Poetry

Harlem Shadows (1922) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem Shadows earned praise from legendary poet and political activist Max Eastman for its depictions of urban life and the technical mastery of its author. As a committed leftist, McKay—who grew up in Jamaica—captures the life of Harlem from a realist’s point of view, lamenting the poverty of its African American community while celebrating their resilience and cultural achievement. In “The White City,” McKay observes New York, its “poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed” and “fortressed port through which the great ships pass.” Filled him with a hatred of the inhuman scene of industry and power, forced to “muse [his] life-long hate,” he observes the transformative quality of focused anger: “My being would be a skeleton, a shell, / If this dark Passion that fills my every mood, / And makes my heaven in the white world’s hell, / Did not forever feed me vital blood.” Rather than fall into despair, he channels his hatred into a revolutionary spirit, allowing him to stand tall within “the mighty city.” In “The Tropics in New York,” he walks past a window filled with “Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, / Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,” a feast of fresh tropical fruit that brings him back, however briefly, to his island home of Jamaica. Recording his nostalgic response, McKay captures his personal experience as an immigrant in America: “My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; / A wave of longing through my body swept, / And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, / I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.” This edition of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (1918) is a collection of poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson. Marking Johnson’s debut as one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems is an invaluable work of African American literature for scholars and poetry enthusiasts alike. Comprised of Johnson’s earliest works as a poet, the collection showcases her sense of the musicality of language while illuminating the experiences of African American women of the early twentieth century. “The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, / As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on.” Recalling Paul Laurence Dunbar’s classic poem “Sympathy,” which immortalizes the African American experience with the line “I know why the caged bird sings,” the title poem of Johnson’s collection compares the heart to a bird. Musical and dreamlike, Johnson’s poem envisions “the heart of a woman” as it “enters some alien cage in its plight, / And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars / While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.” With each repetition of “breaks,” the reader can feel the restlessness and fear of the bird as it beats its wings against its cage, the heart as it beats against the “sheltering bars” of the ribs. In this poem, and throughout the collection, Johnson shows an efficiency with language uncommon to many poets, let alone one making her debut. This edition of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Spring and All (1923) is a book of poems by William Carlos Williams. Predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his works, often comprised of a seamless blend of both forms of writing. In Spring and All, the closest thing to a manifesto he wrote, Williams addresses the nature of his modern poetics which not only pursues a particularly American idiom, but attempts to capture the relationship between language and the world it describes. Part essay, part poem, Spring and All is a landmark of American literature from a poet whose daring search for the outer limits of life both redefined and expanded the meaning of language itself. “There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.” In Spring and All, Williams identifies the incomprehensible nature of consciousness as the single most important subject of poetry. Accused of being “heartless” and “cruel,” of producing “positively repellant” works of art in order to “make fun of humanity,” Williams doesn’t so much defend himself as dig in his heels. His poetry is addressed “[t]o the imagination” itself; it seeks to break down the “the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment.” When he states that “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow,” he refers to the need to understand the nature of language, which keeps us in touch with the world. This edition of William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Clouds and Sunshine (1920) is a collection of poems by Sarah Lee Brown Fleming. Published during the Harlem Renaissance, Clouds and Sunshine is a powerful work of poetry exploring themes of faith, racial identity, loss, and love in twentieth century America. Recognized as a leading advocate for the advancement of Black girls and women throughout her life, Fleming is a writer whose voice never falters from the task at hand: telling the story of her people. Separated into three sections, Clouds and Sunshine shows Flemings prowess as a lyric poet of the Romantic persuasion, a dialect poet in the tradition of Paul Laurence Dunbar, and a groundbreaking political writer who observed the experiences of Black Americans while recording and examining her own. In “Tuskegee,” she offers an ode to the iconic institution founded by Booker T. Washington in Alabama: “On thy consecrated ground / Is carved a wondrous story, / Out of chaos, Washington / Raised this place to glory.” In “The Black Man’s Hope,” located in the section titled “Race Poems,” Fleming condemns the politics of the United States, which promises so much to white Americans while betraying time and again a people it never meant to recognize as citizens: “I hear the talk of the white man’s hope / In the ring and at the poll, / But never a word of the black man’s hope / Do I hear as time doth roll. // Bowed with the weight which slavery left / Upon his chattled frame, / No star of hope comes into view / The weight is still the same.” In two brief stanzas, Fleming effectively condemns the emptiness offered with every election cycle. Far from despairing, she makes a powerful case for resistance while telling a terrible truth: prejudice is a manmade thing, and only targeted action can undo it. This edition of Sara Lee Brown Fleming’s Clouds and Sunshine is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi (1921) is a collection of poems by Yone Noguchi. Although he is widely recognizing as a leading poet in English and Japanese of the modernist period, Noguchi was also a dedicated literary critic who advocated for the cross-pollination of national poetries. Alongside a brilliant introduction, in which he addresses the collective power of world literature, he provides a selection of his best poems from a quarter century of work.

”The time is coming when, as with international politics where the understanding of the East with the West is already an unmistakable fact, the poetries of these two different worlds will approach of one another and exchange their cordial greetings.” A firm believer in plainspoken language and a practitioner of free verse, Noguchi envisioned his art as a humble contribution to the union of East and West. In his early poems written in California, he reflects on loneliness and the natural world while reveling in the extended lines and celebratory phrases made popular by Whitman. In his third collection, From the Eastern Sea (1903) he settles into a more reserved prosody, characterized by stillness and vibrant imagery. Included in this collection are his prose poems and a series of Japanese Hokkus, whose minimalism and spiritual clarity continue to captivate readers and poets of all languages and nations. “Is there anything new under the sun? / Certainly there is. / See how a bird flies, how flowers smile!” These poems not only teach us to look, but to see the world anew.

This edition of Yone Noguchi’s Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi is a classic of Japanese American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

America and Other Poems (1853) is a book of poems by J.M. Whitfield. Published while the poet was working as a barber in Buffalo, New York, America and Other Poems captures his sense of poetic form while expressing his belief in the abolition of slavery. In these odes, hymns, and prayers, Whitfield established his reputation as a pioneering African American poet, an impassioned voice for his people who tirelessly sought to change the course of history with his words. “The North Star,” which concludes the collection, was written for Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist newspaper The North Star, that “guard of truth and liberty” for all. “The writer of the following pages is a poor colored man of this city, engaged in the humble, yet honorable and useful occupation of a barber.” In the introduction to his debut book of poems, J.M. Whitfield proudly and directly asserts his identity. Although he does not fit in with the traditional figure of the poet, Whitfield proves his mastery of form while condemning slavery in the strongest terms. “America” opens the collection with a direct address to the nation “from whence has issued many a band / To tear the black man from his soil, / And force him here to delve and toil”: “America, it is to thee, / Thou boasted land of liberty,— / It is to thee I raise my song, / Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.” Without fear, Whitfield questions the moral and political promise of a nation built by slaves. He demands through song and prayer the advent of a day when to “north and south, and east and west, / The wrongs we bear shall be redressed.” This edition of J.M Whitfield’s America and Other Poems is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

The Collected Poems and Prose of Jupiter Hammon compiles the works of Jupiter Hammon, America’s first published black writer. When his poem “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” appeared in print as a broadside in 1761, Hammon unknowingly changed American literature for generations to come. Born into slavery, Hammon was a highly talented poet and preacher whose subtle criticism of slavery employed Christian symbolism and promoted a vision of salvation through determination and faith in God. In 1786, Hammon gave “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York” at the inaugural assembly of the African Society of New York City. In it, he proclaimed that “If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves.” His message of hope and spiritual uplift employed Christian theology while responding to the needs and desires of enslaved African Americans. In “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley,” Hammon harnesses the communicative power of poetry to acknowledge and praise a pioneering young poet: “While thousands muse with earthly toys; / And range about the street, / Dear Phillis, seek for heaven’s joys, / Where we do hope to meet.” Through this shared passion for poetry and belief in life after death, the two poets—who never did meet in life—join in mind and in spirit despite their earthly status as slaves. Through humility and hope, Hammon expresses his solidarity with a kindred soul while igniting and inspiring countless others. This edition of The Collected Poems and Prose of Jupiter Hammon is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

“In the whole of European literature there is no poet who can furnish the texts for a more significant variety of discourse than Virgil. [He] symbolizes so much in the history of Europe, and represents such central European values…” –T.S. Eliot

The Georgics (29 BC) is a poem by Roman poet Virgil. Although less prominent than The Aeneid, Virgil’s legendary epic of the Trojan hero Aeneas and his discovery of what would later become the city of Rome, The Georgics have endured as a landmark in the history of poetry. The Georgics were inspired by Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and Hesiod’s Works and Days, an Ancient Greek poem describing the creation of the cosmos, the history of Earth, and the role of agriculture in human life. The Georgics is considered Virgil’s second major work of three and has inspired generations of poets and scholars interested in the ability of literature to bridge the artificial gap between humanity and the natural world.

“What makes the cornfield smile […] What pains for cattle-keeping, or what proof / Of patient trial serves for thrifty bees; / Such are my themes.” Beginning with these lines, Virgil’s Georgics is a poem about the life of the world and the need for order to ensure humanity’s survival. Surveying such diverse topics as the creation of the universe, the cycles of human history, and the technical processes applied to soil and animals to produce food and sustain life itself, this poem attempts to rekindle in its reader a sense of unity with the world. Written in a time of immense political upheaval following the death of Julius Caesar and the rise of Emperor Augustus, The Georgics is as much a poem of survival as of faith, a falling back on the old ways that sustain and nurture life, a way of preserving a volatile present for a future forever in the making.

