Atlas Hour is a collection of poem-maps whose cosmology embraces the works and lives of the painters Vermeer and Mark Rothko, Fra Angelico and Gerhard Richter, the anonymous child-artists of the Nazis’ Terezin transit camp and the poet’s own children. Sifting and selecting moments in history and in the annals of art, these poems bring the stuff of everyday into relationship with the great mysteries of existence: what we believe, who we love, whom and what we choose to hurt or leave unharmed.

The Nail in the Tree meditates on crucial subjects in devastating circumstances, exploring how childhood can be violent and generative, how trauma integrates in art and daily life, and what the artist’s role is. In this part memoir, part art-historical treatise, Carol Ann Davis narrates her experience of raising two sons in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, on the day of and during the aftermath of the shooting there. She describes revelations her children come to in the weeks that follow, quietly echoes the words of a principal on that day, and recounts painful series of texts and calls to further and further distant family members. She writes in beautiful, devastating, poetic language.

Trekking from the U.S. to the Caribbean and Canada— wind at their back, ear to the ground, listening for “the logos of what trembles underfoot”— the poems in Music For Exile syncretize a host of lyrical, received and invented forms to beckon a “mythic assemblage,” an aggregation of personal and historical losses, intimate and en masse. From walking up Canefield River to hearing a thief on the stairs in Philadelphia, from dredging the voices of New England’s enslaved to confronting familial grief, these poems trouble the ache, that “ironic hunger for home” when home is itself a vortex of violence. In poems of place, poems of encounter, domestic epics and epistolary calls, deGannes allows both the narrative and associative to limn the caesurae in one immigrant woman’s arc. The poems trace and retrace, they crossover, they “draw poison out” they “fissure desire” and proclaim “no one can say gone is gone,” enacting and inviting an expansive reckoning of all that has brought us here. From this, might be salvaged a radical sense of belonging, Glissant’s “knowledge of the Whole, greater for having been at the abyss.” Music For Exile is Nehassaiu deGannes’ first book-length collection of poems.

The most up-to-date anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, translated by American poets and edited by the executive editor of the bilingual literary journal Poetry East West. Showcasing the achievement of Chinese poetry in the last twenty years, a time of tremendous literary ferment, this collection focuses on a diversity of exciting poets from the mainland, highlighting Duo Duo (laureate of the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature) and Liao Yiwu (recipient of 2012 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade organization) along with not yet well-known but brilliant poets such as Zang Di and Xiao Kaiyu and younger poets Jiang Tao and Lü Yue. The anthology includes interviews with the poets and a fascinating survey of their opinions on “Ten Favorite Chinese poets” and “Ten Best-Known Western poets in China.” Featured poets: Duo Duo, Wang Xiaoni, Bai Hua, Zhang Shuguang, Sun Wenbo, Wang Jiaxin, Liao Yiwu, Song Lin, Xiao Kaiyu, Lü De’an, Feng Yan, Yang Xiaobin, Zang Di, Ya Shi, Mai Mang, Lan Lan, Jiang Tao, Jiang Hao, Lü Yue, Hu Xudong, Yi Lai, Jiang Li, Zheng Xiaoqiong, Qiu Qixuan, and Li Shumin. With translations by Neil Aitken, Katie Farris, Ming Di, Christopher Lupke, Tony Barnstone, Afaa Weaver, Jonathan Stalling, Nick Admussen, Eleanor Goodman, Ao Wang, Dian Li, Kerry Shawn Keys, Jennifer Kronovet, Elizabeth Reitzell, and Cody Reese.

Part miracle, part oracle, in these poems lava speaks “with the focus of a burning glass,” lighting lyric core samples through geo-historical and cultural texts about Iceland. Shifting the ground so “nouns are never still,” the lava reveals how language itself is a record of collisions: poem as matter, sound as forge, form as friction. And what does it mean to be human in the face of such ancient forces, especially as climate change unsettles the earth that anchors us? By the light of the “sphere’s credo,” can we, too, be remade?

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 her third collection, Geri Doran continues to seek a quieter poem in a more natural form. Against the immediacy of troubled times, these poems retain a belief that long thought, solitude, restraint, and immersion in the world given to us (not made by us) are a means of passionate, even radical, devotion. And yet—what happens when a poet begins to doubt her singular reliance on poetry? When the only way to speak is in a language poised to evanesce? Modal, flexible, sonorous—the lines and tones of these meditative lyrics trace one route back.

Like the wading birds of the title, the poems in this collection find their sustenance in the ground, tilling the earthly measure, even as they lift questions toward the heavens. Summoning the pastoral and the oracular by turns, the poems of Sanderlings achieve a preternatural rapture, both sensual and learned.

In her polyphonic poems, Suzanne Dracius creates protagonists—usually calazazas, light-skinned mulatto women with red or blond hair—who fight like Amazons against racial and gender discrimination. Dracius’s voice is leaping and exalted, often sexually charged, and infused with allusions to Greek and Roman mythology. Nancy Naomi Carlson has translated Dracius’s Exquise déréliction métisse, poems written in French yet including some Creole versions, and with Creole expressions sprinkled throughout. In French, this book was awarded the prestigious Prix Fètkann, whose judges cited the poet’s richness of language, with varied linguistic registers.

Rebecca Dunham’s thrilling new book is a multilayered account of the struggles and torments faced by women as wives, mothers, and daughters — a psychological journey in which the poet seeks communion with writers from the past, including feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft.

Using the metaphor of a “flight cage,” where birds are held captive, as physical manifestation of the space from which her speakers address us, Dunham reinvigorates the persona poem. Instead of “performing” historical figures such as Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Akhmatova, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she invites them to inhabit her, flickering in and out of sight, refusing an easy artifice.

A virtuoso of the phrase and image, Dunham displays a daring range of prosody. Drawing upon Wollstonecraft’s experimental travel narrative, the poet creates a threshold upon which the traditional “crown of sonnets” can be opened to the sudden breakage of collaged text, remaking both the received form and the now-conventional contemporary experimental poem.