Cintia Santana’s virtuoso debut collection, The Disordered Alphabet, reckons with the emotional anarchy of our lives, baring the difficulty of wrestling experience into language. She surveys a cosmic crossroads, “the sluices of heaven wording as we [stand] in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning.” These poems pay homage to inherited forms while fashioning their own shapes — Santana writes in alliterative verse, in footnotes, in epistles to consonants and vowels, in ekphrasis, in thrall. Ranging from A to Z in style, subject, and mood, Santana’s poetic encyclopedia chronicles life’s ubiquitous elegies alongside the world’s innumerable wonders — true to jumbled experience, they arrive in no particular order, or in the particular order of all the time and all at once. If “let there be” enabled light, it released every other sublime liquid, for then also “there was lie. // Lapse. And lake. Luck and leap. Little by little. Letter by letter. And it was late. / And there was bloom.”

Crackling with the hypervigilance of parenthood, Childcare explores the paradox at the root of raising kids: the joy of new life accompanies an awareness of potential loss. Rob Schlegel’s fourth collection observes the tangled emotions of fatherhood; even as he wonders at the strange intelligence of youth, he elegizes the present moment. The longitudinal wisdom of this collection appears in the choreography of its leaps — how it moves from the aside “[My son] needs my love the most when he least deserves it / Is something I read” to the reflection that “Death / Names my shape. I keep my clothes / From dust and ghosts and time. / I’m angry at my father for aging.” From Schlegel’s relentless curiosity and keen observations, the artistic crisis driving the book emerges: does poetry memorialize the ephemeral moment, saving something for us, or does it remove us from experience? The duality of language’s role — that it, ultimately, has the capacity to do both — doubles the significance of “childcare” in this collection, which comes to represent not just the work of child rearing but the dutiful care by adult children for their parents. Perhaps nothing can convey the scope and quality of family life like the concatenated dependencies of “(Un)conditional,” which terminate here: “If the cut draws blood / If life ends in desire // If it begins in love.”

In this electric collection, Mary Slechta brings magical realism and U.S. history to bear on the community of Mulberry Street— an African-American neighborhood with a disputed past. Is this enclave the result of white flight, a tenuous foothold for Southern transplants, or a sliver of the world that spun off during creation, once ruled by a god named Mr. Washington? Variously featuring the area’s residents, Mulberry Street Stories uphold the perseverance of hope despite intergenerational trauma and demonstrate the interconnection of human lives throughout time. Slechta's characters have seen it all, from the persistent mechanisms of systemic racism—forced migration, redlining, gentrification, and more—to the fantastical—children at danger of falling off a flat world; a vampire posing as Henry Box Brown; and a husband tasked with building a supernatural maze to trap the “somethin,” the faceless oppression that has long plagued his family and now threatens his wife. In one exemplary story, Slechta writes an ode to Toni Morrison, honoring her project to elevate the untold. The protagonist, Marjorie, a griot once charged with remembering things exactly as they happened but now suffering from Alzheimer’s, wanders away during a fugue. Drawn in by a taproom’s enchanting music, she begins orating to strangers, captivating the bartender and unknown patrons, one of whom rests his hand on her limb “like a penny on the arm of a record player”—the touch that keeps the disjointed tales together.

How does art mirror and shape our lives? Can it transcend the boundaries of time, wealth, and circumstance? Debra Spark—whose previous work the Washington Post described as "richly imaginative" and "real world magic"—explores these themes in her new novel Discipline. With a trio of important paintings missing, the book weaves together three narratives that span almost a century. From an inhumane boarding school in Maine in the late 1970s to a contemporary Boston art appraiser struggling with raising a teen to the long-lost love letters between a painter and his wife, Discipline is a propulsive literary mystery about family strife and devotion, ambition and authorship, and the abiding and mysterious power of art.

Inspired by the life and family of Walt Kuhn (the painter responsible for the 1913 Armory Show that introduced Americans to modernism) and the scandal-ridden Elan boarding school that was forced to shut down in 2011, this richly drawn, suspenseful novel shows Spark at her most masterful.
 

"A serious young man, / I had trouble saying yes / to the bright, clear days," Soren Stockman's Elephant begins. The poems that follow move through despair, self-destruction, and disassociation to arrive, finally, at that elusive affirmation. Accompanied throughout by the imagined presence of Joseph Merrick, the 20th Century entertainer and medical patient popularly depicted as "The Elephant Man," Stockman's speaker interrogates how storytellers have co-opted Merrick's identity and obscured his voice and inner life. In this projected communion, Stockman tries to encounter the man who was rather than the role molded from his experiences. What does it mean to perform as another? What allows us to love ourselves, and what makes it hard? This debut collection is a path out of loneliness, beyond private absences, to the true self and what it harbors in its heart. Here, at the center of things, we succumb to the succor of existence, given to the light: "What a blessing to love the world / and then finally be born."
 

The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business is an extended elegy for Jacob Strautmann’s home state of West Virginia and its generations of inhabitants sold out by the false promise of the American Dream. Throughout the book, voices rise up from the page to describe a landscape eroded and plundered by runaway capitalism—its mountain tops leveled by the extractive industries, its waters polluted by runoff from mines—and the fallout from that waste. Those who remain are consigned to life in a ravaged land denuded of nature where birds die and “Sheep / birth limp two-headed things and some / that speak like men if they speak at all.”

New Vrindaban lives in the disputed territory between the past and present, between the idealistic theory and the muddied praxis. An electrifying collision of uniquely Appalachian cultural forces, the formal division of poems into “Side One” and “Side Two” pay homage to the concept albums of 1970s garage rock, while the book’s title alludes to the once-flourishing intentional community in West Virginia of the same era. Though New Vrindiban taught Hindu practices to educate members in a less materialistic lifestyle, ideological corruption, and fraudulent leadership had critically destabilized the community by 1990. 

Jacob Strautmann’s latest collection, too, builds an extraordinary temple on the compromised ground — it houses the compressed narratives of varied characters, monumentalizes the beautiful illusions of failed ideas, and remembers the irretrievable innocent love of youth. The music of New Vrindaban is both a ballad of survivor’s guilt and the raucous soundtrack of a record party among friends. It is the “black swift-moving waters,” “the bright clouds unmoored in the wind.” 

Aunt Bird is an astonishing, hybrid poetry of witness that observes and testifies to social, political, and historical realities through the recovery of one life silenced by the past. Within these pages, poet Yerra Sugarman confronts the Holocaust as it was experienced by a young Jewish woman: the author’s twenty-three-year-old aunt, Feiga Maler, whom Sugarman never knew, and who died in the Kraków Ghetto in German-occupied Poland in 1942. In lyric poems, prose poems, and lyric essays, Aunt Bird combines documentary poetics with surrealism: sourcing from the testimonials of her kin who survived, as well as official Nazi documents about Feiga Maler, these poems imagine Sugarman’s relationship with her deceased aunt and thus recreate her life. Braiding speculation, primary sources, and the cultural knowledge-base of postmemory, Aunt Bird seeks what Eavan Boland calls “a habitable grief,” elegizing the particular loss of one woman while honoring who Feiga was, or might have been, and recognizing the time we have now.