Dujie Tahat’s Salat is a book of poems written in a compelling new form of the poet’s own invention that participate, fully — they praise, weep, spit, beg, laugh, choke, sing. In this murderous age it is increasingly unconscionable to be inert, in one’s living or in one’s art. Tahat tells us: “There’s a river in heaven, and I am the star that belongs to it.” Salat is boisterously, resoundingly alive.

Shahr-e-jaanaan sets out to recreate the universe of Urdu and Persian poetic tradition, its tropes both lenses and mirrors for the speaker’s reality. As she maps her romances onto legends, directing their characters perform her own tragedy, their fantastical metaphors easily lend themselves to her fluctuating mental state. Cycling between delirious grandeur and wretched despair, she is torn between two selves— the pitiable lover continually rejected, and the cruel, unattainable beloved comparable in her exaltation to a god. Shahr-e-jaanaan explores, interrogates, and distorts these dichotomies and their symbolism, calling into question the forces that elevate some to divinity even as they damn others to injustice and oppression.

Fascinated by what emerges from unlikely sources when absorbed into memory, Gale Marie Thompson’s poems delight in what remains: John Wayne, Bewitched, turnip fields, camellias and canned figs, and—of course—kitchens. Soldier On uses the light of the kitchen as a starting (and ending) point to explore remembered spaces, which take on new facets and textures in a flood of associations and the mind’s endless cross-indexing. Inside a world of objects, people, and artifacts, Soldier On constructs the language in which we love and lose love.

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