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Inspired by the Greek myth of Alcestis, this poetry collection brings to life myriad voices who venture beyond the known world and exist between realities.

In Greek mythology, Alcestis descends to the mysterious kingdom of death in her beloved’s place. In The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, loss and queer desire echo across the multiverse. “In another life, I’m a . . .” sea witch or swineherd, vampire or troubadour, florist or fossil or museum guard, Oliver writes. These parallel personas inhabit space stations and medieval villages, excavate the Devonian seabed, and plumb a subterranean Anthropocene. In possible futures and imagined pasts, they might encounter “all wrong turns and broken signs” or carry “a suitcase full of stars.”

Oliver’s poems are animated by lush, unsettling verse and forms both traditional and experimental. The Alcestis Machine demonstrates how very present absence can be and how desire knows no boundaries. In neighborhood subdivisions or the vast reaches of space, it’s impossible to know “whose time is slipping / again.” Anyone “could come loose / from gravity’s shine.”

Lyrically enacting the cognitive dissonance and embodied contradictions of our contemporary age, Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal Is Chemical collects innovative poems that straddle the frontiers of language and scientific knowledge. She brilliantly draws on her own experience as a medical editor and her family’s history of Holocaust survival to write into the hybrid legacy of Western medicine: part clinical empiricism, part human fallibility and moral bankruptcy. Displaying a robust formal range, these poems move from feverish elegies to drug-pamphlet erasures, tangible articulations of Bar-Nadav’s epigenetic, cultural, and memorial inheritance as a writer navigating chronic illness and pain. In these pages, Nazi medical experiments, pharmaceutical literature, and manifestations of intergenerational trauma collide in the lyrical archive of Bar-Nadav’s latest collection, winner of the 2022 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Just as she illuminates the paradox of time — that we may think of the past as something gone and yet always present in context and legacy — Bar-Nadav proves the enduring ambivalence of pharmakon, that antidote which poisons us, the medicine that kills. This febrile, fierce book casts spells and confronts illusions, ignites grief and awe, and challenges our assumptions about what it means to heal our bodies, our families, and our shared histories. Perhaps this work fulfills the specious salvation it describes in its opening pages, performing an exorcism of truth-telling that harnesses the heat of a “myth in which a god sets us / on fire and then sets us free.” 

How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them.

The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human.  In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.

Showing how poetics provides a path for building new imagined possibilities

Drawing together a robust corpus of contemporary USAmerican poetry, The Art of Breaking Worlds explores social and political breaks: disasters, failures, and disruptions that simultaneously constitute and fracture the world. These breaks range from unsuccessful political movements and acts of resistance to mass incarceration and biopolitical violence, from anti-Black racism to the infrastructural catastrophes of climate collapse. Paul Jaussen shows how poetry responds to such disasters by incorporating public-facing genres and discourses into its literary practice, thereby rewriting into aesthetic form the public languages used to perpetuate or contain that rupture. This poetic integration of public language thus generates a third space, located between the rhetorical and the aesthetic, a literary practice of both world-breaking and world-making that transforms existing genres while also creating newly imagined modes of collectivity. Grounded in contemporary theory and close readings of works by poets such as Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and Ilya Kaminsky, this book proposes that these dynamics require a distinctive critical poetics, one simultaneously attuned to discourses of struggle and discourses of art, modeling a fresh approach to the relationship between politics and literature.

Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is a truly original Southern epic with immense cultural and creative range. Revered by a devoted cult following since it was first published posthumously in 1978, the poem unfolds over more than fifteen thousand lines without stanza breaks or punctuation, creating an unstoppable linguistic flow that mirrors the chaos and beauty it depicts. In this third edition, meticulously edited by James McWilliams and A. P. Walton, Stanford’s sprawling vision is revived not as a lost relic but as a towering work fiercely alive in its ethical and aesthetic extremes.

Beginning with poetry composed in his teens, Stanford worked feverishly in his early twenties to transform and expand fragments into this colossal, labyrinthine poem that captures the terrains of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas circa 1960. A few years later, he helped prepare the poem for its initial publication before ending his brief life at twenty-nine. The Battlefield blends vernacular speech and dream logic, creating a mythic landscape inhabited by Francis, the epic’s twelve-year-old hero—orphan, seer, street hustler—who navigates racial injustice, cinematic visions, and historical collisions with unflinching poetic force, wandering through myth and memory and armed with a bard’s ear and a trickster’s tongue.

A one-of-a-kind outlaw epic, The Battlefield has hidden in the literary shadows for half a century as a mystical artifact. Now, in this first scholarly edition, Stanford’s visionary masterpiece returns, fortified by the editorial precision and contextual care it deserves.

The Bilingual Muse analyzes the work of seven Russian poets who translated their own poems into English, French, German, or Italian. Investigating the parallel versions of self-translated poetic texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Andrey Gritsman, Katia Kapovich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wassily Kandinsky, and Elizaveta Kul’man, Adrian Wanner considers how verbal creativity functions in different languages, the conundrum of translation, and the vagaries of bilingual identities.

Wanner argues that the perceived marginality of self-translation stems from a romantic privileging of the mother tongue and the original text. The unprecedented recent dispersion of Russian speakers over three continents has led to the emergence of a new generation of diasporic Russians who provide a more receptive milieu for multilingual creativity.

The outpouring of creative expression known as the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s spawned a burgeoning number of black-owned cultural outlets, including publishing houses, performance spaces, and galleries. Central to the movement were its poets, who in concert with editors, visual artists, critics, and fellow writers published a wide range of black verse and advanced new theories and critical approaches for understanding African American literary art. 

The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry offers a close examination of the literary culture in which BAM's poets (including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, and others) operated and of the small presses and literary anthologies that first published the movement's authors. The book also describes the role of the Black Arts Movement in reintroducing readers to poets such as Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Phillis Wheatley.

Focusing on the material production of Black Arts poetry, the book combines genetic criticism with cultural history to shed new light on the period, its publishing culture, and the writing and editing practices of its participants. Howard Rambsy II demonstrates how significant circulation and format of black poetic texts—not simply their content—were to the formation of an artistic movement. The book goes on to examine other significant influences on the formation of Black Arts discourse, including such factors as an emerging nationalist ideology and figures such as John Coltrane and Malcolm X.