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These are poems of queer ecology—poetry that “exults in the grit and texture of the natural world, in the unassuming and overlooked wonders beneath our feet and beyond our doors—in lichen and snow, in martens and mushrooms.” In reckoning with a mother’s aging, a breakup, or grief and disorientation in the face of the climate crisis, these poems seek a spiritual meaning in ecological belonging. Central to the collection is a series of poems exploring science, ceremony, and personal encounters with fungi. Fungi and lichen blur what we consider biological, what we think of as an individual, and how we understand death, and these poems reflect this complexity through imagery, juxtaposition, leaps of imagination, and sonic spells.
 

When Sleep Journeys first appeared in 1981, it took the Urdu poetry world by storm. Now considered one of the finest contemporary Urdu poets, Azra Abbas was among the first to embrace experimental, free verse poetry. A single book-length poem, divided into three cantos, Sleep Journeys is a dreamlike rumination that explores faith, female desire, and the subconscious mind. Abbas’s language is simple and austere, the complexity of the work emerging through repetition, interweaving, and juxtaposition. The result is a gossamer thread that leads the reader through a labyrinth of metaphor, imagery, and awe.

Award-winning translator Daisy Rockwell expertly captures the rhythm and flow of the original. The result is a book that ushers us into a state between sleeping and waking, the world of hidden thoughts and desires. This edition brings one of the most celebrated Urdu poems of the latter twentieth century to a broader, worldwide readership.

The poems in Slipstream deal with the slippery concept of home, with robots and the internet and other human inventions, and with what we can learn from the natural world around us. 

Winner of the Berkshire Prize, Slipstream is a bracing, intimate, and formally adventurous debut that moves with equal grace through personal memory, inherited history, myth, and the ambient technologies of contemporary life. Diana Cao’s poems braid ancient Chinese legend, family migration, illness, love, and grief with moon landers, algorithms, privacy policies, and online ritual, creating a lyric field where the ancestral and the digital speak fluently to one another. The book is formally restless and assured. Sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, fables, and linked sequences feel conversational rather than ornate, their intelligence worn lightly, their music precise and unforced. Throughout, Cao writes with a clarity that never flattens complexity: humor and vulnerability coexist with philosophical rigor. Tenderness is sharpened, not softened, by attention to politics, history, and care. 

What emerges is a voice attuned to relational life in all its registers—daughterhood, friendship, desire, citizenship, species—asking how to live, love, and remain lucid inside systems that both sustain and estrange us. Slipstream is a book of uncommon range and emotional intelligence, one that feels fully of this moment while remaining in deep, living conversation with the past. 

Winner of the 2024 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize
 
Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang’s debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic’s answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.

Slow Fuse of the Possible is a poet’s narrative of a troubled psychoanalysis. It is also a commanding meditation on the powers of language, for good and for ill.

From the beginning of their time together, it is clear that the enigmatic analyst and Daniels are not a good match, yet both are determined to continue their work—the former in nearly complete silence, and the latter as best she can with the tools at her disposal: careful attention to language, deep reading, and literary imagination. Throughout, the story is filtered through the mind of Emily Dickinson, whose poetry Daniels uses as a fulcrum for the interpretation of her own experience. The book is saturated with Dickinson’s verse, and Dickinson is an increasingly haunting presence as crises emerge and the author unravels.

This compelling lyric memoir, so richly steeped in all facets of language and the literary, allows readers a glimpse into the mind of a renowned poet, revealing the dazzling and anguished connections between poetry and psychoanalysis.

Synthesizing emerging theories of aesthetic action in relation to literary and art criticism

Drawing attention to what critical theorist Heather Love identifies as “the micro,” contemporary artists use small materials and cross‑media methods to elicit interpretation and foster critical engagement, immersing audiences in the entangled relations engendered with near and distant others through artistic experience. Small Aesthetics analyzes this insurgent tradition in twentieth- and twenty‑first-century poetry and art to show how it confronts the challenges of creating mutually sustaining lives. Feminist and feminist‑of‑color theorists have long argued that acts of care take on critical force when they foreground collective well-being and solidarity across power, class, and cultural differences. Guided by their insights, Nate Mickelson proposes that literary and visual artworks elicit acts of caring attention that engage audiences in their responsibilities to tend to the collective structures through which their lives unfold. Through his close readings, he extends the “post‑critical turn” in literary and art criticism and demonstrates the urgent vitality of feminist, Black, Latine, queer, and trans lives in increasingly hostile social contexts.

Many people of Portuguese descent take pride in claiming that the word “saudade” is untranslatable. In reality, we come close with a melding of bittersweet nostalgia, bone-­deep longing, and an endless yearning for what one can never have again—or indeed may never have had. Adelaide Freitas dipped her pen in saudade to tell of family separation and bonds that never loosen. In her authentic Azorean voice, she recounts the immigrant experience and centrifugal impulses that force people apart in spite of their desperation to cling to one another. In their sensitive rendering, the translators have captured the nuances of Freitas's novel Smiling in the Darkness, with special care for those who have her native language in their heritage and heartfelt saudade for its loss.

Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt’s So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. “Soon,” she says, “we’ll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow.” In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt’s speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling “in their sweat-resistant fabrics,” “so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time”; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers “no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare.” It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title’s idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, “& look at how lucky I’ve been, for so long.”

Some Hard Stars knits together past and present in pursuit of a deeper understanding of love, rebirth, and sustaining joy. Through poems full of care and tenderness for family, neighbors, and friends, Thacker demonstrates how “love requires / a willing mind,” especially when confronting the difficulties of mortality with honesty. These poems sing and think out loud, through traditional forms and meters as well as through music invented for the needs at hand. They are intense and exacting in their questions, careful and complex in their laments, and delicate with sacred moments of change.

Some Jazz a While, the eagerly anticipated collected poems of one of America's best-loved poets, gathers Miller Williams's most representative work and adds some new pieces as well.

This generous collection welcomes newcomers as well as longtime admirers of Williams's trademark style: a compact and straightforward language, a masterful command of form, and an unsentimental approach to his subject matter. Williams treats the mundane interchanges, the lingering uncertainties, the missed opportunities, and the familiar sense of loss that mark daily life with the surgeon's deft touch.

An American original, Miller Williams involves the reader's emotions and imagination with an effective illusion of plain talk, continually rediscovering what is vital and musical in the language we speak and by which we imagine.