one day to bring Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The séance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as she journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell. In visceral poems embodying millennial angst, paragraph-long conversations overheard at her local coffeeshop, and unhinged Twitter rants, Lozada-Oliva reveals an eerie, sometimes gruesome, yet moving love story.

Ghost Of elegizes a brother lost via suicide, is a mourning song for the idea of family, a family haunted by ghosts of war, trauma, and history. Nguyen’s debut is not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: remnants of memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space. Through lyric meditation, Nguyen seeks to bridge the realms of the living with the dead, the past with the present. These poems are checkpoints at the border of a mind, with arms outstretched in bold tenderness.