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Conceived of as a memoir in poems of late-life love and its betrayal, Magic Lantern traces the borders of loss and investigates the source of our strength to traverse them, finding the roots of resilience in ordinary interactions and illuminating the undramatic power of simple connections. "At a time of our lives when the only hands / we can expect to touch us this gently / will be wearing latex gloves," Aleshire recounts a tender moment before romantic rupture. "The technician in the ER said softly, / trying to attach your heart monitors, / You’re so hairy, I’m not sure / this will stick, but I thought / it didn’t matter how intimately / they handled you; my love / had covered, would cover / you, before and after them." When the realization of the beloved’s treachery obliterates this lucidity and generosity, the speaker feels violated and estranged from herself, reducing the narrative of the affair to “what we did / in the dark, until we became / the dark.” The private destabilization of this heartache pales but compounds the shadows of a world already rent by international war and domestic political upheaval, but Aleshire orients toward another light source: the rewarding labor of building community and the noble pursuit of seeking meaning itself. The title poem executes a beautiful metacommentary on the value of art, which is to say going to the effort, trying for trying’s sake. At a local filmmaker’s screening, the speaker marvels at the powerful impression the artist has rendered with black-and-white film, astonished by how “the depths and brights, / shadows and gleams... make us watching / feel more.” In these deeply compassionate and vulnerable poems, Aleshire draws our attention to the artistry of our lives, the luminosity we stroke and orchestrate through our meticulous care and enduring bonds. This is the light we see by. A transportative seventh collection, Magic Lantern draws the disordered overwhelm of the human experience into a dazzling, seamless sequence of images, setting the ordinary into motion so that it not only coheres, but glows. 

A strange, cacophonous, and contemplative long poem following a posthumous narrator making meaning of life and death. 

Lloyd Wallace’s book-length poem Mammal Pit uses the imaginative technologies of literature to try to say something true about being alive. Conceived as though spoken in a single, long breath by an ostensibly posthumous narrator, this soliloquy accrues fragments, images, impressions, jokes, and regrets as it progresses. The narrator recalls moments from his past life, running through the American South, crossing the long Ohio River into Pittsburgh, and zigzagging over to the oiled, silent hallways of the US Capitol, all while calling up and attempting to make sense of what it was to be alive in a human body surrounded by the heavy liquid of time. Studded with strange, exacting images—“Men dreaming of knives / In such excruciating detail / They wake up with paper cuts / Saliva wife”—Wallace’s debut collection attempts to ask the questions poetry is made to answer: What do you do with death? What do you do when it’s standing beside you? What can you do but hold its hand?

Wallace’s humorous and morbid romp across America and across the boundaries of life and death whirls language away from expected patterns and forms. Committed to the question of what it means to die, Wallace faces its inevitability and the fact that we are all doing it as we speak. 

Mammal Pit is the winner of the 2027 Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize. 

The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, who was born in the eastern province of Camagüey in 1902, died in 1989. This new edition of his selected poems, reissued thirty years after its original publication, includes an extensive, new introductory essay by Roberto Márquez, one of the original translators and a leading authority on Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture.

The hazy settings and amorphous auditors of Tennyson’s dramatic monologues are often contrasted—at Tennyson’s expense—with Browning’s more vivid, concrete realizations. Hughes argues that Tennyson’s achievements in the genre are, in fact, considerable, that his influence can be traced in such major figures as T. S. Eliot, and that the monologue occupies a far more central position in Tennyson’s poetic achievement than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Hughes’ study challenges the traditional view of Tennyson’s inferior achievement, and her account of the elements and operation of the dramatic monologue, especially as demonstrated by three of its most important practitioners, will be of interest to all those concerned with the monologue as a poetic mode.

This seminal scholarly work examines T. S. Eliot's literary development and philosophical outlook through the lens of modernist dialectics, exploring the tension between mastery and escape as central to understanding both his poetry and critical thought. Edited and written by acclaimed Eliot scholar Jewel Spears Brooker, this volume presents expert studies of key intellectual influences on Eliot's modernism—particularly Stéphane Mallarmé, Sir James George Frazer, F. H. Bradley, and T. E. Hulme—yielding fresh and original insights into how these thinkers shaped the poet's artistic vision.

Through careful textual analysis and intellectual history, Brooker investigates how Eliot grappled with fundamental modernist anxieties: the desire for artistic mastery and transcendence alongside the simultaneous impulse toward escape from the constraints of tradition, rationality, and conventional form. She demonstrates how Eliot's poetry and prose reflect a dialectical movement, a constant interplay between opposing forces, that defines both his modernist aesthetics and his philosophical positions.

 An essential resource for scholars seeking comprehensive understanding of modernism's philosophical foundations and poetic achievements, Brooker is devoted to tracing both dialectical movements and biographical developments in Eliot's career.

In Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting lyric poems exploring Esselen words and concepts traverse a supporting cast of prose poems about contemporary life as a queer, Indigenous recovering academic. Deborah A. Miranda witnesses the lives of women who are lovers, mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers caught in a chain of ongoing apocalypse that stretches from the colonization of North America to the current Anthropocene. 

These poems are small but potent ceremonies that center relationship as medicinal. They speak of the ugliness of genocide, substance abuse, environmental destruction, and homophobia with searing fury. They linger on the sacred powers found within a river—“A web of fireflies weaving constellations in the alder’s branches”—or the wonder of “The first woman / who stole my heart / rose up / from the earth / like a creation story.” Throughout this collection, images weave connections between women’s bodies and the moon, bodies and earth, bodies and constellations that surround us. Esselen, Miranda’s Indigenous language, acts as a bridge that translates some of these ancient struggles and insights into contemporary images. 

This collection resists the separation of the body, the spirit, and the sacred. It seeks a reunion of true relationship in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. Miranda balances praise for the burning—but still beautiful and holy—world and grief for the loss of beings and places that cannot be recovered.

Finalist, Montaigne Medal, Eric Hoffer Award

The Black American Literature Forum said of his work, “Mbembe’s poems express a hunger for a fuller life, for an affirmation of existence.” The Kansas City Star commented, “Mbembe works with his own special problem of saying what he has to say and saying it in the authentic voice of a special culture.” The literary quarterly Northeast summed up his work by suggesting we “look for his light on the dark waters of the bay--red flashing four: courage; white flashing one: love--you will find your way safely to harbor.”

In Medicine Show, inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and Orpheus (Greek), and placing them alongside Jagger and Richards, skinheads, and psalms, Tom Yuill’s book mirrors an old-style hawking of wares, with all the charm and absurdity that results when high culture meets pop, when city meets small town, and when provincialism confronts urbanity. Here, the poems talk to one another, one poem nudging the cusps of many others, those poems touching still others' circumferences. Yuill, by invoking the Rolling Stones as muses and as background music, offers cover versions of Shakespeare, Keats, and Dylan Thomas, ultimately giving us a new kind of verse, funneled through the languages and rhythms of his masters' voices.