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In this formally inventive poetry collection, Sati Mookherjee resurrects a shared precolonial pan-South Asian identity, history, and culture in joyful defiance of the nationalist and sectarian movements of today. 

This unusual poetry collection emerged from the author’s interviews of her Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrant family and friends in her native Pacific Northwest about their personal histories: of partition and childhood, immigration experiences, and religious and metaphysical beliefs. The resulting poems reflect the kaleidoscopic identity of the South Asian (“desi”) diaspora—the world’s largest diaspora. At this ugly historic moment, desi-ness offers a real-world model of a joyful, plural community, even as such tolerance is under grave threat from both today’s American right-wing anti-immigrant movement and the toxic nationalism and sectarianism of South Asian geopolitics. The poems themselves are a diaspora of forms: hybrid cross-pollinations of American tradition (Frost, Penn Warren), ancient Indo-Persian-Arabic forms, and self-invention. In a time when hatred of the other is normalized, this book holds love, celebrating a kinship tradition and shared homeland—a Des—that is both precolonial and extant, borderless, found not on any map, but held in the collective un/consciousness of the desi diaspora. In defiance of nationalist rhetoric that would see us divided by language, religion, and country of origin, Des joins the decentralized global movement of scholars, artists, activists, and young people reclaiming the beauty of a shared, precolonial composite culture. 

Designed for Flight both continues and enlarges the exploration of the rhythms of our emotional lives undertaken in Gregory Fraser’s first two collections. A master of metaphor, Fraser works magic within tightly controlled forms, loading lines with surprising juxtapositions and changes of direction. Taken together, the poems trace the sometimes instant, sometimes decades-long movement from incomprehensible loss and grief to rueful reflection and, if we’re lucky, uneasy accommodation. Casting a sharply observant eye on past selves, always steering clear of simple sentiment, the speaker in this collection looks back with bitter irony and forgiveness in equal measure. Against the fears and frustrations of childhood, the dissolution of a doomed relationship, and the distance between the hoped for and the actual, Fraser’s poems offer the imagination’s capacity for endless invention and the compensatory pleasures of art.

In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur. Bulletins and interruptions come from brutal elsewheres and from the interior where music puts electrodes on the body to take an EKG. These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what’s unspoken and unbidden. While we’re driving, while riding a bus, while receiving a call, while passing through an X-ray machine, the personal is intersected—sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly—with the hum and buzz of the culture. The culture, whether New York or Tuscaloosa, Seattle or Philadelphia, past or present, carries the burden of race and “someone’s idea of beauty.” The poems fluctuate between the two poles of “lullaby and homicide” before taking a vow to remain on earth, to look right and left, to wait and to witness.

Undoing traditional psychiatric narratives in this innovative and bold first collection

Drawing from queer, trans, disabled, and Mad poetic traditions, Differential Diagnosis introduces a deeply entangled transMad approach, investigating ways of knowing, loving, and living not legible to the normative eye. This collection challenges the architecture of institutional psychiatry and its popular “wellness” analogues, offering instead a counternarrative of forced institutionalization, disorderly embodiment, and transMad self-determination.

At once jarring and joyful, Differential Diagnosis interrogates psychiatric power and locates capacities for disabled and/or transMad resistance in the oblique, the speculative, and the “nonsensical.” Cavar’s inventive full-length debut defamiliarizes cis, sane, abled existence through linguistic play and speculative imagery, offering Madness not only as poetic content, but also as craft technique and, ultimately, as a new way of being in the normative world.

Before The Song of Roland, before El Cid, and centuries before today's fascination with warrior legends and frontier worlds, there was Digenis Akritas: the great epic of Byzantium and one of the earliest masterpieces of medieval Greek literature. Rooted in the turbulent borderlands between the Byzantine Empire and the Arab world, this remarkable poem brings to life a society where cultures met, clashed, and transformed one another. Based on traditions that emerged from the Byzantine eastern frontier and preserved in medieval manuscripts, Digenis Akritas remains the most celebrated surviving heroic epic of the Byzantine world.

At its center stands Basil, known as Digenis Akritas, the “two-blood border lord.” Born of a union between an Arab emir and a Byzantine noblewoman, he embodies the complex cultural landscape of the medieval eastern Mediterranean. Gifted with extraordinary strength and courage, Digenis grows into an unparalleled warrior, defending the empire's frontier against raiders, outlaws, and rival champions while forging his own legend along the banks of the Euphrates.