This edition of Virgil’s The Georgics is a classic work of Roman literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

“The first taste I had for books came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.” –Michel de Montaigne

The Lover’s Assistant; or, New Art of Love (1760) is an updated translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria; or, The Art of Love (2 AD) by English satirist Henry Fielding. Divided into three books, Ars Amatoria; or, The Art of Love was immensely popular—if a little controversial—in its time, and has survived numerous charges of indecency over the centuries. For the modern reader, it should prove a surprisingly relatable work on intimacy from an author of the ancient world. Fielding’s translation, of the first book alone, remains true to Ovid’s Latin while updating its examples and historical context for the contemporary English reader.

At times serious, at others humorous, The Lover’s Assistant; or, New Art of Love uses a mix of down-to-earth examples and relatable references to mythology in order to offer salient advice for the reader longing for love. Maintaining much of Ovid’s content, Fielding replaces the context of the poem—ancient Rome—with that of his contemporary England. Topics include etiquette, remembering birthdays, avoiding unhealthy jealousy, being open to older and younger lovers, and nurturing honesty. With his wry wit and clear-eyed sense of English aristocratic life, Fielding—who is seen as a pioneer of English literature for his work, including the comic novel Tom Jones (1749)—provides a loyal reinterpretation of Ovid’s classic study of romance between men and women. The Lover’s Assistant; or, New Art of Love, although frequently tongue-in-cheek, is an earnest and effective attempt to enlighten and encourage its readers to partake—responsibly—in one of life’s greatest pleasures.

This edition of Ovid’s The Lover’s Assistant; or, New Art of Love is a classic work of Roman literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

The New Life (1294) is a work of verse and prose by Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Composed in the prosimetrum style, The New Life explores the popular medieval theme of courtly love. Made up of alternating commentaries, sonnets, and canzoni, the work is an essential expression of Dante’s poetic gift, and a foundational work for the dolce stil novo literary movement to which Dante was a central figure. Written in the Tuscan vernacular, the poem was influential in establishing a standardized Italian language.

Compiled and published following the death of Beatrice Portinari, whom Dante loved from the age of nine when he saw her on the streets of Florence, The New Life translates his personal grief into a moving and universally recognizable work on the nature of love. Dante, who believed that romantic love could lead to a development of the soul, subsequently bringing one to the love of God—a concept central to The Divine Comedy—divided his work into prose commentaries and poems in verse, a popular style known as prosimetrum. Despite this debt to tradition, however, Dante wrote The New Life in the Tuscan vernacular as opposed to Latin, making his work more accessible to readers. Autobiographical in nature, The New Life portrays Dante coming to terms with his grief, praising the deceased Beatrice, and turning friends and acquaintances into figures populating his poems. From sorrow to salvation, Dante finds the light of God through the darkness of death, testifying to the transformative power of love while proving beyond any doubt the power of a transformative poetry.

This edition of Dante Alighieri’s The New Life is a classic of Italian literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

“In the whole of European literature there is no poet who can furnish the texts for a more significant variety of discourse than Virgil. [He] symbolizes so much in the history of Europe, and represents such central European values…” –T.S. Eliot

The Eclogues (38 BC), also known as the Bucolics, is a work by Roman poet Virgil. Although less prominent than The Aeneid, Virgil’s legendary epic of the Trojan hero Aeneas and his discovery of what would later become the city of Rome, The Eclogues have endured as a landmark in the history of pastoral poetry. The Eclogues were inspired by the bucolic idylls of Hellenistic poet Theocritus, poems set in the rural region of Arcadia in Ancient Greece. In contrast to Theocritus, whose poems idealized agricultural life for a cosmopolitan audience based in Alexandria, Virgil’s work is grounded in the complex sociopolitical realities of its day, a time of civil war following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

“Some brutal soldier will possess these fields / An alien master. Ah! To what a pass / Has civil discord brought our hapless folk!” Displaced from his land, Meliboeus laments his fate to the farmer Tityrus, who has been fortunate enough to retain his ancestral home. Set amidst civil war, poverty, and cultural upheaval, the Eclogues vary in tone and scope from the tragic dialogue just described to a lonely shepherd crying for lost love and a singing competition held between two gifted men. In emphasizing the connection between poetry, singing, and labor, Virgil recalls the roots of written language in an older, oral tradition, restoring what has been lost—peace, land, possessions, love—in what can never be taken away. “Love conquers all things; yield we too to love!” In a time of widespread uncertainty, Virgil found solace in surrendering to the unknown while remaining certain of one eternal truth: as long as love survives, there will be songs.

This edition of Virgil’s The Eclogues is a classic work of Roman literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847) is an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A master of poetic tradition and form, Longfellow wrote Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie in dactylic hexameter, the meter of such classical epics as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Virgil’s Aeneid. Inspired by the experience of the Acadians, a Francophone people living in northern Maine and the Canadian Maritime provinces who were forcefully expelled by British forces during the French and Indian War, Longfellow composed his American epic, a story of faith, romance, and perseverance steeped in tradition and beloved by generations to come.

In the French colony of Acadie, a young woman named Evangeline Bellefontaine marries Gabriel Lajeunesse. They begin their lives together in happiness, surrounded by the beauty of the forests and waters of the Maritimes. When war breaks out between the French and the British, the Acadians are forced out of their homes by the advancing British. Separated from Gabriel, Evangeline makes her way across America in search of safety and her missing husband. After several near misses and years of living on the road, Evangeline settles in Philadelphia, where she joins a convent and cares for the sick as a deadly epidemic sweeps across the land. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie is an epic of a forgotten history, a tale of hardship and the love that would overcome it.

This edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) is the first book of poetry published by an African American author. Written while Wheatley was a slave in Boston, the collection was published in England. Regarded for her mastery of classical poetic form, Phillis Wheatley earned praise from Voltaire and George Washington. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral has long been the subject of scholarly work on the history of African American literature, with some critics arguing that Wheatley’s poems proved detrimental to the struggle of enslaved African Americans. Whether Wheatley made excuses for slavery or, as some have argued, included subtle critiques of the institution in her writing, her talent and importance to the history of African American literature remain undisputed.

Despite her status as a slave, Phillis Wheatley seems to have viewed herself as a blessed individual, a woman for whom life itself was a sign of God’s grace, and in whom talent arose in the form of a foreign language. Many of her poems—elegies, odes, and monologues—are aimed at others. Whether in mourning, in praise, or in warning, Wheatley frequently offers her own voice to university students, royalty, God, the muses, and deceased infants. When she does offer glimpses of herself, for instance, in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” she provides a complex perspective on her status as a slave: “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too.” While her words may seem strange to our modern view of the American institution of slavery, they provide an important historical lens onto the adoption of Christianity by African American slaves, who developed a faith grounded in resistance, hope, and redemption.

This edition of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

North of Boston (1914) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Following the success of Frost’s debut, A Boy’s Will (1913), North of Boston was published in London to enthusiastic reviews from both Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. His success abroad quickly translated to critical acclaim in the United States, and Frost would eventually be recognized as a leading American poet.

“Mending Wall” takes place in spring, as the people emerge from their homes to assess the damage done by the long, dark winter. Observing that parts of the stone wall on the edge of his property have fallen, the poet joins his neighbor “to walk the line / And set the wall between us once again.” Although he feels they “do not need the wall,” his neighbor insists that “’Good fences make good neighbours,’” continuing down the line to reinforce the space between them. A meditation on humanity, civilization, and democracy, “Mending Wall” is an iconic and frequently anthologized poem. In “After Apple-Picking,” as fall gives over to winter, the poet remembers in dreams how the “Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end” as he climbs the ladder into the heart of the tree. Both a symbol for life and a metaphor for the poetic act, apple picking leaves the poet “overtired / Of the great harvest [he himself] desired”, awaiting sleep as he describes “its coming on,” wondering what, if anything, it will bring.

This edition of Robert Frost’s North of Boston is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Selected Poems (1923) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Dedicated to Edward Thomas, a friend of Frost’s and an important English poet who died toward the end of the First World War, Selected Poems is a wonderful sampling of poems from Frost’s early collections, including A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Known for his plainspoken language and dedication to the images and rhythms of rural New England, Robert Frost is one of America’s most iconic poets, a voice to whom generations of readers have turned in search of beauty, music, and life.

“Mowing” envisions the poet’s work through the prism of rural labor. “There was never a sound beside the wood but one / And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. / What was it it whispered?” The speaker does not know, but continues his task, hypnotized by its rhythm and simple music. In “After Apple-Picking,” as fall gives over to winter, the poet remembers in dreams how the “Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end” as he climbs the ladder into the heart of the tree. Both a symbol for life and a metaphor for the poetic act, apple picking leaves the poet “overtired / Of the great harvest [he himself] desired”, awaiting sleep as he describes “its coming on,” wondering what, if anything, it will bring. “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps Frost’s most famous poem, is a meditation on fate and free will that follows a traveler in an autumn landscape, unsure of which path to take, but certain he cannot stand still.

This edition of Robert Frost’s Selected Poems is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

A Boy’s Will (1913) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Published in London and dedicated to the poet’s wife, Elinor, A Boy’s Will, which received enthusiastic early reviews from both Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats, launched Frost’s career as America’s leading poet of the early-twentieth century. Invoking such figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy, Frost ties himself to tradition while establishing his own poetic legacy, grounded in an intuitive sense of rural New England life and the subtleties of the soul.

“Into My Own,” the collection’s opening poem, reveals the poet’s strange wish to “steal away” into “those dark trees, / So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze.” Without fear, he welcomes uncertainty, ventures into it willingly, knowing it is the only way to live. In “Ghost House,” the poet enters a realm of shades and spirits, an underworld of memory where “a lonely house” has left “no trace but the cellar walls.” As he moves through this twilight landscape, encountering the “mute folk…Who share the unlit place” with him, the poet meditates on life and death, their proximity and distance, and his own sense of self within both. “Mowing” envisions the poet’s work through the prism of rural labor. “There was never a sound beside the wood but one / And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. / What was it it whispered?” The speaker does not know, but continues his task, hypnotized by its rhythm and music.

