With funky tempos and stretched, staggering lines, Matt Donovan’s new sequence interrogates the ways our daily lives teem with beauty and loss. He summons figures engrained in American culture to portray collisions of pleasure with tragedy, and to offer evidence for what creation can cost. As “each day lurches us toward … / things dying, things newborn,” the poet of Rapture & the Big Bam can be either a companion in mourning or a celebrant of unbeaten anticipation.

In Sharon Wang’s thrilling and corporeal geometry, touch dominates, if often in its ‘aftermarks’: singes, whiffs, folds of fabric, echoing gestures between bodies. With generous language and quicksilver intelligence, Wang expresses ‘a hunger so large it stops the mouth.’ Her poems describe what is ‘hard and brilliant,’ the spaces between objects, and what’s left in the wake of losses. “Despite its attunement both to elegy and to witness, the mode is praise: ‘He loved the world. He loved it suddenly / and without reason.’ . . . As the poet works to understand, ‘If in fact it wasn’t possible to build / the world anew,’ she does build––extravagantly, judiciously, lovingly. The result is a book of radiant integrity.” — from the judges’ citation for the Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Rewild is a collection of documentary lyric poetry that explores places that, having been ravaged by war and environmental plunder, have since been abandoned to regenerate and restore. At this moment where we find ourselves in the Anthropocene, the poems hover between ruin and restoration. They open ways we can ask transformative questions and turn ourselves into these questions that begin to tunnel through difficulty and despair into “another spreadsheet than human … chromosomal and intricate.” To begin to unbuy ourselves, to rewild our communal lives.