Blending action, romance, folklore, and faith, the poem follows Digenis through daring adventures, dramatic combats, encounters with marvels, and a passionate love story. Yet beyond its heroic exploits lies a vivid portrait of frontier life in the medieval Byzantine world, where Christian and Muslim, Greek and Arab, imperial power and local tradition intersected in unexpected ways. The result is an epic that is at once a thrilling tale of adventure and a window into a fascinating civilization.

This acclaimed English verse translation restores a foundational work of medieval literature for modern readers. Supported by scholarly commentary, a bibliography, and maps, it offers an accessible introduction to one of history's great heroic traditions and to the legendary figure who became the archetypal hero of Byzantine folklore.

Glazier investigates the ways in which computer technology has influenced and transformed the writing and dissemination of poetry.

In Digital Poetics, Loss Pequeño Glazier argues that the increase in computer technology and accessibility, specifically the World Wide Web, has created a new and viable place for the writing and dissemination of poetry. Glazier’s work not only introduces the reader to the current state of electronic writing but also outlines the historical and technical contexts out of which electronic poetry has emerged and demonstrates some of the possibilities of the new medium.

Glazier examines three principal forms of electronic textuality: hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and works in programmable media. He considers avant-garde poetics and its relationship to the on-line age, the relationship between web “pages” and book technology, and the way in which certain kinds of web constructions are in and of themselves a type of writing. With convincing alacrity, Glazier argues that the materiality of electronic writing has changed the idea of writing itself. He concludes that electronic space is the true home of poetry and, in the 20th century, has become the ultimate “space of poesis.”

Digital Poetics will attract a readership of scholars and students interested in contemporary creative writing and the potential of electronic media for imaginative expression.
 

Incisive essays on modern poetry and translation by a noted poet, translator, and critic.

Marking a formal reinvention for the poet, this collection addresses the strangeness of time, blending writers and images from the past with contemporary scenes.

This book-length sequence of turbulent sonnets follows their speaker's impulses and imagination through the seasons of their composition. Written between 2016 and 2022, Divers is a collection shaped by contradiction and marks a new period of lyric experimentation for poet Sam Amadon. These poems are rigorously constrained while also making space for improvisation. They hold to a decasyllabic line while moving in and out of meter. They sing of time, and struggle to understand it. They find words for our moment in the pages of old books. Lines from great writers of the past—including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, and Michael Drayton—echo through Amadon's poems of contemporary menace and wonder. Here we see both the owls lining our fences and the black SUVs rolling down our streets. Out of these conflicts, Amadon’s sonnets step up, lift off, and dive into themselves.

A new, expansive collection by one of the most provocative and inventive poets of our time. 

In Dodging, Charles Bernstein pushes his poetics toward new kinds of formal and tonal attentions. This multifaceted work brings together comic velocity, pointed political critique, and passages of lyric intensity. Bernstein calls these poems “too late”: written late in life as irreversibility presses against reflection, regret, and renewed resistance—a situation in which dodging is not evasion but survival, a way of moving through political catastrophe and personal loss without being silenced by either.

The collection unfolds in three interrelated “fits”—a term suggesting bursts of composition, rhythmic surges, and formal groupings—titled “Dodging,” “Struggle,” and “Reflection.” These sections move from a series of flashes and fragments, then to assembled riffs and collaborations with poet Tracie Morris, and finally turn to refractions and aphorisms that embrace active contradiction. Together they trace a shifting field of contrasts: between satire and elegy, volatility and concentration, comedy and grief.

Both fundamentally true to Bernstein’s voice and radically radiant in its range, Dodging is a work that moves restlessly across forms and tones—by turns sly, searching, and unguarded, where humor and grief occupy the same ground.

Samuel Piccone’s Domestica firmly plants its feet at the fraught intersection of inheritance and the escape from it. Across these interrogative poems, the routines of marriage, parenthood, and faith reside in a place where “every garden is erased / by the thrum of impermanence.” If “silence is the earth’s way of embracing us / in whatever loneliness we think we deserve,” Piccone seeks whatever answers are held in the deepest recesses of that silence. At once aphoristic and vulnerable, these poems insist that “the stars are there to ache us into asking whatever we haven’t / brought ourselves to ask.” To startle us into paying attention to the world.