Lucrezia Marinella
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet.
Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella’s other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.
William Trowbridge
University of Arkansas Press, 1989
The world of William Trowbridge is one preoccupied with loss, with the fall from some possibility of grace that all who are born must bear. In the title poem of Trowbridge’s first full-length collection the poet calls our attention to movies, to Shane in particular. He asks us to identify, not with Shane, the lonely knight on a nameless quest, but with the much more lonely, and real, Jack Palance, the Prince of Darkness.
Trowbridge favors the villain, the outcast, the imperfect, the sinner, the alienated: King Kong, the Frog Prince, Frankenstein’s monster.
Alden Solovy
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2024
Siew Hii
University of Wisconsin Press, 2026
“There is no version of this wherein I am given the time machine and do not destroy it,” writes Siew Hii in this wide-ranging collection that offers a poet’s perspective on what it means to be a queer Asian American in the American South. Exuding wit and profound insight, Hii’s is a voice that can elicit both laughter and sober reflection within the space of a few lines. In an explosion of different styles and formats, she delivers precise, cutting observations about self, family, and strangers.
From taking aim at Hollywood’s representations of identity, to exploring the meaning and dynamics of family, to describing her adopted home of Florida through a set of formally explosive poems, Hii makes sense of an unjust and absurd world, all the while exhibiting genuine curiosity and humor. Entered Some Aliens offers rare and powerful insight into feeling out of place and out of time.

Carol Frost
Tupelo Press, 2014
Robert D. Hamner
University of Missouri Press, 1997
In Epic of the Dispossessed, Robert D. Hamner offers an insightful, well-researched analysis of Omeros, the masterful epic poem by 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. Rich and various, Omeros is an innovative extension of the epic tradition. Despite Walcott's insistence that he violates the formulaþhe notes his autobiographical presence in the poem and the absence of classical heroic figures and epic battlesþthe poem incorporates fragments of all the definitive characteristics of the genre. Hamner establishes that through its self-reflexive textuality, Omeros complements the time-honored tradition of the epic by giving voice to the marginalized peoples of the New World.
Hamner briefly explains his perception of the epic tradition and its viability in contemporary literature. He examines Walcott's writing career and traces his development of devices, themes, techniques, and a narrative style essential to epic poetry. Although Walcott could not have fully anticipated Omeros, a retrospective view of his writing reveals the consistent accumulation of the skills and broad scope required for such an undertaking. Hamner attempts also to show that Walcott has incorporated into his personal style not only the more obvious aspects of his formal education but also uniquely West Indian cultural material and forms of expression.
Hamner describes Omeros as an epic of the dispossessed because each of its protagonists is a castaway in one sense or another. Regardless of whether their ancestry is traced to the classical Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, or confined to the Americas, they are transplanted individuals whose separate quests all center on the fundamental human need to strike roots in a place where one belongs.
Walcott's vivid, lyrical verse is visually compelling and aurally appealing. He is, however, a richly complex, allusive writer dealing with a wide range of profound human problems. Given the exciting climate of postcolonial and postmodern criticism, Walcott offers students and scholars unparalleled opportunities for challenging, creatively interpretive insights. Epic of the Dispossessed will be a valuable companion to the work that may prove to be Walcott's crowning achievement. The fresh and original Omeros stands on its own merits; nevertheless, it deserves to be examined in light of both Western tradition and its Caribbean context.

