As John Gallaher prefaces this book, “It should have been an easy story to sort out, but it took fifty years.” My Life in Brutalist Architecture confronts the truth of the author’s adoption after a lifetime of concealment and deceptions with lucid candor, startling humor, and implacable grief. Approaching identity and family history as a deliberate architecture, Gallaher’s poems illuminate how a simple exterior can obscure the structural bricolage and emotional complexity of its inner rooms. This collection explores — and mourns — the kaleidoscopic iterations of potential selves as prismed through our understanding of the past, a shifting light parsed by facts, memories, and a family’s own mythology. The agonizing beauty of My Life in Brutalist Architecture is its full embrace of doubt, a jack that makes space for repair even as it wrenches one apart. After his daughter’s birth, the author considers the only picture of himself before the adoption, captioned “Marty, nine mos.” In legal documentation, in the photographic archive, this child no longer exists. “I appear next as John, three-and- a-half,” Gallaher writes, “and Marty disappears, a ghost name.” “And so, then, what does the self consist of?” he asks. The answer is, necessarily, no answer. “The theme is time. The theme is unspooling,” Gallaher summarizes, testifying to a story’s inability to recover the past or isolate its meaning. Equal parts reckoning and apologia, Gallaher’s latest work disrupts the notion that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, attesting to the irrevocable harm of silence, while offering mercy in its recognition of our guardians as deeply flawed conduits of care. Referencing Vitruvius’s foundational elements of architecture (firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, or solidity, usefulness, and beauty), Gallaher fuses an elegy and an ode to family when he writes “that in the third principle of architecture, / they bathe you and feed you. You won’t remember. // And they know this.” Gallaher’s lyricism encapsulates this, humanity’s consummate tragedy and profoundest grace — that love, even when forgotten, persists. 

An energetic exploration of the expanse of language translated and otherwise transformed

In Renditions Reginald Gibbons conducts an ensemble of poetic voices, using the works of a varied, international selection of writers as departure points for his translations and transformations. The collection poses the idea that all writing is, at least abstractly, an act of translation, whether said act “translates” observation into word or moves ideas from one language to another. Through these acts of transformation, Gibbons infuses the English language with stylistic aspects of other languages and poetic traditions. The resulting poems are imbued with a sense of homage that allows us to respectfully reimagine the borders of language and revel in the fellowship of idea sharing. In this tragicomedy of the human experience and investigation of humanity’s effects, Gibbons identifies the “shared underthoughts that we can (all) sense:” desire, love, pain, and fervor.

The capstone of a quarter-century career in poetry, To the Boy Who Was Night collects the poetry published by Rigoberto González since 1999, including selections from five previous books as well as new work. Mirroring González’s personal trajectory, the arc of this work articulates the course of a life: these poems recall leaving a beloved homeland, confront masculinity and sexuality in new adulthood, imagine the earth devoid of human inhabitants, descend into the realm of ghosts, and return to arrive at Dispatches from the Broken World. This latest section ventures into foreign terrain — an autobiographical confrontation with isolation and the aging body. His lyrical exploration, like the weather reports scrawled on ancient temple walls, will preserve this age-old message: “likely a poem, surely an epitaph.” To the Boy Who Was Night bears the fruit of 25 years of poetry, González’s boldest and most comprehensive volume yet.

Arielle Greenberg’s I Live in the Country & other dirty poems exploits and undoes the stereotype of the “wholesome country life.” Here, the speaker moves to the country (“where the animals are”) in order to live a whole life, one in which she can live honestly and openly in a nonmonogamous marriage. Her book is a visceral, erotic celebration of the cornucopia of sexual pleasures to be had in that rural life—in the muck of a pasture in spring or behind the bins of whole-wheat pastry flour at the local co-op. Greenberg hauls out what has previously been stored under dark counters and labeled deviant—kink, fetish, and bondage—and moves it into the sunshine of sex-positivity and mutual consent. In doing so, she forges new literary territory—a feminist re-visioning of the Romantic pastoral poems of seduction. “I am trying to turn my eye toward joy,” she writes. “My heart toward bliss.”

In the long limbo of post-viral syndrome, Julia Guez aptly frames the recursive paralysis of pandemic rhetoric, whose seeming transitions always arrive at the same uncertainty: "and then what / and then / what, what / then." The Certain Body captures life with illness-how the body moves through disease and rests in the liminal space of otherness. Following the speaker through a harrowing and disorienting SARS-Cov-2 infection, readers witness the poet's gradual refortification as Guez traverses all facets of sickness: its mercies, its pleasures, its gratitudes, its reliefs, its gorgeousnesses. Probing, sharp poems centering an awareness of human ephemerality answer the words of Viktor Shklovsky: "And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony." In "If Indeed I Am Ill," Guez writes, "These sonatas, these scores, tell me / what of them will last when everything falls away-" Through these lyric expressions, Guez shows us not just how art can heal but how healing is art, a modality of acceptance, the meaning in the process, a mosaic of imperfections that creates and embraces what is.