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B/RDS endeavors to dismantle discourses that create an artificial distinction between nature and humanity through a subversive erasure of an iconic work of natural history: John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-1838). This process of erasure considers the text of Birds of America as an archival cage. The author selectively erases words from the textual cage to reveal its ambiguity and the complex relationship between humanity and the other-than-human world. As the cage disappears, leaving a space for scarce, lyrical poems, birds break free, their voices inextricably entangled with ours.

Prose poems written in the author’s own words and prompted by the erasure process are also interspersed throughout the collection. These migratory poems, like ripples, trace the link between past and present and reveal the human-nature disconnect at the root cause of environmental and social problems, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Along its five movements, B/RDS also explores how we can reimagine our relationship to environment through language within new frameworks of interconnectedness. Thus, as the collection resists the distinction between nature and culture on which traditional nature poetry relies, it also acts as an ecopoetic manifesto. It suggests that a critical, lyrical poetry could contribute to ecological awareness by singing humanity back within nature.

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Cynthia Cruz reevaluates the paradox of the death drive in her eighth collection of poetry, Back to the Woods. Could it be that in ceaselessly snuffing ourselves out we are, in fact, trying to survive? In “Shine,” Cruz’s speaker attests that “if [she] had a home, it would be // a still in a film / where the sound / got jammed.” This book inhabits the silence of the empty orchestra pit, facing “dread, and its many / instruments of sorrow.” The quiet asks, “Did you love this world / and did this world / not love you?” We return to the site of our suffering, we perform the symphony of all our old injuries, to master what has broken us. To make possible the future, we retreat into the past. “I don’t know / the ending. // I don’t know anything,” our speaker insists, but she follows the wind’s off-kilter song of “winter / in the pines” and “the dissonance / of siskins.” Cruz heeds the urgency of our wandering, the mandate that we must get back to the woods, not simply for the forest to devour us — she recognizes in the oblivion “flooding out / from its spiral branches” an impossible promise. At the tree line, we might vanish to begin again. 
 

Chronicling reproduction and parenting within a lesbian relationship, this poetry collection reveals both the anxieties and awe inspired by rearing children. 

In her frank, vulnerable third book of poetry, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers considers queer kinship through scientific, cultural, and personal lenses. Bad Cell presents perspectives on family and inheritance that are at once granular and comprehensive. From a pregnant woman being mistaken as a man by a store clerk to some “FAQs Re: Queers & Reproduction” that dispel stereotypes, the collection celebrates the fluidity of gender.

Early in the volume, Rogers addresses the emotional and physical complications of fertility treatment and pregnancy loss, a medical journey that, though harrowing, is gorgeously rendered in taut lyric language. Later, in forms like the abecedarian, definition poem, questionnaire, haibun, and a sonnet crown, the poet looks at how cells themselves—the stuff of life—divide and recombine. As in previous collections, Rogers leans into science-inspired verse, showcasing her talent for turning small-scale mechanics into meaningful metaphors. 

The book also supports an openness to neurodivergence in children: “I want to assemble / something that can speak / for everyone,” says the speaker of “Apraxia.” And Rogers does, with the skill of a seasoned poet and essay writer, whose eye for the particularness of the world is encompassing and gives new insight into the experience of parenting: “But I’m not mom, I tell / writers who think I’ve gone soft, given up deeper subjects. As if these wild, / xenogeneic offspring aren’t a full-on wrestle with the deep.”

In Bardic Deadlines, writer and editor Geoffrey O'Brien collects twenty of his essays on poetry that originally appeared in the Voice Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books. O'Brien surveys an array of some of the most striking and innovative poets to emerge in recent decades, including Susan Howe, August Kleinzahler, Clark Coolidge, Nathaniel Mackey, Gustaf Sobin, and Michael O'Brien. Discussions of contemporary work are juxtaposed with considerations of other traditions going as far back as the second-century Chinese anthology The Songs of the South and the Sanskrit master Kalidasa, traditions considered highly relevant to current practice. There are engaging, in-depth portraits of the work of poets John Clare, Hugh MacDiarmid, Emily Brontë, Kenji Miyazawa, and Frank O'Hara, among others. There is also an exploration of the poetics of Walt Whitman that highlights themes addressed throughout the collection: the physicality and musicality of language, the spatial dimension of poetry, the intimate bond between poet and reader, and the secret and often obsessive strategies by which the poet hides secrets in plain sight and enlists the reader in the making of the poem. Each essay focuses on poetry as an experience that impinges on basic questions of identity and being.

