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In his fourth full-length collection, Jose Hernandez Diaz explores the first-generation Mexican American experience in nuanced linear verse, avant-garde offerings, and deadpan absurdist prose poems. 

The Lighthouse Tattoo features plainspoken pieces that reveal the Latinx experience through the lens of a socially conscious contrarian in work that melds the quotidian and the profound. Also included, of course, are experimental prose poems in the signature style and voice that contributed to the meteoric rise of this unique artist. Invoking James Tate, Gabriel García Márquez, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Albert Camus, Marosa di Giorgio, and others, Hernandez Diaz cements his place in both the poetic and surrealist traditions. 

Even as it unravels mysteries and explores the strange—zebras in a zoo on the moon or English dragons on the Pacific Coast Highway—The Lighthouse Tattoo shines its light on the complex emotions of a seasoned Latinx poet. In this extraordinary volume, the titular tattoo itself becomes evidence of a trauma survived, an apt metaphor for the book as a whole. As one speaker says, “I’m trapped inside of this prose poem, but I don’t want to get out. It's nice and cozy in here. I’m invincible.”

The Right to Remain Violets is an electrifying poetry collection that reimagines the language of policing, public education, and state surveillance to illuminate the lived realities of Black and Brown youth in East Palo Alto—a city shaped by redlining, freeway expansion, and decades of over-policing. Blending documentary poetics with hip-hop cadence and Catholic liturgy, Antonio De Jesús López transforms transcripts, municipal documents, and legal language into a powerful form of witness. These poems trace how children are drafted into systems of surveillance and criminalization, even as they search for joy and solidarity amid Silicon Valley’s contrasts of wealth and dispossession.

Inventive and emotionally resonant, the collection spans sonnets, sestinas, hip-hop, and prayer, insisting that language can both indict and heal. López brings his experiences as an award-winning poet, scholar, and former mayor of East Palo Alto to each poem. At once elegy and refusal, The Right to Remain Violets speaks to readers of documentary poetics, social justice literature, and those who believe in the radical importance of protecting childhood in an America reckoning with itself.

A gripping oscillation between the manufactured and the natural, between capitalism and truth

To Think of a Match is a collection of daydreams from behind the eyes of retail clerks, corporate mascots, ghosts of 49ers, and sundry others. Situated in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, home of the Mall of America and the glistening Bde Maka Ska, these poems explore the intimate collisions of class and labor, spiraling out from the recent history of the Gold Rush and into the near future of asteroid mineral mining and beyond. Halee Kirkwood searches for possibilities of a postcapitalist future in our most squirmy, slimy, and wriggly forms of earthly life. What can invertebrates teach us about the ways humanity organizes labor, creativity, and community? What does it mean to have a body caught between economies and ecologies? Contending with subjects ranging from Sappho to Petco and envisioning a new pastoral that is honest about the human and nonhuman domains we are building today, To Think of a Match yearns for a poetics that thrives between shifts.