Geri Doran
Tupelo Press, 2019
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Bridwell Press, 2025
Louis Armand and Michel Delville
Bridwell Press, 2026
Erasurism traces how erasure shapes art and thought across history, exposing the political and poetic forces behind creative acts. The book explores erasure as a radical aesthetic and philosophical force shaping avant-garde, modernist, and postmodern practices across literature, art, media, and theory. From ancient cave marks to biopoetry, the volume traces a history of erasure that challenges authorship, ideology, and representation—uncovering the hidden politics and poetics beneath every act of writing.
Maya Phillips
Four Way Books, 2019
Lisa Fay Coutley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Bonnie Arning
University Press of Colorado, 2017
From the moment of a marriage’s heated inception to its period of luminous crowding and onward into distance and darkness, Bonnie Arning’s Escape Velocity asks if it’s possible to exist outside the only universe we’ve ever known. In modes both lyric and narrative, we are given a peephole into the height and decline of a marriage that begins beneath the moving lights of Las Vegas, Nevada, and traverses the devastating terrain of gambling, miscarriage, infidelity, and violence.
Arning gives voice to divergent aspects of love and violence through her use of math problems, erasures, dictionary entries, structured stanzas, and sprawling free verse. This multiplicity of forms comes together to explore everything from pop culture references of domestic violence to cultural notions of victims and victimhood. However dark, collectively these poems tell a love story—an acceptance of our capability to love those who hurt us, but also the love-of-self required to slowly and steadily reach "the velocity to be everleaving."
In the tradition of Eavan Boland and Louise Glück, Arning wrestles down and examines the terrible without flinching. We journey with her, engrossed by each difficult truth: a precipice near which we are both terrified to stand and transfixed by its unnerving insistence on beauty.
Dan Murphy
University of Utah Press, 2025
Michael McGriff
University of Arkansas Press, 2021
Winner, 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Michael McGriff’s Eternal Sentences bears witness to the world of gravel roads, working-class families, and geographic isolation in poems that illuminate both common occurrence and the territories of the surreal. Here, in rendering every line as a single sentence, McGriff depicts a world seen through fragments, quick leaps, and wild associations. Haunted as much by place and people as by the possibilities of image-making itself, Eternal Sentences is a song for the hidden depots of rural America.
Edited by Giulia Gaimari and Catherine Keen
University College London, 2019
Walter Ancarrow
Omnidawn, 2023
Linda McCarriston
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Charles Peguy
St. Augustine's Press, 2024
Leslie Williams
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
Anita Skeen
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Ramy Al-Asheq
Seagull Books, 2021
K. S. Nisar Ahmed
Seagull Books, 2025
Edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Walt Whitman, Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller
University of Iowa Press, 2020
Some of the dimmest years in Walt Whitman’s life precede the advent of Leaves of Grass in 1855, when he was working as a journalist and fiction writer. Starting around 1850, what he’d begun writing in his personal notebooks was far more enigmatic than anything he’d done before.
One of Whitman’s most secretive projects during this timeframe was a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle; serialized anonymously in the spring of 1852, and rediscovered and properly published in 2017. The key to the novel’s later discovery were plot notes Whitman had made in one of his private notebooks.
Whitman’s invaluable notebooks have been virtually inaccessible to the public, until now. Maintaining the early notebooks’ wild, syncretic feel and sample illustrations of Whitman’s beautiful and unkempt pages, scholars Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller’s thorough transcriptions have made these notebooks available to all; sharing Whitman’s secret space for developing his poetry, his writing, his philosophy, and himself.
Camisha L. Jones, Michael Northen, Naomi Ortiz, and Travis Chi Wing Lau
Northwestern University Press, 2026
An anthology of poems and essays by and celebrating Disabled writers
Declaring that Disabled people exist, innovate, thrive, and persevere, Every Place on the Map Is Disabled imagines the world we deserve. Its contributors spotlight the wisdom Disabled people embody from living within and navigating the economic and medical systems, communities, and families that often oppress their existence. This anthology is an intersectional compass pointing to the creative ways Disabled people build bridges to each other through Disability poetics and perspectives.
The contributing poets write about love, resistance, loss, pain, beauty, and culture. They capture tender and life-affirming moments where one Disabled person recognizes themself in another. The essays illustrate how Disability poetics suggest avenues for embracing the full spectrum of disability experiences. Every Place on the Map Is Disabled offers students, scholars, members of disability communities, and any reader a direction for paving a wider path toward a collective survival.
Michael J. Rosen
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Juliana Spahr
University of Alabama Press, 2001
Jason Bayani
Omnidawn, 2025
Andrea Cohen
Four Way Books, 2021

James Byrne
Tupelo Press, 2015
Ruth Behar
Swan Isle Press, 2018
Sage Ravenwood
Gallaudet University Press, 2023
Martha Nell Smith and Julie R. Enszer, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Adélia Prado
Tupelo Press, 2013