This edition of Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Maud, and Other Poems (1850) is a collection of poems by British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The first work Tennyson published after becoming Poet Laureate in 1850, Maud, and Other Poems contains several of the poet’s most celebrated works. “Maud,” the title poem, is a narrative that explores themes of forbidden romance, marriage, death, and mourning. “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” originally published in The Examiner in 1854, was written as a tribute to the British Light Cavalry Brigade, which led an ill-fated charge at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War.

“Maud” follows a young poet who, after the tragic loss of his father, falls in love with the beautiful Maud. Despite his honorable intentions, the narrator is thwarted by Maud’s brother, who wants his sister to marry a wealthy businessman. When the brother takes a brief trip to London, the young poet uses the opportunity to court Maud in earnest. But time is not on his side, and the brother returns to throw a ball in order to introduce the businessman to his sister. As his chance at love erodes, the poet makes a desperate choice and risks losing everything—love, home, and life itself. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a tribute to the British casualties at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. Tennyson’s patriotic narrative poem addresses the controversy surrounding the charge, which took place because of a mistaken order and sent hundreds of British cavalrymen in a doomed head-on assault on a well-fortified Russian line of defense.

This edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Maud, and Other Poems is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Mountain Interval (1916) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Having gained success with his first two collections, both published in London, Frost returned home to New Hampshire and completed his third volume, Mountain Interval. The book opens with “The Road Not Taken,” and though this would become Frost’s most famous poem, the collection is not defined by it. Here we find the hallmarks of Frost’s work: rural landscapes, dramatic monologues, and subtle meditations on the meanings of life and art. This is Frost at the height of his power, a poetry that speaks as much and as often as it listens.

“The Road Not Taken” is a meditation on fate and free will that follows a traveler in an autumn landscape, unsure of which path to take, but certain he cannot stand still. Often summarized using only its final two lines—“I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference”—Frost’s poem refuses such neat categorization. Far from simple praise of independence, “The Road Not Taken” examines the anxiety of choice, the psychic response to the uncertainty that precedes even the simplest decision. In “Birches,” Frost recalls his childhood fondness for climbing trees, raising himself from the ground “To the top branches,” only to fling himself “outward, feet first” back to earth. Against the backdrop of adulthood, in which “life is too much like a pathless wood,” the poet recalls the simplicity and wonder of being a child in nature, no more and no less than “a swinger of birches.”.

This edition of Robert Frost’s Mountain Interval is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Suffrage Songs and Verses (1911) is a collection of political poems by American author and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Inspired by her work as a social reformer and advocate for women’s suffrage, Gilman turned to poetry as a means of supporting the cause of suffragists everywhere. Although she is widely recognized for her novels, short stories, and nonfiction, Gilman’s poetry showcases her command of language and fiery passion for the political and social advancement of women.

“She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping” opens the collection with an image of latent power, a woman “[s]low advancing, halting, creeping…to the hour” of her liberation. In “Locked Inside,” Gilman echoes the trope of poetry as a voice imprisoned—explored by such poets as Ovid, Coleridge, and Dickinson—to envision a woman who “beats upon her bolted door, / With faint weak hands,” barred from the life of the world she not only desires, but desperately needs. In “Boys Will Be Boys”—a poem with a message for our contemporary awakening to the violence perpetrated by men against women—Gilman argues that women must turn to “love and truth” rather than “warfare” in order to have their way. Other poems in Suffrage Songs and Verses explore the nature of motherhood, the institution of marriage, and the need to elevate individual identity beyond the confines of gender. Gilman’s work as a poet proves a substantial contribution to both the suffragist cause and the vibrant tradition of political poetry in twentieth century literature.

This edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Suffrage Songs and Verses is a classic of American literature and poetry reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

While traveling to a wedding, a young man is pulled into the eventful narrative of the Ancient Mariner who is compelled to share his story. It’s a miraculous tale about guilt, humanity and one’s capacity to change.

The Ancient Mariner notices a young man traveling to a nearby wedding. He abruptly interrupts his journey and starts sharing a story about his time at sea. He details its humble beginnings and the tumultuous events that followed. As the young man listens, he’s taken aback by the story and the man’s fight for survival. The Ancient Mariner faced hunger, thirst and eventually death before making a realization that would change the course of his life forever.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most famous works. Initially published in 1798, it’s had a lasting impact on literature and pop culture, including music and film. It’s a brilliant tale of morality that examines a character’s actions and the inevitable consequences.

With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Rime of the Ancient Mariner is both modern and readable.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Written in the form of biblical prophecy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell presents philosophical ideas about God, humanity and the complex nature of ethics. It’s a bold yet humorous examination of binary belief systems and their conflicting principles.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a remarkable narrative that explores common religious themes such as good versus evil. The author uses vibrant storytelling to expand on the importance of these contradictory terms. He details how competing ideals are integral to the human experience. Without them, a person may remain stagnant and never reach their full potential. Progress cannot occur without the tension stemming from love and hate, reason and energy, or attraction and repulsion.

William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell uses stunning visuals and metaphors to discuss the nuances of man. His unique perspective highlights fundamental differences that embody the human condition. Within the text, Blake investigates the greatness the is often found in struggle.

With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is both modern and readable.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

The Poems of Catullus describes the lifestyle of the Latin poet Catullus, his friends, and his lover, Lesbia. Catullus writes about each of his subjects in tones unique to them. With wild stories of the trouble and comradery shared by his friends, Catullus provides insight on more scandalous aspects of high society Roman culture. However, Catullus’ most shocking and compelling subject is his lover, Lesbia, the wife of an aristocrat. The two share a secret and sensual love, taboo not just because of the infidelity, but because Lesbia is many years older than Catullus. Throughout his poems, Catullus depicts their complicated relationship, first in a tender, lustful way, detailing their affairs, then gradually becomes more heated with angst and confusion. In his exploration of their relationship, Catullus embodies the possibility of simultaneously loving and hating someone. With vivid emotion and imagery, The Poems of Catullus provide a clear picture of the poet, his friends, and his lover and invoke a strong impression on its audience.

Because of the deep emotions infused with each word and the visceral depictions of ancient Roman life, this collection of poetry is relatable to a modern-day audience, and is an essential educational source. Catullus paved the way and inspired change in the art of poetry, influencing countless poets and poetry styles. The Poems of Catullus also helped create the idea of poetry as a profession. The Poems of Catullus serves a valuable and educational source, enlightening audiences on the culture of the upper-class of the late Roman Republic. However, because Catullus also explores the complex human emotions regarding friendship, sex, and love, The Poems of Catullus have proven to be a timeless testament to the duality of humankind, embracing emotions that lie between the extremes in the spectrum of feeling.

Catering to a contemporary audience, this edition of The Poems of Catullus features a new, eye-catching cover design and is reprinted in a modern font to accompany the timeless exploration of human emotion and the humorous, exciting life events of the influential poet Catullus.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) is a collection of sonnets by English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Written between 1845 and 1846, Sonnets from the Portuguese is a series of love poems written by Browning to her husband, the prominent Victorian poet Robert Browning. Although Elizabeth was initially unsure of the poems, Robert encouraged their publication, suggesting she title them to make readers believe they were translations and not personal declarations of love between the couple. Using the sonnet, Browning adopted a traditional form made famous by Shakespeare while staking a claim for herself as one of nineteenth century England’s premier poets.

Filled with references to the Greek pastoral poet Theocritus and the tragic figure Electra, as well as invocations to God, Sonnets from the Portuguese immerses itself in biblical and classical tradition while remaining deeply personal and authentically romantic. Sonnet “XV” addresses the inherent tragedy of love, the depth of sadness with which a lover beholds another with “Too calm and sad a face,” overwhelmed with the knowledge that with love comes “the end of love, / Hearing oblivion beyond memory.” In sonnet “XXVIII,” Browning reflects on the distance between lovers kept apart: all she has of him are her letters, “all dead paper, mute and white!” And yet, “they seem alive and quivering” in her “tremulous hands,” a living reminder of the man she longs to be with. “XLIII,” the most famous sonnet of the collection, begins “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” and records the poet’s confession of a love more powerful than “the passion put to use / In [her] old griefs…” Not only has her lover brought her such joy, he has also given her a love she “seemed to lose / With [her] lost saints,” a love strong enough to transcend religious faith entirely, a love that is destined to last, and to be even “better after death.”

This edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

A worldwide best-seller since its date of original publication in 1923, The Prophet has become a token of free thought and intellectual betterment across many generations of readers. This unique and timeless classic is composed of 28 prose poetry fables, each examining a different facet of the human experience. A treasure worth holding close, The Prophet is an unforgettable book of poems worth savoring.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Canadian Born (1895) is a collection of poems by E. Pauline Johnson. Revered as one the foremost indigenous Canadian poets of her time, Johnson was a prolific writer whose works explored her Mohawk heritage while shedding light on the racism and persecution faced by indigenous peoples across North America. Canadian Born captures Johnson’s range as a poet in tune with the Romantic tradition without erasing her dualistic sense of identity as a woman of Mohawk and English heritage. Introducing her collection with a brief inscription, the poet lays out the political purpose of her work addressed to all “Canadian born” individuals, “whether he be [her] paleface compatriot who has given to [her] his right hand of good fellowship,” or “that dear Red brother of whatsoever tribe or Province.” No matter the identity of her reader, Johnson hopes to show them that “White Race and Red are one if they are but Canadian born.” Whether or not she succeeds in her mission is up to the reader to decide, and yet the beauty and power of her poetry cannot be denied. Personal and political, patriotic and critical of colonial misdeeds, Johnson captures as much as she can of the Canadian experience, paying equal regard to a mariner longing to return to “the sea, the hungry sea” and an Indian corn husker with “Age in her fingers, hunger in her face, / Her shoulders stooped with weight of work and years.” This edition of E. Pauline Johnson’s Canadian Born is a classic of Canadian literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

The Gardener (1915) is a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated into English by Tagore and dedicated to Irish poet W. B. Yeats, The Gardener is a collection of earlier poems republished following his ascension to international fame with the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature. When Yeats discovered Tagore’s work in translation, he felt an intense kinship with a man whose work was similarly grounded in spirituality and opposition to the British Empire. For the Irish poet, Tagore’s poems were at once deeply personal and essentially universal, like a secret kept by all and shared regardless. Whether or not we admit it, his words never fail to remind us: to be human is to be vulnerable. “In the morning I cast my net into the sea. I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and strange beauty—some shone like a smile, some glistened like tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride. […] Then the whole night through I flung them one by one into the street. In the morning travellers came; they picked them up and carried them into far countries.” In his landmark collection Gitanjali, Tagore explored the realm of the spirit, paring down language to its clearest, purest form. In The Gardener, he gives expression to more worldly themes. Here, he is a fisherman, a restless wanderer, a servant and queen, an observer of life in all forms. This edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener is a classic of Indian literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Gitanjali (1912) is a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated into English by Tagore and published with a groundbreaking introduction by Irish poet W. B. Yeats, Gitanjali is the collection that earned Tagore the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature. When Yeats discovered Tagore’s work in translation, he felt an intense kinship with a man whose work was similarly grounded in spirituality and opposition to the British Empire. For the Irish poet, Tagore’s poems were at once deeply personal and essentially universal, like a secret kept by all and shared regardless: “I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.” Whether or not we admit it, his words never fail to remind us: to be human is to be vulnerable. “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.” The essence of Gitanjali is humility. Written following the deaths of his wife and two children, the collection unites poetry and prayer in search of peace. Grounded in Hindu tradition, his poems remain recognizable to readers of all faiths and nations. His subjects are love and loss, life and death, belief and despair. Through them, he approaches truth. This edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali is a classic of Indian literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Stray Birds (1916) is a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated into English by Tagore after he received the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, Stray Birds is a powerful collection of short poems by a master of Indian literature. “Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.” The poems of Stray Birds are a masterclass in clarity and concision. Like birds themselves, they flutter across the sky of the page before passing beyond the limit of sight. In prayer, in celebration, and in evocations of the natural world, Tagore comes as close to the truth as possible, catching a glimpse before it can fly away forever: “Let me live truly, my Lord, so that death to me become true.” In plainspoken language, Tagore gives voice to the soul. This edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds is a classic of Indian literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

A Stanford University Press classic.

A Stanford University Press classic.

A Stanford University Press classic.

A celebration of music from beginning to end, The Weary Blues is the debut poetry collection by the foremost Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes.

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, / I heard a Negro play. / Down on Lenox Avenue the other night / By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light / He did a lazy sway. . .

With these first lines, Hughes invites the reader into an experimental playground that tells the story of a Black man's life in America. Featuring poems such as, "Dream Variations," "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," and "Our Land," Hughes weaves in and out of verse, highlighting the lows of struggle in the face of segregation and racism, but also the highs of creation from the time when, "the Negroes were in vogue."

Now considered to be an American classic, The Weary Blues embodies the feel of the rhythm, improvisation, and soul of Black classical music, pioneered the genre of "jazz poetry," and left an irreplaceable mark in the African-American literary canon.

Professionally typeset with a beautifully designed cover, this edition of The Weary Blues is a sensational reimagining of a Harlem Renaissance staple for the modern reader.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems is a new collection that delves into the current raw state of the country and the world, and both new and older poems that explore interpersonal relationships.

In Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, Jim Tilley draws on his experience as a poet and mathematician to fix a lens on the current raw state of the country and the world and on interpersonal relationships. At times, his mood is merely contemplative, especially while expressing his fondness for nostalgia and in his testaments to family and friends, but as he delves relentlessly into matters political, ecological, and environmental, that mood turns darker, even ominous, infused occasionally with humor to present a more optimistic outlook.

Finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize

An authoritative volume representing the vast oeuvre of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and visionary poets.

Widely regarded as some of the most important and innovative poetry from postwar Europe, Tomaž Šalamun’s work offers a singularly thrilling reading experience. Sharp and subtle, Šalamun’s rhythms intertwine with an incantatory force; his prescient, liberatory politics and poetics pulse like a heartbeat. In Kiss the Eyes of Peace, the histories of Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia, and Europe are broken into kaleidoscopic harmonies of terror and joy: friends and family talk to each other under the sun as snow, apples, and deer mingle with blood and bones, with salt and cabbage, with gold, silk, and wine, and with God and heaven in the sand and grass.

“Love tore apart all my theories,” writes Šalamun. His oracular poems, suffused with mystic pronouncements that confound and delight, are as moving as they are eerie. And yet, if “every true poet is a monster,” Šalamun’s profound imagination also offers us peace—grace, even—in the wildness and wilderness of his art: “May everything erupt on a clear day, just as it is, / into sacredness and the beauty of the gift: life.”

Translated from the Slovenian and curated by esteemed author and translator Brian Henry, and with a Foreword from award-winning author Ilya Kaminsky, this expansive arrangement is the first of its kind to offer a comprehensive English-language retrospective of Šalamun’s storied career.

“My language was born among trees,
it holds the taste of earth;
my ancestors’ tongue is my home.”
—from “The Old Song of the Blood”

A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited bilingual edition, offering an expansive take on the internationally renowned work of Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ Maya poet born in the western highlands of Guatemala.

Featuring both Ak’abal’s Spanish translations from the indigenous K’iche’ and English translations by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, this collection blossoms from the landscape of Momostenango—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. Ak’abal’s unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. “In church,” he writes, “the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews.” Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it.

Attuned, uncompromising, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers “tell us / what earth is like / on the inside.” Even in the birds, who “sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying.” At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.

An aching meditation on the cyclical nature of grief and memory’s limited capacity to preserve everything time takes from us.

How does one make sense of loss—personal and collective? When language and memory are at capacity, where do we turn? Confronted with “a year meant to end all / those to come,” acclaimed poet Adam Clay questions whether anything is “wide enough to contain what’s left / of hope.” In the absence of a clear way forward, the poems of Circle Back wander grief’s strange and winding path. Along the way, the line between reality and dreams blurs: cows stare with otherworldly eyes, 78s play under cactus needles, a father becomes his own child, and the dead become something more complicated—a “sketch turned to painting / left in a room dusty from / lack of passing through.”

But amidst these liminal landscapes, a “thread of promise” persists in poetry. As flawed as language is, we still turn to it for longevity, for love, like “Keats, / sketching himself back into place.” Vulnerable and nuanced, Clay details the difficult work of healing—and in doing so, captures those needful moments of reprieve in grief’s “strange circle.” Two friends dashing through a sprinkler. A garden of startled birds. Out for a run some gray morning: a sudden patch of wildflowers. Circle Back is a bared heart, one readers will find as thoughtful as it is tender.

In the poetry collection Behemoth, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysical imagination, both in its secular and sacred forms, as something universal, endemic to consciousness, embedded in our longing to capture a lost past and stave off anxieties about the great forgetting to come. As such the book figures as both a critique and empathetic analysis of idolatry, broadly understood and equally universal, problematic as a failed strategy intent upon possession, at odds with values embedded in its symbols. Figures critical to our identity—including those associated with race, nation, and religion—become most prone to unmindful projection, fears and vulnerabilities and our subsequent potential for cruelty and exclusion. Central to the book’s inquiry is the legacy of the holocaust as something that persists, recognized or not—a critical element of cultural memory that both eludes our language and summons our need to speak.

Some Problems with Autobiography, Brian Brodeur’s fourth collection, grapples with the porous and fragmentary nature of midwestern American identity in poems that range across prosodic forms and hybrid genres. By turns self-mocking, meditative, and tragi-comic, this book explores the perils of digital technologies, ecological uncertainties, and the inadequacy of language to convey our collective distress, asking how much pleasure and hardship the human heart can bear. Brodeur’s narrative poems feature a dramatis personae rare in contemporary poetry, including a Syrian refugee enrolled in a writing workshop, the wife of an accused serial killer shopping defense lawyers, a horny psychoanalyst confessing a dream, and a carpenter working for the Department of Education during New York City’s first lockdown. From dramatic-monologue sonnets and narrative sestinas to discursive lyrics cast in Rubáiyát stanzas and Alcaic strophes, Some Problems with Autobiography brings ancient modes into startlingly contemporary contexts. 

In Transit, Nicholas Pierce’s debut poetry collection, charts the poet’s maturation across three sections, each centering on a different kind of love, from the pedagogical to the romantic to the familial. Form and subject are inseparable in poems that consider the complex power dynamic of an older man befriending a younger one, that draw on such classic texts as Plato’s Symposium and Homer’s Odyssey to make sense of the seemingly random encounters and missed chances that, as one poem puts it, “make up a life.”

As the book’s title suggests, these poems take place on the move, in cars, on boats and planes. They find the speaker abroad, as in “The Death of Argos,” a sonnet sequence that invents a new configuration for the form. Above all, though, the poems of In Transit attempt to capture a world in flux, turning to form as a stay against the transitory nature of experience.

The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.

In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, Tuệ Sỹ is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.

Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ’s Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the “fleeting dream of red blood at dusk” to the quiet determination of one who sets out to “repaint the dawn,” these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.

At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.

The newest entry in the Multiverse series, Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a debut collection activated by sampling, troubling, and trespassing.

This is a book of what its teenage nonspeaking autistic author Imane Boukaila, calls “tacit treasures.” Where manifestos encounter poems and raps encounter essays, the lyric constellations that mark this debut sing in opposition to those “troubled-abled” who would coerce and control disabled lives.

Boukaila offers another way: her “LOL tressed philosophy,” her truth. This liberatory philosophy exists at the periphery, thresholding, in all the places where life opens toward neurodivergent revolution. “Treasures thrive in open spreading spaces,” she writes. From the muddy streams shimmering with trout, to the space storms in the starry skies, to the tressing that exists between minds, Boukaila offers us a chance to make mistakes, to be messy, to learn and unlearn the languages we use to survive. 

Readers seeking “treasures yet to be uncovered” will find this and more in this expansive collection.

The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas.

In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez explores the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant. “I am woman and I celebrate every vein,” she writes, “where I guard my ancestors’ secrets / every Zoque man’s word in my mouth / every Zoque woman’s wisdom in my spit.”

How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love.

Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground.

The How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems audiobook read by Mikeas Sánchez, Wendy Call, and Shook is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.

In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into “a thousand red granules.” Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. “I left that town / forever,” Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems incite a complex emotional discourse on what it means to leave—if it’s ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.

Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “I can make it all sound so beautiful. / You’ll barely notice that underneath / this poem there is a body / decaying into the American ground.” Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish—“your hair, your ears, your hands.”—leaving behind “the fucked up / trees,” the “long, cold river.” In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.

“It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.

The Winter Stranger audiobook read by Jackson Holbert is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks. 

In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to “extend the choreography.”

In fact, his entire thrust is out and toward. Each poem moves out along its own underutilized pathway, awakening unseen dimensions for the reader like a wooded night walk suddenly lit by fireflies. And as each path elaborates itself, Wolfond’s guiding hand seems always to stay held out to the reader, inviting them further into a shared and unprecedented unfolding. 

The Wanting Way is actually a confluence of diverse ways—rallies, paths, waves, jams, streams, desire lines—that converge wherever the dry verbiage of the talking world requires hydration. Each poem is an invitation to bathe in the play of languaging. And each poem is an invitation to a dance that’s already happening, called into motion by the objects and atmospheres of a more-than-human world. Wolfond makes space for new poetics, new choreographies, and new possibilities toward forging a consensual—felt and feeling—world where we might find free disassembly and assembly together. 

There is a neurodivergent universe within this one, and Wolfond’s poems continuously pull back the unnecessary veil between human and nature. 

Issue 34 Includes

• Poetry Translation Folios with work by Guatemalan K’iche Maya poet Humberto Ak’ab’al, translated by Michael Bazzett; Lithuania superstar poet Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Brian Henry; Spanish poet Sandra Santana, translated by Geoffrey Brock; and Venezuelan poet-in-exile Jesüs Amalio, translated by David Brunson, Jr. Plus a Fiction Translation Folio with two stories by nternationally renowned Portuguese writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, translated by Alexis Levitin.

• Poetry by National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ada Limón; Guggenheim Fellows Paul Guest and Mark Halliday; Ruth Lilly Fellow Marcus Wicker; William Carlos Williams Awardwinner Martha Collins; Rilke Prize winner David Keplinger; NEA Fellows Michael Bazzett, Brian Henry, Lance Larsen, Alex Lemon, Jenny Molberg, and Corey Van Landingham; as well as Kelli Russell Agodon, Abdul Ali, Sean Cho A., Michael Dumanis, Chanda Feldman, Melissa Ginsburg, Matty Layne Glasgow, Niki Herd, Alicia Mountain, Lis Sanchez, Indriani Sengupta, and many others.

• Fiction by Madeline Haze Curtis, Maria Poulatha, Alyssa Quinn, Kate Weinberg, and Tara Isabel Zambrano.

• Nonfiction by Brooke Barry and Robert Long Foreman.

• The cover features a recent piece by Minneapolis-based artist Dyani White Hawk, whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Walker Art Center, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and elsewhere.

As game to follow a beckoning Laura Palmer into the burning woods as she is to step into the shoes of Little Red Riding Hood as she lays waste to her wolf, LaPointe explores the sublime space between beauty and danger through lush, almost baroque, use of folktale and color. Red, white, blue, and an amalgam that is none of the above—rose—vie for the speaker’s embrace as a mixed-race woman. Here, poems become offerings, rituals, incantations conjured in the name of healing and power.

Like the stones and cards laid on an altar, Rose Quartz offers a reading at the intersection of identity and myth, trauma and truth, telling the story of past, present, and future.

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.

Pavlić’s collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kate’s shadow hovers like a penumbra over these pages that unfold a kaleidoscope of her world. A small-town apartment full of “paintings & burritos & pyramid-shaped empty bottles of Patron & an ad hoc anthology of vibrators.” A banged-up Jeep, loose syringes underfoot, rattles under Colorado skies. Near an ICU bed, Pavlić agonizes over the most difficult questions, while doctors “swish off to the tune of their thin-soled leather loafers.” And a diary, left behind, brims with revelations of vulnerability nearly as great as Pavlić’s own.

But Call It in the Air records more than a relationship between brother and sister, more than a moment of personal loss. “I sit while eleven bodies of mine fall all over the countless mysteries of who you are,” he writes, while “Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth.” In moments like these, Pavlić recognizes something of his big sister everywhere.

Rived by loss and ravaged by grief, Call It in the Air mingles the voices of brother and sister, one falling and one forgiven, to offer an intimate elegy that meditates on love itself.  

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger’s Ice indexes the findings from memory’s slow melt—stories and faces we’ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost.

“I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this,” Keplinger writes. “You are asking that same question.” In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernity—masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, “searching for a way to stay in pain forever”; a grandmother mending socks, “her face in the dark unchanging”; Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia.

With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of what—and who—we’ve harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolf’s head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a mother’s phantom. “I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that I’ve misshapen,” Keplinger writes.

So is there “a point to all this singing”? Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolf’s head can’t, either. But sometimes, “out of the snow of confusion,” something answers, “saying gorgeous things like yes.” And the flowers “open up / their small green trumpets anyway.”

Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”

“The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.”

Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.

Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.

A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with “a story pulsing in every blood cell.” In Besaydoo, Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland, the Sierra Leonean in California, the girl straddling womanhood, the woman re-discovering herself. “I am made from the obsession of detail,” she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother’s singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where “everyone is broken, but trying.” A multitudinous witness.

 Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages—Krio, English, French, poetry’s many dialects—to highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance. “I make myth for peace,” she writes, as well as for loss, for delight, for kinship, and most of all for a country where Black means “steadfast and opulent,” and “dangerous and infinite.” She writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.

But in Besaydoo, there is no partition between the living and the dead. There is no past nor present. There is, instead, a joyful simultaneity—a liberating togetherness sustained by song.

The Besaydoo audiobook read by Yalie Saweda Kamara is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.

Sara Eliza Johnson’s much-anticipated second collection traces human emotion and experience across a Gothic landscape of glacial and cosmic scale.

With a mind informed by physics, and a heart yearning for sky burial, Vapor’s epic vision swerves from the microscopic to telescopic, evoking an Anthropocene for a body and planet that are continually dying: “So alone / I open like a grave,” Johnson chronicles her love for “all this emptiness, this warp and transparence, the whorl of atoms I brush from your brow,” and considers how “each skull, / like a geode, holds a crystal colony inside.” 

Almost omnipresently, Vapor stitches stars to microbes, oceans to space, and love to pain, collapsing time and space to converge everything at once. Blood and honey, fire and shadow, even death and mercy are secondary to a profoundly constant flux. Facing sunlight, Johnson wonders what it would mean to “put my mouth to its / mouth, suck the fluid / from its throat, and give / it my breath, my skin, / which was once my / shadow,” while elsewhere the moon “is molten, an ancient red, and at its bottom is an exit wound that opens into another sea, immaculate and blue, that could move a dead planet to bloom.”

In Vapor, Sara Eliza Johnson establishes herself as a profound translator of the physical world and the body that moves within it, delivering poems that show us how to die, and live.

Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between “seed” and “summit” of a life—the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians—and it does not let readers look away.

In this debut collection, No‘u Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo‘o, ma‘i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red—for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair “the way my grandmother—not god— / the way my grandmother intended,” and we heed; before her, “we stunned insects dangle.” Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic. Through the medium of formal dynamism and the material of ʻŌiwi culture and mythos, this living decolonial text both condemns and creates.

Ask the Brindled is a song from the shattered throat that refuses to be silenced. It is a testament to queer Indigenous women who carry baskets of names and stories, “still sacred.” It is a vow to those yet to come: “the ea of enough is our daughters / our daughters need to believe they are enough.”

I Love Information, selected by Brian Teare as a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, is a sophisticated and cerebral examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which.

 Egret feathers. Pulverized chickpeas. A “faint but constant series of ovals and lines” that, remarkably, spell the name Penelope. “Nobody owns the meaning of these things,” Courtney Bush writes, but this does not stop the poet from seeking, from “reading meaning in the garbage” and in the flowers growing there. What does she seek? Not facts. Instead, something transcendent and mysterious, knowledges that can only be unlocked through experimentation with language, with art.

 In lieu of linear thought, Bush’s poems operate under unique logic systems that grow and branch like vines, driven not only by the urge to learn but also by the need for connection—between people, things, stories. Her speakers make cognitive leaps with youthful credulity, eager and open. “It comes down to a few things,” says one. “Vessels and bags / Every crude tool / Every day a friend to tell.” And another: “I want to tell you what a sword is. / To want to tell you has been my entire life.” They are explorers of the pathways between our outer and inner worlds, translators between what is and what could be.