Winner, 2026 Society of Midland Authors Book Award
Finalist, 2026 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist, 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize

Barley Child, Greg Rappleye’s fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish American lives—recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed. The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an electrifying human choir—male and female, child and adult, Irish and American—their voices rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, a strained Catholic faith, and a virulent legacy of madness and alcoholism.

Free of nostalgia and cant, with a sharp Irish wit that often braves nearly monstrous subject matter, and reported with eyes that seldom mist over, Barley Child is a volume that once again confirms Greg Rappleye as a poet of witness.

The Beautiful Lesson of the I is a collection of finely made poems by an accomplished poet. It will reward the scholar and the student of poetry, as well as the reader looking for the simple pleasures of poetic insight authentically felt. Winner of the Swenson Poetry Award 2005. Now in paperback.

Becoming Hybrid offers an intimate exploration of creative process and hybrid poetics. Weaving together essays, interviews, personal narrative, and pedagogical reflections, this book explores what it means to be “hybrid” in the twenty-first century, as artists increasingly produce work that challenges traditional formal boundaries. The book examines the transdisciplinary practice of artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Don Mee Choi, and Claudia Rankine, many of whom write from diasporic experience or from identities historically pushed to the margins. Emerging from Barizo’s lifelong engagements with music, philosophy, art, and literature, the book illuminates the idiosyncratic pathways she has taken to unsettle disciplinary boundaries as an author, artist, and performer. Becoming Hybrid traces how disciplinary and genre-bound conventions have shifted and dissolved across time, offering tools for decolonial pedagogy and collaborative writing workshops that honor multiple voices, lived experiences, and cultural traditions. Accessible yet intellectually rigorous, the book opens up a conversation about hybridity and creativity, making it an essential guide for anyone interested in how contemporary art and literature are reshaping the ways we think, write, and create today.

A bold approach to the work of contemporary, Indigenous, and other emergent artists as revisionist adaptations of medieval lyric poetry.

In this book, Marisa Galvez gathers an eclectic array of contemporary poets, artists, writers, and translators—from Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos and Irish painter Louis le Brocquy, to Occitanists Gérard Zuchetto and Jean-Louis Séverac, to Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, poet Rosanna Warren, and essayist Eliot Weinberg—to explore how they reimagine medieval European lyric forms. Galvez calls these adaptations unthought medievalism, and in Before the Global South, she argues that we should understand them as a mode of inquiry that is at once scholarly, critical, and creative. In these modern innovations, Galvez finds an expression of the medieval that challenges popular and scholarly dogmas alike, one she believes can inspire us to create a more shared, global world.

A critical examination of modernist poetry and the demands of leftist literary theory.

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. As other writers moved sharply to the Left, and as leftist critics promulgated a proletarian aesthetics, these modernist poets keenly felt the pressure of the times and politicized literary scene. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement.

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of these responses: what these four poets wrote—in letters, essays, lectures, fiction (for Williams), and most importantly, in their poems; what they believed politically and aesthetically; how critics, particularly leftist critics, reviewed their work; how these poets reacted to that criticism and to the broader milieu of leftism. Each poet’s response and its subsequent impact on his poetic output is a unique case study of the conflicting demands of art and politics in a time of great social change. 
 

The name "Beowulf" lingers in our collective memory, although today fewer people have heard the tale of the Germanic hero's fight with Grendel, the dreadful Monster of the Mere, as recounted in this Anglo-Saxon epic.

This edition of Beowulf makes the poem more accessible than ever before. Ruth Lehmann's imitative translation is the only one available that preserves both the story line of the poem and the alliterative versification of the Anglo-Saxon original. The characteristic features of Anglo-Saxon poetry— alliterative verse with first-syllable stress, flexible word order, and inflectional endings—have largely disappeared in Modern English, creating special problems for the translator. Indeed, many other translations of Beowulf currently available are either in prose or in some modern poetic form. Dr. Lehmann's translation alone conveys the "feel" of the original, its rhythm and sound, the powerful directness of the Germanic vocabulary.

In her introduction, Dr. Lehmann gives a succinct summary of the poem's plot, touching on the important themes of obligation and loyalty, of family feuds, unforgivable crimes, the necessity of revenge, and the internal and external struggles of the Scandinavian tribes. She also describes the translation process in some detail, stating the guiding principles she used and the inevitable compromises that were sometimes necessary.