Noah Falck
Tupelo Press, 2020
Greg Kerr
University College London, 2021
Mike Lala
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Sandra McPherson
University of Illinois Press, 2007
From movie making to medical misadventures, meditations on widowhood to feminist protestations, Expectation Days is a dazzling portrayal of instances in Sandra McPherson’s life. Her autobiographical collection uses peculiar and exact language to reflect on a wide range of activities that include grouse hunting, going through airport security after 9/11, and climbing a coastal cliff. From being an unintended child to ceremonializing a lifetime “served,” McPherson speaks in both clear and distressing voices from the state of speechless fear that is bereavement.
Will the little figures ever reach the monument?
A doctor orders me to be on watch.
Will the mist pass over their cheeks
and clear the strollers’ eyes?
If so, I’ll see it. I’m on watch.
I train my eyes on paintings
to see if there is any change.
--from “On Suicide Watch”
Norman Fischer
University of Alabama Press, 2015
An exploration of how language, creativity, and spiritual practice shape human experience.
By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Norman Fischer’s Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a collection of essays by Zen master Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice.
Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Fischer embraced the twin practices of Zen Buddhism and innovative poetics in San Francisco in the early 1970s. His work includes original poetry, descriptions of Buddhist practice, translations of the Hebrew psalms, and eclectic writings on a range of topics from Homer to Heidegger to Kabbalah. Both Buddhist priest and participant in avant-garde poetry’s Language movement, Fischer has limned the fertile affinities and creative contradictions between Zen and writing, accumulating four decades of rich insights he shares in Experience.
Fischer’s work has been deeply enriched through his collaborations with leading rabbis, poets, artists, esteemed Zen Buddhist practitioners, Trappist monks, and renowned Buddhist leaders, among them the Dalai Lama. Alone and with others, he has carried on a deep and sustained investigation into the intersection of writing and consciousness as informed by meditation.
The essays in this artfully curated collection range across divers, fascinating topics such as time, the Heart Sutra, God in the Hebrew psalms, the supreme “uselessness” of art making, “late work” as a category of poetic appreciation, and the subtle and dubious notion of “religious experience.” From the theoretical to the revealingly personal, Fischer’s essays, interviews, and notes point toward a dramatic expansion of the sense of religious feeling in writing.
Readers who join Fischer on this path in Experience can discover how language is not a description of experience, but rather an experience itself: shifting, indefinite, and essential.
Peck, Steven L.
Signature Books, 2025
Mark Turcotte
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Edited by Matthew Kilbane
Amherst College Press, 2025
Though contributors write from a variety of methodological positions and address themselves to a range of archives, they share the primary conviction that the impact of Web 2.0 on literary practice is far-reaching, far from self-evident, and far more variegated and unpredictable than easy summations of social media’s influence suggest. Expressive Networks asks after poetry’s present and future by examining what poems themselves express about the social make-up of networked platforms.
Edited by Matthew Kilbane with contributions from Cameron Awkward-Rich, Micah Bateman, Andrew Campana, Sumita Chakraborty, Scott Challener, C.R. Grimmer, Tess McNulty, Michael Nardone, Seth Perlow, Anna Preus, Susanna Sacks, Carly Schnitzler, Melanie Walsh, and Samuel Caleb Wee.
Jenny L. Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2026
The second poetry collection by award-winning author Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw), Extant confronts the many ways in which Native Americans continue to be associated with the distant past and imagined, even today, as more animal than human. For more than a century, anthropologists, museum guides, and high school teachers have described Native American bodies, cultures, and languages as “endangered” or “almost extinct.” Through a combination of blackout poems, occasional poems, and free verse, Davis rewrites the narrative of what it means to exist, to live in a present shaped by colonial violence that emphasizes the power of survival. Drawing on online question forums, scientific studies, kitschy decor, and the day-to-day musings of an Indigiqueer Native woman, Extant stages encounters of Native survival within a world full of stars, cicadas, earthworms, and moss.
John James
Tupelo Press, 2026
Lorenzo Thomas
University of Alabama Press, 2000
Brett Foster; foreword by Jeffrey Galbraith
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Laura Long
West Virginia University Press, 2017
Edited by George Bornstein
University of Chicago Press, 1985

Lawrence S. Rainey
University of Chicago Press, 1991

Akiko Miyake
Duke University Press, 1991