 Bush’s reverence for the act of thought echoes that of a religious scholar gazing at the heavens. In order to learn, these poems suggest, we must believe the not-known is worth knowing. We must let belief hover around all parts of our lives, as a child does. “To have the idea of the secret chord is to have the secret chord,” Bush writes. To learn, we must make believe.

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.

 When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Jennifer Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold.

 Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations—among Taiwan, China, and America—cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later—the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past.

Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.

Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”

And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”

With speakers set adrift in mysterious settings—a motel in the middle of a white-sand desert, a house haunted by the ghost of a dead writer, an abandoned settlement high in the mountains, a city that might give way to riotous forest—Black Observatory upends the world we think we know. Here, an accident with a squirrel proves the least bizarre moment of a day that is ordinary in outline only. The future is revealed in a list of odd crimes-to-be. And in a field of grasses, a narrator loses himself in a past and present “human conflagration / of desire and doubt,” the “path to a field of unraveling.”

Unraveling lies at the heart of these poems. Murray picks at the frayed edges of everyday life, spinning new threads and weaving an uncanny and at times unnerving tapestry in its place. He arranges and rearranges images until the mundane becomes distorted: a cloud “stretches and coils and becomes an intestine / embracing the anxious protagonist,” thoughts “leap from sagebrush / like jackrabbits into your high beams,” a hot black coffee tastes “like runoff from a glacier.” In the process, our world emerges in surprising, disquieting relief.

Simultaneously comic and tragic, playful and deeply serious, Black Observatory is a singular debut collection, a portrait of reality in penumbra.

National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection

Finalist for the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Finalist for the 2024 Minnesota Book Award

Longlisted for the Julie Suk Award

“Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly? 

Here, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”

If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.” A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.

A thoughtful new collection of poems, one that deconstructs the deceptively simple question of what it means to be good—a good person, a good citizen, a good teacher, a good poet, a good father.

With These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, Hayan Charara presents readers with a medley of ambitious analyses, written in characteristically wry verse. He takes philosophers to task, jousts with academics, and scrutinizes hollow gestures of empathy, exposing the dangers of thinking ourselves “separate / from [our] thoughts and experiences.” After all, “No work of love / will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart.” But how do we act on fullness of heart? How, knowing as we do that “genocide is inscribed in our earliest and holiest texts”?

Thoughtful but never preachy, Charara sits beside us, granting us access to life’s countless unglamorous dilemmas: crushing a spider when we promised we wouldn’t, nearing madness from a newborn’s weeping, resenting our lovers for what happened in a dream. “Good poems demand to be written from inside the poet,” we are reminded. And that is where we find ourselves here: inside a lively and ethical mind, entertained by Charara’s good company even as goodness challenges us to do more.

“All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myself / and someone else,” writes Elizabeth Metzger. From the shadowy perspective of confinement, where the presence of death unsettles all outcomes, these poems examine an expansion and fracturing of the self—into motherhood as well as childhood, into past selves and future unknowns. The child becomes parent, the parent becomes child, the child arrives but in doing so is lost. New loss haunts new life, and life becomes “one or two lives.” The door is more valuable than the prize behind it.

With ambivalence as well as deep feeling, Metzger wonders how a single body can be expected to hold both immense joy and immense mourning, profound longing and creeping numbness, when one so often overtakes the other. She plunges into the darkness inside—of the gloomy room, the inner body, the afterlife and the pre-language mind—and sends back “a searchlight across the underworld,” Eurydice in search of herself.

Aching and contemplative, Lying In is an exquisite portrait of an in-between time—and of the person who emerges on the other side. “Isn’t it obvious how we’ve changed?”

From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood.

“What is learned? I’ll return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run / days over years.” Using unpredictable syllabics, rhyme, and syntax, Day of the Child captures the sensation of altered time that accompanies a child’s growth. Seasons come and go. A schoolboy becomes a dreaming infant becomes a five-year-old exploring metaphor for the first time becomes an ultrasound image, “a frieze on screen.” A mother cycles through her own often dissonant identities: “soother, watcher, blame-taker.” And both mother and child assume another, significant role: artistic collaborators.

For Day of the Child is a poem co-created by child and mother, offering a space in which each’s stories, thoughts, words—“unbound / by Time & time’s delineations”—tangle together. In which apartness—“Oh indivisible divisible,” the presence of another heart beating inside the mother’s own body—is continually negotiated. And in which the mother considers her place as intermediary between the child and the world: her protection, her complicity, her joy. Its octave pairs ebb and flow, expand and contract, producing a portrait of raising another human as refracted as it is circular, just as a river “breaks into many suns, the sun.” For, as the child asserts, “love is a circl[e] round / as a Ball.”

Challenging the notion that parenthood is not itself a poetic endeavor, Day of the Child makes of childrearing “a refrain I reframed each day with new words.” 

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.

 In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K. Iver writes, at the confluence of love poem and elegy.

 “I say to the water if you were here, / you’d be here.” With cinematic precision, they conjure dorm-room landlines, the lingering sweetness of shared candy, a ballet strap and “soft / fingers tracing it, afraid to touch / the skin.” They punctuate depictions of familial abuse and the cruel politics of the Deep South with fairy tales: a girl who endures abuse refusing to grow into a mother who inflicts it herself, queer youth kissing fearlessly, bodies transcending the violence of a reductive gender binary. In these fantasies, “there’s no / reason to leave town no hidden / torches waiting for us to fall asleep.”

 Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco sees us through a particular kind of grief—one so relentless, it’s precious. It presses us, also, to continue advocating for a world in which queer love fantasies become reality and queer love poems “swaddle the impossible / contours of joy.”

A Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Poetry

A CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Poetry

“Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.” She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.

These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.”

Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.

Winner of the 2022 Levis Reading Prize
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's 2021 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book
A Publishers Weekly “Top Ten Pick” for Fall 2021 Poetry Titles
A Library Journal “Poetry Title to Watch” for 2021
A Chicago Review of Books “Must-Read Book of September 2021”

Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.

With Devon Walker-Figueroa as our Virgil, we begin in the collection’s eponymous town of Philomath, Oregon. We drift through the general store, into the Nazarene Church, past people plucking at the brambles of a place that won’t let them go. We move beyond the town into fields and farmland—and further still, along highways, into a cursed Californian town, a museum in Florence. We wander with a kind of animal logic, like a beast with “a mind to get loose / from a valley fallowing / towards foul,” through the tense, overlapping space between movement and stillness.

An explorer at the edge of the sublime, Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature, of memory, and of a beauty that is “merely        existence carrying on and carrying on.” In her wanderings, she guides readers toward a kind of witness that doesn’t flinch from the bleak or bizarre: A vineyard engulfed in flames is reclaimed by the fields. A sow smothers its young, then bears more. A neighbor chews locusts in his yard.

For in Philomath, it is the poet’s (sometimes reluctant) obligation “to keep an eye / on what is left” of the people and places that have impacted us. And there is always something left, whether it is the smell of burnt grapes, a twelfth-century bronze, or even a lock of hair.

From Michael Bazzett, poet and translator of The Popol Vuh, a collection that explores the myth of Echo and Narcissus, offering a reboot, a remix, a reimagining.

“Narcissus was never one to see himself // in moving water. // He liked his image / still.” In The Echo Chamber, myth is refracted into our current moment. A time traveler teaches a needleworker the pleasures of social media gratification. A man goes looking for his face and is first offered a latex mask. A book reveals eerie transmutations of a simple story. And the myth itself is retold, probing its most provocative qualities—how reflective waters enable self-absorption, the tragic rightness of Echo and Narcissus as a couple.

The Echo Chamber examines our endlessly self-referential age of selfies and televised wars and manufactured celebrity, gazing lingeringly into the many kinds of damage it produces, and the truths obscured beneath its polished surface. In the process, Bazzett cements his status as one of our great poetic fools—the comedian who delivers uncomfortable silence, who sheds layers of disguises to reveal light underneath, who smuggles wisdom within “rage-mothered laughter.” Late-stage capitalism, history, death itself: all are subject to his wry, tender gaze.

By turns searing, compassionate, and darkly humorous, The Echo Chamber creates an echo through time, holding up the broken mirror of myth to our present-day selves.

Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.

Art. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before “our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms.” Lovers who don’t return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli occupation.

Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling”: whether it’s coming up with “plans / to solve the world’s problems,” plans that “eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans,” or dreaming “of a war / that’s got no war in it,” or proclaiming that “I don’t believe in survival.”

In You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.

"That's the magic of this book—the way Adam Clay, line after line, enacts the mind on the page." —MAGGIE SMITH

To Make Room for the Sea reckons with the notion that nothing in this world is permanent. Led by an introspective speaker, these poems examine a landscape that resists full focus, and conclude that “it’s easier to love what we don’t know.”

“I hold this leaf I think / you should see, but I can’t quite / say why,” Adam Clay writes, as he navigates a variety of both personal and ecological fixations: disembodied bullfrog croaks, the growth of his child, a computer’s dreaded blue screen of death. The observations in To Make Room for the Sea convey both grief for the Anthropocene and hope for the future. The poems read like field notes from someone who knows the world and hopes to know it differently.

On the precipice of great change and restructured perspective, Clay’s poems linger in “the second between taking in a vision and processing it,” in the moment when the world is less a familiar system and more a palette of colors and potential.

To Make Room for the Sea delights as much as it mourns. It looks forward as much as it reflects. Deft and hopeful, the poems in this collection gently encourage us to take another look at a world “only some strange god might have thought up / in a drunken stumble.”

“Sometimes,” writes Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.”

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor.

But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.”

Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod—selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction.

Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light—but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, “the bloody hand holding back / the skin,” revealing “the world’s inner workings, / rubbery and caught between the teeth.” These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page.

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.

“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations.

Indeed, while John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: what is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom—or what—do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse?

An Electric Literature “Most Anticipated Poetry Book of 2021”

From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s newest collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories.

“‘You tell me how I was born   what I am,’” demands Naka-Hasebe Kingsley—of himself, of the reader, of the world. The poems of Dēmos: An American Multitude seek answers in the Haudenosaunee story of The Lake and Her children; in the scope of a .243 aimed at a pregnant doe; in the Dōgen poem jotted on a napkin by his obaasan; in a flag burning in a church parking lot. Here, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley places multiracial displacement, bridging disparate experiences with taut, percussive language that will leave readers breathless.

With astonishing formal range, Dēmos also documents the intolerance that dominates American society. What can we learn from mapping the genealogy of a violent and loud collective? How deeply do anger, violence, and oppression run in the blood? From adapted Punnett squares to Biblical epigraphs to the ghastly comment section of a local news website, Dēmos diagrams surviving America as an other-ed American—and it refuses to flinch from the forces that would see that multitude erased.

Dēmos is a resonant proclamation of identity and endurance from one of the most intriguing new voices in American letters—a voice singing “long   on America      as One / body             but many parts.”

“As part of the publisher’s 'Seedbank' series, aiming to preserve endangered literatures, the poet Beachy-Quick offers a modern gloss on six ancient Greeks.”—New York Times Book Review, “New & Noteworthy Poetry”

Anthology. The Greek origins of the word gesture at a bouquet, a garland; “a flower-logic, a petal-theory, a blossom-word.” In Stone-Garland, Dan Beachy-Quick brings the term back to its roots, linking together the lives and words of six singular ancient Greeks. 

Simonides: honest servant to patrons. Anacreon: lustful singer, living on in the work of his acolytes. Archilochus: cruel critic, beloved of the Muses. Alcman: who took birds as his teachers. Theognis: chronicler of human excellence and vice. Callimachus: cosmopolitan head librarian at Alexandria. These are the poets who appear in these pages, sometimes in fragments, sometimes in sustained glimpses. 

Drawing inspiration from the Greek Anthology, first drafted in the first century BC, Beachy-Quick presents translations filled with lovers and children, gods and insects, earth and water, ideas and ideals. Throughout, the line between the ancient and the contemporary blurs, and “the logic of how life should be lived decays wondrously into the more difficult possibilities of what life is.”

Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden. 

Selected by Kazim Ali as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, Thrown in the Throat “gloriously stakes new territory in queerness.”

Finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2020
A Lambda Literary “Most Anticipated LGBTQ Book” of August 2020
Named a “Must-Read Poetry Collection” of August 2020 by The Millions

“Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages.” And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.

With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat  shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.

Selected by Victoria Chang as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, John McCarthy’s Scared Violent Like Horses is a deeply personal examination of violent masculinity, driven by a yearning for more compassionate ways of being.

McCarthy’s flyover country is populated by a family strangled by silence: a father drunk and mute in the passenger seat, a mother sinking into bed like a dish at the bottom of a sink, and a boy whose friends play punch-for-punch for fun. He shows us a boy struggling to understand pain carried down through generations and how quickly abandonment becomes a silent kind of violence; “how we deny each other, daily, so many chances to care,” and how “we didn’t know how to talk about loss, / so we made each other lose.” Constant throughout is the brutality of the Midwestern landscape that, like the people who inhabit it, turns out to be beautiful in its vulnerability: sedgegrass littered with plastic bags floating like ghosts, dilapidated houses with abandoned Fisher Price toys in the yard, and silos of dirt and rust under a sky that struggles to remember the ground below.

With arresting lyricism and humility, Scared Violent Like Horses attends to the insecurities that hide at the heart of what’s been turned harsh, offering a smoldering but redemptive and tender view of the lost, looked over, and forgotten.

“Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it.” —DAN BEACHY-QUICK

Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels through such places as Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest. Along the way, Pankey ponders mortality, religious narratives and iconography, the continued press of childhood on the present, and the simultaneous violence and beauty of the natural world.

At the book’s core are three ambitious poems titled “The Complete List of Everything,” which together offer an extended vision of American longing and connection—as well as a window into the sort of compendium of images and moments a sustained devotion to poetry can yield. “The hope was to construct // A coherent totality of meaning from odds / And ends,” Pankey writes, and so much of this book is about the difficult work of constructing meaning from the available material all around us. This book is an extraordinary example of lyric-meditative journaling—a large and profound collection by a brilliant poet writing at the height of his powers.

What shape does Dutch art take in the American imagination? Austere, perhaps. Insular. Fixated on nature, every writer’s “traditional source of consolation.” And all of these qualities may indeed be true of the Netherlands’ early literature. But in Rinkeldekinkel, readers will encounter a radically different body of Dutch poetics—one defined by international cultural exchange, linguistic invention, and contemporary life.

Over three decades, the twenty-three poets featured here celebrate the colorful world that blossomed in the wake of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and global Cold War conservatism. Poets, writes anthology editor Rob Schouten, took this moment to adopt a “new view on reality,” one filled with “bewilderment and excitement.” The rise of multiculturalism in the Netherlands, the influence of pop culture, and a cultural shift away from highly formal language led to the development of a public voice that mirrored the changes happening across an increasingly diverse Western Europe.

From Mustafa Stitou’s surreal ruminations on death and faith, to Elma van Haren’s energetic and evocative verse, to Hester Knibbe’s ruminative feminist ekphrases, each poet in this anthology brings something distinct to the page. Rinkeldekinkel is a celebration of artistic variety that English-speaking audiences will be delighted to attend. “Nothing’s tied and all is loose,” writes Ingmar Heytze, so we all should “dance and know that [we] exist.”

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020

For almost twenty years, Rick Barot has been writing some of the most stunningly crafted lyric poems in America, paying careful, Rilkean attention to the layered world that surrounds us. In The Galleons, he widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.

These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815, these ships evoking both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides. “Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” Barot writes of his grandmother. “No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.”

With nods toward Barot’s poetic predecessors—from Frank O’Hara to John Donne—The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet’s work, marrying “reckless” ambition and crafted “composure,” in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, “incredible and true.”

Finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Winner of the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry

Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents’ bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.

In Su Hwang’s rich lyrical and narrative poetics, the bodega and its surrounding neighborhoods are cast not as mere setting, but as an ecosystem of human interactions where a dollar passed from one stranger to another is an act of peaceful revolution, and desperate acts of violence are “the price / of doing business in the projects where we / were trapped inside human cages—binding us / in a strange circus where atoms of haves / and have-nots always forcefully collide.” These poems also reveal stark contrasts in the domestic lives of immigrants, as the speaker’s own family must navigate the many personal, cultural, and generational chasms that arise from having to assume a hyphenated identity—lending a voice to the traumatic toll invisibility, assimilation, and sacrifice take on so many pursuing the American Dream.

“We each suffer alone in / tandem,” Hwang declares, but in Bodega, she has written an antidote to this solitary hurt—an incisive poetic debut that acknowledges and gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, suggesting frameworks for how we might collectively move forward with awareness and compassion.

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.

“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations.

Indeed, while John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: what is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom—or what—do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse?

Winner of the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Winner of a 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry

Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros.

Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men “only touch when they fuck in a backseat.” Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, “the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.”

But if Jake Skeets’s collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place—full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover’s body: A spine becomes a railroad. “Veins burst oil, elk black.” And “becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.” Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense.

Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity.

Additional recognition: 

Named a “Best Poetry Book of 2019” by Electric Literature, Entropy Mag, and Auburn Avenue

Named a “Favorite Book of 2019” by Lit Hub

Named a “Best Queer Book of 2019” by BuzzFeed and Book Marks

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR

In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: “Earth.” There are no inhabitants, and no sun—only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.

This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, “the book of the woven mat,” one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose—and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett—this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as “the phonetic rendering of a living pulse.”

By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this striking new translation of The Popol Vuh—the first in the Seedbank series of world literature—breathes new life into an essential tale.

Winner of a Wisconsin Library Association "Outstanding Achievement Award"

What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. “An emptying drain, driven by gravity.” And in Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper—selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—it is the place where connection is darkly transfigured by distance and power.

So we learn as Johnson’s speaker descends into his inferno, his Virgil a hacker for whom “nothing to stop him is reason enough to keep going,” his Beatrice the elusive Anon, another faceless user of the deep web. Here is unnameable horror—human trafficking, hitmen, terrorism recruitment. And here, too, is the lure of the beloved. But gone are the orderly circles of hell. Instead, Johnson’s map of the deep web is recursive and interrogatory, drawing inspiration and forms from the natural world and from science, as his speaker attempts to find a stable grasp on the complexities of this exhilarating and frightening digital world.

Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.

From one of our finest poets comes a collection about time—about memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world.

Called “the poet of things” by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if they’ve grown obsolescent, even when they’ve been forgotten. So objects—rendered in cinematic detail—fill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago.

Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. “What did they tell me, all those years?” Bogen writes. Immediate Song offers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.

Named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
Society of Midland Authors Honoree in Poetry

In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. Those who stayed at the plant to stabilize the reactors, willing to sacrifice their lives, became known internationally as the Fukushima 50.

In tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh takes a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the disaster. Here we meet its survivors and victims, from a pearl-catcher to a mild-mannered father to a drove of mindless pink robots. And here, too, we meet Roripaugh’s unforgettable Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and “annihilatrix.” Tsunami is part hero and part supervillain—angry, loud, forcefully defending her rights as a living being in contemporary industrialized society. As humanity rebuilds in disaster’s wake, Tsunami continues to wreak her own havoc, battling humans’ self-appointed role as colonizer of Earth and its life-forms.

