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Marianne Moore said of Robert Francis's poetry, “He is so penetrating, delicate, and wise, one goes away without having said a word, merely grateful to have received so much.”

Francis readers will welcome this new volume of verse which features poems in the whole technical gamut of Francis styles, including word count, with which he first delighted critics in Come out into the Sun. 

Like Ghosts of Eagles also presents for the first time entirely new Francis styles and techniques. Such poems as “Bloodstains,” “Going to the Funeral,” and “Silent Poem” are distinguished by “fragmented surface,” a technique in which single words or short phrases are delivered without connecting tissue. Also new to his work are poems in which sentences are fused together in one continuous stream, as in “The Mountain,” “The Righteous,” and “The Peacock.” 

The works are equally diversified in mood, ranging from the bitterly satirical through the elegiac, lyrical and playful, to poems of pure celebration. “Few others writing today work with such fragile sounds and with such delicate, almost pastel perceptions,” wrote David Clark upon first reading the manuscript of Like Ghosts of Eagles.

Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas’s new translations of Aimé Césaire’s Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed (poems deleted) expose to a new audience a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of a po­et’s course, encapsulating in one volume Césaire’s entire literary career and creative evolution as perhaps the only French poet writing simultaneously at the crossroads of the avant-garde and classical movements. 

This volume’s inclusion of previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed is politically important; despite their initial exclusion from a French republication of Soleil Cou Coupé in 1961, these thirty-one poems are crucial to understanding Césaire’s legacy and remain of tremendous pertinence today as they provide helpful ways of thinking about and contextualizing discussions on race, identity, global identities, and the links between “black conscious­ness” and “social consciousness.”

It is our everyday explorations—the small explosions within life, family, and “ordinary” survival—that make up Gregory Fraser’s fourth collection of poetry, Little Armageddon. Fraser writes at eye level, detailing the experiences of fatherhood, love, and the quiet of daily life, poised at the brink of abrupt upheaval.

These poems are an exercise in precision and reflection. Free verse and prose show readers the life within the landscape. In “My Daughter and the Lizard,” the speaker reflects on grace, meditating on the reptile his child is inspecting: “I scissor-jab three holes through the lid / of a Mason jar and tell her to be gentle, / ‘It’s a living thing,’ I say, ‘not a toy.’”

We are how we live. These poems balance imagination and truth telling with rich verse that brings the reader’s ear closer to the quiet—and how intense it truly is.

Attentive to echo and resonance, this debut collection ranges across and makes connections among natural, musical, and literary histories.

The title for Katherine Gibbel’s debut collection plays with the etymology of the sonnet, or sonnetto in Italian: a little song or little sound. Exploring the possibility of words and the limits inherent in both language and form, Little Sound asks its reader, “Did you hear that?” and tunes in to what echoes when we listen. 

Divided into three long poems, Little Sound explores language, gossip, reading practices, love, and death, tracing webs of meaning across a range of seemingly disparate topics. Gibbel’s speaker interrogates partial histories and turns them into meditations on the literary, the natural, and the personal, including the subdivided memorial prairies of the Midwest, family history, pipe organs, and medieval theology. Associative, funny, curious, bell-like, and elaborately architectural, Gibbel’s poems offer a study in emotional nuance, knowing winks, and sonic attentiveness.

A luminous, darkly playful collection of poems that moves with equal ease through myth, scripture, history, domestic life, and the surreal textures of contemporary existence. 

In three interwoven sections—”King David,” “Loose Change,” and “Life with Atropos”—Sam Magavern’s Loose Change reimagines biblical figures, philosophers, ordinary laborers, animals, and dreamers with a voice that is by turns comic, tender, metaphysical, and elegiac. These poems assemble a mosaic of loss, desire, absurdity, memory, and endurance, finding flashes of beauty and meaning in the discarded, the humble, and the half-forgotten. With formal agility and a distinctive wit, Loose Change affirms poetry’s power to transfigure the everyday while confronting time, mortality, and longing with both gravity and radiance.

Cain has been ranked as one of the two best dramatic poems written in England in the nineteenth century. Because of its religious heterodoxy, which veiled a political iconoclasm, and also because of Byron’s notoriety, Cain stirred up a storm among Tories and clergymen “from Kentish town to Pisa.” From 1821 to 1830 more was printed about its eighteen hundred alarming lines than about the twenty thousand of Don Juan. One solemn Frenchman even translated the work in order to supply his countrymen with a text that he could then rewrite and confute.

After the initial controversy, readers began to regard Cain not merely as revolutionary propaganda but as a fictional portrait of common youthful experience: a sequence of aspiration, discontent, uncertainty, confusion, misunderstood isolation, fear, frustration, anger, and finally a rash, inevitable, but futile revolt that led to a future of hopeless regret.

Truman Guy Steffan here presents a text, arrived at by collation of the first and several later editions with the original manuscript (presently in the Stark Collection of the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin).

The first eight essays, which comprise Part I, cover a number of literary topics: Byron’s defense of his purposes in Cain and the relevance of his dramatic theory to the poem; the characterization that is an ideological confrontation, a revelation of personal conflict, as well as a rendering of individuals who have an existence independent of the author; the principles that controlled Byron’s absorption and expansion of biblical materials; the integration of the imagery with the dramatic substance; the incongruities of the language; the metrical heterodoxy; and a description of the manuscript and of Byron’s insertions.

Part II contains the text of Cain, accompanied by notes on the variants, the manuscript cancellations and additions, certain linguistic details, and the scansion of some unusual verses. Then follow annotations on allusions, sources, and analogues, and on a few passages of the play that have elicited unusual conflict over interpretation.

Part III provides a history of Cain criticism, from the opinions of Byron’s social and literary circle and of the major periodicals and pamphlets to the more complicated contribution of the twentieth century.

This important work stands not only as a valuable addition to Byron scholarship but also as an illuminating record of the changing critical and cultural attitudes from the early nineteenth century to the 1960s. Steffan has done a remarkable job in bringing together and synthesizing an enormous body of material.

Class consciousness and contradictions percolate throughout Colin Pope’s third collection. Highly personal, these poems acknowledge the damage wrought on underprivileged populations while celebrating a working-class background. Dishwasher, delivery guy, ne’er-do-well, paper boy—the characters who populate this volume are caught within societally imposed definitions; infused with dignity, humanity, and compassion, Losers thumbs its nose at other folks’ labels. A celebration of postindustrial, rural America, this book is a paean to anyone thought undesirable and highlights the advantages (and disadvantages) imposed by geography, beauty, status, wealth, and opportunity.

The vision begins with a river. From this river, you can see a village, marine life, and ancestral rituals. It is here that you recognize origins, and a poison beginning to spread through paradise. Suddenly, a premonition: a wounded animal. The certainty of war cries. What you take with you is what you become, each movement a gamble, a lottery of life that transforms you until this moment, when uncertainty becomes an ally.

Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. Conjuring dreamlike visions of extravagant fruits and rivers animated by the power of divination, these poems follow the speaker from the lash of war’s arrival through an urgent escape and reinvention in a land that saves with maternal instinct but also smothers its children.

In this bilingual collection, Colombian American poet Elizabeth Torres threads together the stories of family dynamics and the realities of migration with the archetypes of tarot and the traditional Lotería game, used for centuries as an object of divination and entertainment. Through these themes and images, the poems in Lotería narrate intimate moments in the lives and journeys of migrants, refugees, and all who have been forced into metamorphosis in order to reach the other side of the river.

Winner of the 2022 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets, this collection showcases masterfully crafted and translated poems.