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A surreal story in verse that follows a woman facing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic alongside ecological crisis and crumbling social norms.
 
Jennifer Hasegawa’s NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire, is an experimental poetic take on biography, growing increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a call for attention to the looming ecological crisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling.
 
Feeling ever-increasing existential strain leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and culminating in her decision to no longer venture outside of her apartment, Naomie is not surprised to find her name is an anagram for anomie, a term for the breakdown of social norms. In these pages is a meticulous account of everything that went wrong in Naomie’s five decades of life. We find retellings of a life’s most significant moments—not because they are sources of pride, but because they stand as the only decipherable moments of humanity amid a world of static. This story in verse acts as a survival guide, romance novel, liberation handbook, pulp thriller, and jokebook for those who will live through ongoing plagues, environmental change, total AI integration, water wars, and cyberattacks and who will come out the other side ready to restart.
 

New Vrindaban lives in the disputed territory between the past and present, between the idealistic hopes and complicated reality of creating a better world. An electrifying collision of uniquely Appalachian cultural forces, the formal division of poems into “Side One” and “Side Two” pay homage to the concept albums of 1970s garage rock, while the book’s title alludes to the intentional Hare Krishna community in West Virginia founded in the same era. 

Jacob Strautmann’s latest collection builds an extraordinary temple on the compromised ground — it houses the compressed narratives of varied characters, monumentalizes the beautiful illusions of failed ideas, and remembers the irretrievable innocent love of youth. The music of New Vrindaban is both a ballad of survivor’s guilt and the raucous soundtrack of a record party among friends. It is the “black swift-moving waters,” “the bright clouds unmoored in the wind.”

The first English-language translation of Rosabetty Muñoz’s vital and innovative poetry from across her extraordinary body of work

Rosabetty Muñoz is one of Chile’s most acclaimed and innovative contemporary poets. Her poems highlight the lives of girls and women on the islands of the Chilean archipelago, portraying the hardships they encounter in this often-overlooked region of the world. In this meticulous and compelling translation from Elena Barcia, Nothing Like Paradise offers a collection of selected works from across Muñoz’s oeuvre, offering a close look into the breadth and emotional intensity of her poetry.

These poems depict the wounds inflicted by the Pinochet dictatorship, foreign invasions, sexual exploitation, the incursions of global capitalism, and political exile. Renowned for her powerful use of multiple voices and striking images, Muñoz channels the thoughts and emotions of the islands’ female inhabitants, bringing immediacy and drama to their stories and transforming readers into their witnesses and confidants. Her poems invite us to confront pain and injustice with empathy and to turn understanding into a collective act of compassion and resistance.