“She’s an unsubtle thief / a giver of gifts,” Roripaugh writes of Tsunami, who spits garbage from the Pacific back into now-pulverized Fukushima. As Tsunami makes visible her suffering, the wrath of nature scorned, humanity has the opportunity to reconsider the trauma they cause Earth and each other. But will they look?

From James P. Lenfestey, a collection of poems that lends delicacy and gentle humor to durable, long-lasting love.

Writing love poems fifty years into a marriage is no easy task: "If he exaggerates his love, she'll know . . . And if his desire for her is undiminished, / who would believe?" But in A Marriage Book, Lenfestey meets his own challenge with aplomb. These poems drop readers into the rich, textured world of one couple's enduring intimacy, from the warmth of a bedroom occupied by two to squabbles over miscommunications and crumbs in the kitchen.

As the marriage (and the Book) transition into parenthood, Lenfestey illuminates the equally stalwart wonder of observing one's children as they age and develop. Paternal love persists, and is even fed by, watching his children argue, suffer their own mistakes, and roar horrible breath at breakfast. So much poetry is about storms, / bruised fruit, locusts eating everything," he writes. "This poem is about a harvest that satisfies."

A Marriage Book is a collection that essences the magic from the household quotidian, creating a technicolor portrait of a vibrant and dynamic family.

Winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, North American Stadiums is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.

“You were supposed to find God here / the signs said.” In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention; overlooked places of industry become sites for pilgrimage; and history large and small—of a city, of a family, of a shirt—is unearthed. Here is a factory emptying for the day, a snowy road just past border patrol, a baseball game at dusk. Mile signs point us toward Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Salt Lake City, Chicago. And god is not the God expected, but the still moment amid movement: a field “lit like the heart / of the night,” black stars stitched to the yellow sweatshirts of men in a crowd.

A map “bleached / pale by time and weather,” North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Selected by Fady Joudah as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, Jos Charles’s revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. 

“i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.” In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.” “did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer—making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. 

Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.

WINNER OF THE UNT RILKE PRIZE

How does it feel to experience another city? To stand beneath tall buildings, among the countless faces of a crowd? To attempt to be heard above the din?

The poems of Another City travel inward and outward at once: into moments of self-reproach and grace, and to those of disassociation and belonging. From experiences defined by an urban landscape—a thwarted customer at the door of a shuttered bookstore in Crete, a chance encounter with a might-have-been lover in Copenhagen—to the streets themselves, where “an alley was a comma in the agony’s grammar,” in David Keplinger’s hands startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare.

Yet Another City deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. In these poems, our entry into the world is when “the wound, called loneliness, / opens,” and our voyage out of it is through a foreign but not entirely unfamiliar constellations of cities: Cherbourg, Manila, Port-au-Prince.

This is a rich portrait of the seemingly incommunicable expanses between people, places, and ideas—and the ability of a poem to transcend the void. 

In The Mirrormaker, songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw melds myths ancient and contemporary among the raspberries, wolves, and taconite mines of Minnesota’s Iron Range.

A companion volume to Laidlaw’s 2015 project, The Stuntman, this collection fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom, subject of the song “Girl from the North Country.” But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, The Mirrormaker takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction.

In these poems, Laidlaw explores themes of history and celebrity, love and longing, myth and meaning, in a landscape both ravaged and redemptive. He pits romantic obsession against self-obsession—“The first time I saw the moon / I thought it was my idea”—and asks whether a meaningful distinction can ever be drawn between the two. These themes are explored further in a companion song suite, written by Laidlaw and recorded with a longtime collaborator from the Iron Range, that accompanies this book via download.

Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.

From the author of You Must Remember This, an uncanny collection of poems that plumbs our capacity for cruelty and for wonder.

Who? A speaker at once questioner and questioned. An artist who embraces and resists what his work requires of him. “A naked / man in a crowd.”

What? Poems at once surreal and vulnerable, refusing to hide their uncomfortable truths behind their wildest imaginings.

Where? In the mind, where “Nobody fails at meditation / like I do.” Outside dreamlike cities. In the rich earth under a simple mattress. In new, disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales.

When? As a child, spurning his mother. As a young man, seeking wisdom and peace. And as an older man, looking back at what he once was.

Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, The Interrogation is a catechism of the self—or selves. Inside this collection’s hall of mirrors, faces double and multiply endlessly, and voices echo, laugh, and taunt. Why? these poems ask. Why does art demand sacrifice? Why does the heart want what it wants? And how do we escape loneliness?

The Interrogation is an accomplished collection, unsparingly honest, infused with yearning and laced with dark humor.

Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Writers' League of Texas Book Award

Over the course of four collections of poems, Alex Lemon has become known for his kinetic voice and sense of the dark absurd. Now this electrifying poet moves in a new direction—with a book-length sequence at once intensely vulnerable and thoroughly of our moment.

Populated by visions and ghosts, Another Last Day follows its speaker on a search through a natural landscape turned on its edge, the landscape of today’s America. In these poems, the moments of an ordinary day are rendered in raw, nearly hallucinatory detail: Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. Endless rain. And, stranger: A dog carrying a hand in its mouth. An emergency room filled with moans. A place where reality and dreams merge, where “the dead refuse to be left / underground.”

When Lemon’s speaker invites us “behind my closed eyes,” it is into the vision of a speaker so plugged into the livingness of this world that he is tossed to the edge of living itself. And yet, in his poems, this openness is never just painful. “the world is a terrible place,” he writes, “but I want to last forever // clinging to its teeth.”

From celebrated poet Eric Pankey, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary.

The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird’s flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature’s smallest details: a lizard’s quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail’s shell. Here the sensory world and the imagined one collide in unexpected and wonderful ways, as Pankey scrutinizes the physical for meaning, and that meaning for truth.

With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known—and the unknown—be captured in language? “If one cannot see clearly,” Pankey writes, borrowing from Freud, “one at least wants / what is unclear to be in focus.”

Augury is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence, “a book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.”

A dual-language collection of vivid, tightly knit poems from one of the most important contemporary poets writing in German.

The Art of Topiary is the gorgeous product of a long collaboration between Jan Wagner and American poet David Keplinger. With the care of master gardeners tending their plants, Wagner and Keplinger have shaped Wagner’s originals—acclaimed internationally, now in English for the first time—into precise, delightful, and highly modern translations.

Along the way, the collection unfolds dialogues between discipline and freedom, sound and sense, faithfulness and improvisation. In these poems, formal structures are a corset loosened by each line of verse, a garden always pleasurably at risk of being overrun. Yet for all Wagner’s wit and sharp poetic detail, The Art of Topiary is written with an intimate earnest: a swarm of gnats take on an urgent mystery as they hum in code around the speaker’s ears, a bird atop a rhino’s leathery back becomes a fragile porcelain cup, and the antlers of an elk reach for the air like a champion for a trophy.

Compact, lightfooted, and curious, The Art of Topiary is the exciting American debut of a stunning and joyful voice in global literature.

“A first book of remarkable talent and depth.” —PATTIANN ROGERS

Like Atlas holding up the world, this collection elevates human history—acknowledging and transforming patterns of all kinds through careful attention.

In Atlas, Katrina Vandenberg captures the way events reverberate and repeat across time and place. In the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, as one poem notes, a virus fueled through the tulip trade, making the flowers’ veined petals so beautiful the price of bulbs soared; in the twentieth century in the United States, blood tainted with the AIDS virus was inadvertently transfused into the veins of hemophiliacs, eclipsing “the purpose that briefly lit their brilliant veins.” In another poem, Vandenberg links an image of her sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a woman just “made over” on that day’s episode of Oprah.

Like any good atlas, this collection plots intersections: of love, death, history, art, and desire. Carrying lines and themes from one poem to the next, drawing on family artifacts, memory, and imagination, these are poems that build a conversation.

Since Milkweed Editions’ original publication of The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, Marilyn Chin has been widely celebrated as a consummate poet of the hybrid experience. At once ancient and contemporary, personal and political, grounded and yet uniquely dazzling, this extraordinary collection blends Asian and Western sensibilities in a pioneering way.

Here, with wit and energy, Chin defines her existence as a first-generation Asian American woman, effectively straddling two cultures. And she spins virtuoso jazz in her juxtaposition of the contemporary with images and metaphors from Chinese tales and classic poems, creating an expansive poetry of self.

Featuring an afterword by the author addressing the collection’s effect and the developments in her work since, this edition reintroduces a modern classic to a new generation of readers.

“When a poet spills her secrets, that’s a special gift.” —KIRKUS 

An award-winning poet, a mother, a lover of the land and every creature in it, as well as a student of zoology, the author is at home in the vocabulary of nature. In this work of prose punctuated and intensified by poetry, she describes the genesis of her most admired verse and reveals how and why she writes.

“When a poet spills her secrets, that’s a special gift. . . . Pattiann Rogers seeks to situate, in plain words, the genesis of her poetry, an experience she handles with aplomb even while it lays her open. . . . Much of Rogers’s poetry has fixed on natural history and notions of place, giving praise to creature and landscape, deciphering how she will act honorably with them without sermonizing or sanitizing.” —Kirkus 

“Pattiann Rogers deservedly receives plaudits for [her] luminous writing. . . . Rogers is a multi-talented, national treasure.” —Eugene Weekly

“A trained zoologist, Pattiann Rogers brings a scientist’s eye to her poetry, often with startlingly beautiful results. As she creates a poem, she says, the poem also creates her. Rogers’s prose flows in and out of the poems, making the book a gentle primer not only on reading her poetry but on reading poetry in general.” —Library Journal