The great tradition of Irish poetry courses through Seán Mac Falls’ blood and into his lines, as if he has spent a lifetime inhaling the sea breezes, cliffs, and peat bogs, ennobled from William Butler Yeats to Seamus Heaney to Eavan Boland. Here in a generous volume is a stunning treasury of pleasures, direct and appealing in voice, earthbound and empyrean in spirit, epistemological and rare.

Part creation myth, part prophesy, Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini stitches together the fabrics of our dystopian present, reminding us of our culpability and power in this grand, human experiment. These often darkly humorous poems guide readers into dreamscapes and under-worlds that are ominously contemporary. From a looking-glass planet, we peer back at our own homes and see the news as a horror movie. There is the sickening feeling that something has gone terribly wrong. Monsters prowl here inspired as much by Sarah Kane as Mary Shelley. We hold a tiny prehistoric horse in our paws. We are masochistic voodoo dolls traipsing hand in hand through grisliness and the sublime. If there is any hope in this nightmarish proliferation of cyborgs and militia, it lies within the liberating powers of the feminine. Glass Bikini is both mirror and warning, asking us to see our own strange and terrifying shapes, the monsters we have helped create, and the ones we have become.

Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America’s leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing. Bringing together poets who are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Native American, Wiccan, agnostic, and otherwise, this book offers frank and thoughtful consideration of themes too often polarized and politicized in our society. Participants include Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forché, Gerald Stern, Christian Wiman, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr, and others, all wrestling with difficult questions of human existence and the sources of art.

Good Bones, the collection that took the internet by storm in 2017, is a collection of modern poetry that speaks to the world we live in. Maggie Smith contemplates the past and our future, life and death, childhood and motherhood. She writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. Smith takes in the dark world around her with a critical eye, always searching for the hidden goodness: compassion, empathy, honesty. “There is a light,” she tells us, “and the light is good.” Smith skillfully reveals the layers of the world around us through lyric language and vivid imagery: “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake.” These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world. We come away from this collection hopeful about making the world a better place, a place to share with future generations. As Smith tells us in Good Bones, “This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

In the sequence of poems comprising Annie Guthrie’s first book, the quest for the meaning of human consciousness and its tangled subjectivity is drawn as a slow-building narrative of the mystic experience. The journey enacted is that of the self as character, who encounters insurmountable mysteries in a breaking selfhood. A dossier of contemplative exploration, THE GOOD DARK chronicles an immersive search in three acts: Unwitting, Chorus, and Body: stations through which the character must pass, and where she is accumulatively confessed, compounded and erased.

There has been no anthology in English dedicated to the poetics of the great generation of Russian modernists. For a group of poets so widely admired, relatively little seems known about their philosophy of poetry and their poetic influences, and although there is tremendous aesthetic diversity in this group, they have more in common than many readers assume. Russian poetry was a small world, made even smaller by the arrests, disappearances, pogroms, famines, assassinations, and political conflagration of the revolutionary era, and literary differences were often overcome by a mutual sense of historic cataclysm. This anthology’s structure is like textile, with many common threads intertwining, doubling back, sometimes unraveling—creating a matrix of poetic conversation: Mayakovsky on Khlebnikov, Pasternak on Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva on Pasternak, Brodsky on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova on Mandelstam. Shared themes range from expected (the word) to serendipitous (the ocean). Above all these poets are obsessed with proximity—to God, to nature and place, to poetic predecessors, to language (their own and others), and always, forever, to the inexpressible.