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If the list, as Umberto Eco once claimed, is the basis of culture, then the poems in this collection are a soil sample of all the rotted fauna and toxic waste that make up the loam contemporary white fatherhood plants its monoculture in—girldad fighterjets, midwestern vanity license plates, Clark Griswold prodding a caged ape, Fabio bleeding in the bathroom as reckless gender reveals incinerate a blasted landscape. In a world that is more poison than paradise, that is as much microplastic as it is polycrisis, a world that has been hacked into nations and stitched back together by oily supply chains and fuzzy diasporic memory, these poems wonder what a father is, can be, and should teach to their offspring when all they’ve been taught has been how to blend into a country intent on transforming difference and dissent into knickknacks. Knuckled like a crayfish and sieving the trash-clogged streams of our era, Conor Bracken’s poetry is bent—in self-defense? in prayer? supplication?—on bringing the contradictions of creating life in a necrophagous era into the kind of tension necessary to strike a chord or fire an arrow. 

Exploring queerness, belonging, and the meaning of home through the lens of a Filipino American

How does a queer brown body move through the American panorama? In Amphibian, Joseph O. Legaspi explores the metaphor of “amphibious living”—adapting, surviving, and flourishing in varying geographies—as it pertains to immigrants and to queerness. These poems draw on the natural world to illuminate personal experiences and, in turn, closely examine cultural, environmental, and societal constructs and concerns.

Legaspi searches in nature for evidence of the validity of his own existence, determined to declare his belonging. Dwelling in landscape as a guide into the interior, Amphibian journeys not only between earth, water, and air, but also into the past, cataloging an immigrant’s departures, arrivals, and returns to native soil. This moving collection is at every turn liberating, fraught, and altered.

As Long as We’re Here is an off-key anthem, a funhouse mirror held up to our dumpster fire era. Chronically online, distracted and distracting, with too many browser tabs open at once, attentive to everything and focused on nothing, Brouwer delights in the late capitalist absurdities of sleeping apps and internet dance crazes, and riffs on the argot of the group chat and the team meeting. These slippery poems both suffer from and revel in their ADD. Their shifts are as fleet as our news feeds, their serpentine sentences leap from barroom jests to high modernist splendor and back. But the book is not all fun and games. Dreamy tales of edgelords and loyalty oaths often arrive at places of surprising pathos and beauty. Mortality gnaws at the narrators of these poems, and political unrest lurks in the background. Still, a sense of solidarity—that we of the title, a recurring pronoun throughout—keeps despair at bay. Indeed, As Long as We’re Here is a book of intimacy, of the coterie. Friends and lovers people its lyrics, which often feel like late-night hang sessions with eccentric, wise-cracking pals. Full of wry wisdom and lush music, As Long as We’re Here knows what to do with a diminished thing: make it sing.