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From former U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera comes a searing bilingual collection that speaks directly to America and all its peoples. Flourishing Shadows / Sombras Florecientes is a lyrical journey through migration, memory, and resistance—an urgent address to a nation grappling with its identity. Blending autobiography and Indigenous, Chicanx, and Beat traditions, Herrera reclaims language as a tool of compassion and truth. With ink drawings and evocative verse, this book honors the migrants who traverse borders and histories, flourishing even in the shadows. A call to listen, to remember, and to act.

More than a poetic critique, this book initiates a conversation—a direct address to readers that invites reflection, solidarity, and action. Drawing on his anthropological training and lived experience, Herrera weaves together the cultural richness of Indigenous Mexico, the urban vibrancy of San Francisco’s literary scene, and the enduring legacy of migrant journeys. Flourishing Shadows / Sombras Florecientes is a vital addition to the Camino del Sol series and a powerful testament to the resilience and humanity of those too often relegated to the margins.

CALIBA’s 2025 Golden Poppy Book Award Winner, Poetry

The shadow of mothering has never been given a richer, fuller, more debased vision than in Youna Kwak’s For This and Other Cruelties. Kwak casts a cold eye on the splendid and cruel intransigence of maternal paradoxes in all their impossible double binds, monstrous pleasures, and profane mystifications. Shifting between lyric and prose poems, this collection throws slanted light on the ineffability of our deepest attachments, envisioning a world where mother is “a creature whose only enemy could be human.” Kwak brings us face to face with the irreconcilable facts of being mother, mothered, and alive.

When poet/critic Lars Gustafsson was the editor of Bonniers Litterära Magasin, he was bombarded with the question, “What makes a good poem?” Forays into Swedish Poetry is his answer.

The fifteen poems in this volume range across the history of Swedish poetry from the 1640s, at the beginning of the Period of Great Power, to the late twentieth century. Poets as diverse as Skogekär Bergbo, Erik Johan Stagnelius, August Strindberg, and Vilhelm Ekelund are discussed from historical, psychological, and sociopolitical viewpoints. However, Gustafsson includes only those poems he considers excellent.

Each essay begins with a presentation of the poem both in Swedish and in English translation. Gustafsson’s analyses are built upon his subjective experiences with poems and poets and upon a more objective structural approach that investigates the actual machinery of the poems. Thus, Gustafsson enlightens us with his always imaginative, sometimes daring analyses, and we learn a great deal about the critic himself in the process. One of his main concerns is what he calls, in his discussion of Edith Södergran, the very mysteriousness of human existence. Time and again, Gustafsson emphasizes the enigmatic, arcane aspects of life in his analyses. In contrast, his vocabulary and approach also bespeak a constant interest in science and technology.

In his introduction, Robert T. Rovinsky, the volume’s translator, presents examples of Gustafsson’s various thematic interests as voiced in his poems, several of which are translated here for the first time. While “The Machines” explores his theory of people as automatons and “Conversation between Philosophers” his linguistic pessimism, Gustafsson’s work as a whole shows his enchantment with its major theme: the intrinsic mystery of life.

A collection of poems envisioned as a magic wardrobe of mirrors, vast with ocean and meadow, revealing reflections of the muses, a deer woman, and a sea-monster lover.

Forever Mistaken for Ourselves tells a story of transformations. Iron dresses, veils nailed to an hourglass, and a sex-changing flower/human defy or define a woman and her place in daily life and history. Queen Anne's black lace leaves holes open for a ghost. Never just coy, these characters and artifacts get up and do battle with complacency, in an all too often misogynistic world. Beasts come and go through the mirrors, a fish-man breaking through to deliver a whole-body kiss to a woman. Forests rise, and lawns “lean lethargies” to hold the reflected images of the speakers. Is there a confirmation of existence? “If she is—a silver say-so.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander is widely celebrated as a love poet, a meditative poet, and a poet of ecological awareness. He has always been a writer drawn to cross-cultural encounter, as active in translation as any poet of his generation. This collection of essays on his work brings together an international range of poets, novelists, critics, and translators, including Charles Altieri, Stephanie Burt, Julia Fiedorczuk, Jorie Graham, and Jeanette Winterson.

The collection features interviews as well as essays of different kinds—reviews, appreciations, and interpretations—and they address Gander’s poetry, fiction, and translations. They illuminate major concerns at the heart of all his work: eros, companionship, loss, renewal, an openness to the life all around us, and a rapt attention to the natural world.

Hayden Carruth survived isolation, mental health problems, and long struggle with drink and smoke to produce a vision of modern poetry rooted in the New England tradition but entirely his own. Many feel his best poems emerged from the isolation of rural Vermont, and his poems often are concerned with rural images and metaphors reflecting the land and hardscrabble people around him. Together with his second love, jazz, Carruth’s rural experiences infuse his poems with engaging and provocative ideas even as they present sometimes stark topics.

This volume collects essays and poems from such notable contributors as Donald Hall, Marilyn Hacker, Adrienne Rich, Philip Booth, Matthew Miller, and Sascha Feinstein, among many others. The book’s sections concern the kinds of writings, and the values expressed in his writings, for which Carruth was most famous, including what editor Shaun T. Griffin calls “social utility,” jazz, his impoverished rural environment, and “innovation” in poetic form.

Fictionalized poems that embody the reality of life in twentieth-century China through the voice of Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong.

From the Diary of Madame Mao is a poetry collection of fictionalized diary entries in the voice of Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong and a vilified leader of the “Gang of Four," a Maoist political faction which wielded unchecked and violent suppression of dissent during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The haunting voice in this collection recounts the events of twentieth-century China through the imagined inner thoughts of Jiang, a liberated woman in a male-dominated society who struggled to fend for herself but then, upon gaining totalitarian power, became “mentally ill.” Maria Teresa Ogliastri—who has lived under authoritarian regimes in Venezuela for more than two decades— “opts for compassion” in her portrayal of this infamous public figure, conveying the full complexity of human emotion and experience in her singular lyric voice.

Jane Miller loves poetry. In these provocative and deeply insightful essays, she unpacks the work of giants like Adrienne Rich, Paul Celan, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Federico García Lorca alongside painters such as Caravaggio and Paul Klee, as well as ancient Chinese music and techniques of the contemporary poem. Miller explores the use of the question mark in the history of poetry and its function as a revelation of poetic voice. She considers the positive and negative aspects of surrealism on the contemporary poem, its anti-feminist origins in France, its contemporary usage, and the benefits of super-real images. Miller examines how identity politics might affect the imagination. She describes ancient Chinese musical instruments to show how their sounds resonate off/in American poems and on the aural integrity of the lyric poem. She interrogates the political implications of language and the degeneration and regeneration of words. Finally, in an essay about what she dares not say about poetry, she comes out against forms of surrealism, narrative, jargon, rhetoric, irony, and appropriation. This masterful work can be read as advice to a young writer, but it also invites us into the mind of a writer who has developed her craft through the course of a lifetime of writing, reading, and exploring the world, showing not only the ideas that influenced her—feminist, lesbian, and international works—but also how Miller has, in turn, influenced ideas.