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.

Samantha Peabody, a seasoned bio-acoustician and eccentric recluse living in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, recalls in this journal-like novel her year with two children who accompanied her in a “Sonic Adventure Program,” deep in the woods. Spending time with the girls, eight-year-old Betty and six-year-old Janet, Sam must confront her conscience in light of an ever-widening communion with the forest around them. This is the tale of an aging adult and two troubled children and their shared journey to compassion. In its uncanny texture and structure, the novel contemplates the transformations possible for those who listen to — and truly hear — the sounds of wilderness, where one’s true nature sings.

Inspired by nineteenth-century engravings for the Webster’s Dictionary, Engraved explores a fantastic land at the edge of obsolescence and loss. The poems teem with whaling schooners, passenger pigeons, a bayonet, cupola furnace, clavichord—words and objects at the brink of extinction, placed in and around the death of the poet’s father. But these poems also create, or recreate; through illustration, music, and myth, the imagination here allows the dead to reappear, mostly, and sometimes also lets them go. Located at the intersection of art and grief, these poems honor anyone who has set down lines and vanished from the earth.

Like Neruda and Paz, Perse and Milosz, Christopher Merrill is both a writer and a cultural envoy, crisscrossing the globe as chronicler and courier. Boat records a series of passages over a decade, employing varied formal strategies: meditations and fantasias, prose poems and versets, lyric sequences and narratives, translations and ghazals. Composed in war zones and embassies, refugee camps and monasteries, Boat is a logbook tracking questions of memory, the body and body politic, faith, mortality, and the ways of knowledge moves through generations. Reflecting ten years of life on the wing and forty years of writing, including extensive translation from other languages, Boat bears witness to what Merrill has heard and seen in places most Americans will never visit.

The poems in Bed, many written during prolonged bed rest, examine how life’s interruptions—illness or new motherhood, loss or lust—can lead us to intimate revelations with others and with our selves. We spend much of our lives in bed—it is a border, a boundary, a haven, and a trap—and the poems in Bed confront and question the very limits of body and mind. In dream and waking, in sickness and sex, in marriage and birth, in grief and death, the bed is a space that can either mark time or transcend it, a place of perpetual becoming and reinvention. Here is a body trying to remember pleasure amidst the material of suffering, a language trying to keep up with a love that begins before speech. The bed in Bed is often an absent center—a missing mind—around which intimacy must dance. Maybe it is the wanted child. Maybe it is the mourned self. Maybe it is your mind these poems must be tucked into to be kept or come alive.

In her second book, Jennifer Militello uses symptoms, diagnostic tests, and antidotes to illuminate tensions of identity that are central to illness and health. An endangered psyche confronts maladies and faces gods in poems that embody the complexities of self. Selected by Marilyn Hacker as a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Body Thesaurus examines the failing conduit of human physicality, offering beauty as a counter-stream to struggle.

Jennifer Militello’s work is ruminative and lyrical but with an unusually theatrical verve, which is displayed in associative leaps so agile that readers will be exhilarated by the imagination at work (and play) in each poem. This powerfully unified first book grapples with what is simultaneously gigantic and miniscule in human existence: the momentous everyday dramas of love and family.

In her newest collection, award-winning poet and memoirist Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, poems comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother’s role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. This book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello’s trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange.

Goblets of gin, fans of feathers, war-bombed bricks, loaves of bread, soot, smoke, and paper money—such are the tangible things that touched the lives of women who worked as wage laborers during an era of Europe of cabaret and hyperinflation. The crises of modernity and capital, as well as the human experiences of women and who loved, lost, and fought against the structures of privilege that all the while aided them during a fraught stretch of time between wars, come alive in City Scattered, a chapbook of poems that invite us to experience and examine the conditions of labor that echo those of our current day.

Rajiv Mohabir uses his queer and mixed-caste identities as grace notes to charm alienation into silence. Mohabir’s inheritance of myths, folk tales, and multilingual translations make a palimpsest of histories that bleed into one another. A descendant of indentureship survivors, the poet-narrator creates an allegorical chronicle of dislocations and relocations, linking India, Guyana, Trinidad, New York, Orlando, Toronto, and Honolulu, combining the amplitude of mythology with direct witness and sensual reckoning, all the while seeking joy in testimony.

In this award-winning debut collection, the smallest things of the world bear enormous emotive weight. For Jenny Molberg, the invisible and barely visible are forms of memory, articulations of our place in the cosmos. Parsing the intersections between science and personal history, and contemplating archival letters from 17th- and 18th-century scientists along with new studies in biological phenomena, Molberg’s poems examine complexities of relationships with parents and the faultiness of certainty about earthly permanence. In the title poem, a child begins by looking at an ant through a microscope, and later, as a husband and father, with the same discerning eye he recognizes the cancer in his wife’s breast. Marvels of the Invisible sounds the depths of both grief and amazement, two kinds of awareness inseparably entwined.

“Riven by the events of the first decade of this century and shot through with grief and a bird-like wonder, Mary Molinary uses the space of the poetry collection to experiment with a form—and therefore invent a mechanism—to reckon with this ‘marked little bird of a heart’ that must live each day with the knowledge of the ongoing torture, war, and violence performed in one’s name. Perhaps in imitation of a complicity alternately figurative and real, the poet situates commonplaces hard by the nearly indescribable: a borrowed ornithology joined to an ancient illumination, ‘a speaking self’ beside ‘a seen other,’ elegy followed by apology followed by ‘what will emerge.’ Through her thousand fresh images and tender elisions we are asked to look and finally see. To read Mary & the Giant Mechanism is to revisit our common history with an open, lyric heart.”— Carol Ann Davis, judge’s citation for the Tupelo Press First Book Award

The aftermath of death leaves many of us dumbstruck—turned inward and inarticulate. Having lost both parents, poet Rusty Morrison attempts to find in that shocked silence a language scored by the intimacy of that aloneness with death. Each poem-series in this book of multi-part sequences evolves a new form, stretching every sentence past expectation so as to disrupt the truisms of grief and find affinities in the shifting flux that death discloses. Readers are offered what the poet experienced in the writing process, not relief but a heightened intensity. Beyond elegy, Morrison’s new work embodies the volatility of death in life, which mourning allows us to experience.

Yes Thorn abides with mysteries—mortality, spirituality, sexuality, nature, divinity, love—and interrogates them without necessarily pressing toward or expecting explanation. Its diction is sometimes ornate, but language and images that dwell in more classically lyric places are often undercut or mixed with tougher, blunter elements.