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The essential selected works of Ireland’s leading poet, Micheal O’Siadhail

With an illustrious literary career that has spanned over fifty years, renowned poet Micheal O’Siadhail has cemented his place on the international stage. From his debut collection, The Leap Year (1978), to his latest collection, Desire (2023), O’Siadhail captures evolving struggles with love, faith, and humanity. Here, spanning the entirety of his outstanding career, is the essence of his masterful body of work.

The Essential Poems voyages through traditional and innovative poetic forms, investigating love and passion, joy and loss, world-shaping events and personal experiences. O’Siadhail sounds the depths of meaning and evokes wonder, surprise, anguish, and delight. A lyrical meditation on the relationships between humanity and nature, despair and faith, and the richness of courage in the acts of healing completes what proves to be this unforgettable and necessary collection of the inimitable Irish poet.

The Future is a book about time. The tender, vulnerable, and bitingly funny poems of Monica Ferrell's third collection confront the hours as they stream by, our relatively brief lives that feel so long while we are living them, successive generations and the unwinding story of our species, and the bewilderingly vast geological age of the planet. Traveling across eras, through ice ages to the eighteenth century and the modern day of Ozempic and chatbots, these poems also square up to the obscurity of what comes next as they peer forward into time still to come.

At once irreverent yet elegant, sophisticated yet conversational, these poems capture what it means to get by day to day in a 21st century destabilized by ecological collapse, political havoc, and the incursion of technology into our most private and intimate spaces. “Every day I wake up,” Ferrell writes, “and ask, is it today? The volcano?” Restless in their imaginative scope, these poems leap across the world, from the enduring statues at Angkor Wat and Hampi to Alpine meadows contaminated with plastic to a supermarket in Vermont. Without papering over any of the difficulties we face today, Ferrell nonetheless expands our capacity to wonder, especially about the experience of motherhood, how the future keeps finding a way of breaking through.

This book manifests as that impossible, unimaginable collision that annihilates the world as we thought it was and sees it emerge as pure energy. Ferrell includes us in “the bequest of this battered planet, this sweetly belabored thing,” from one generation to the next, reminding us of the genesis contained inside obliteration: “one November night I too once opened my eyes to the bright.” 

A stroll through deceptively tranquil spaces and the restlessness of social convention

Depicting the uneasy performance of class and femininity in the stilted, suffocating spaces of a social life suffused with English propriety, Megan J. Arlett’s The Garden Party is a poetic meditation on desire and agency. From the imagined space of the titular garden party to the interior of an art gallery, from the rolling hills of Sussex to Trinidad under British colonial rule, Arlett paints the conventions of polite society as both strange and arbitrary, allowing the restlessness of the poems’ speakers to rise to the surface. Through free verse, received forms, and ekphrasis, these poems stage a conversation with other artists, eras, and art media, moving through natural and constructed locations that are sometimes historical and often imagined. This collection considers what it means to love a place despite its histories and flaws and offers ways of navigating this tension through art. The Garden Party is a striking yet quiet rebellion against order and expectation.

Poetry that serves as a broad collection of historical incidents and considers how we weigh and value events.

Named for a sura of the Quran, The Gathering is an epic in cantos that indiscriminately records deeds and events that have taken place on this earth. Its speaker—a nearly omniscient archivist—is propelled by a force more elemental than causation to visit moments and subjects, moving swiftly through thoughts, physiologies, and environments. Under an imperative to record everything encountered—however small, cruel, or sad—the archivist must grant radically equal weight to each thing. Yet as these entries accumulate, a strange significance accrues, and the negligible seems necessary. Each mundane fragment of life finds consolation. What was, was; what happened, got to happen.

Southern Arizona is a world-renown hummingbird destination. The Great Hummingbird Chase chronicles John P. Schaefer and Ken Lamberton’s passionate quest to photograph all fifteen of Arizona’s hummingbird species.

A play that explores the influence of pioneer drag artist Bert Savoy.

The Half of It is inspired by the life and work of Bert Savoy, a Vaudeville drag artist who was active in the 1910s and early 1920s. Savoy was at the height of his career when he was tragically killed by lightning in 1923. The play highlights the groundbreaking and inspirational work of this important, yet largely forgotten, pioneer. Characters include some of Savoy’s famous friends, such as Klondike Kate and Mae West (who many believe borrowed her sassy stage persona from Savoy’s drag act). The play explores themes of gender identity, gender expression, celebrity in the modern era, the LGBTQ community of the early twentieth century, and the origins of contemporary drag performance.

Racial identity and literary form in the modernist anthology

The Image and the Fire examines the coterie anthology—a small, outsider literary collection—as a key, yet understudied, instrument of literary intervention within American modernism. Whit Frazier Peterson argues that these anthologies, produced outside of institutional or canonical frameworks, served as deliberate challenges to dominant literary paradigms. Distinct from academic anthologies that helped codify the American literary canon, coterie anthologies were used by both white and Black avant-garde movements to disrupt prevailing cultural narratives and assert alternative literary visions.

Through close analysis of three seminal case studies—Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound; Fire!!, a short-lived but groundbreaking magazine from the Harlem Renaissance, co-edited by Wallace Thurman; and Black Fire, compiled by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal during the Black Arts Movement—Peterson traces a genealogy of the coterie anthology as a politically charged genre. He reveals how Black American writers and editors, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, reappropriated and reconfigured this type of anthology format from white modernists.

Ultimately, The Image and the Fire positions the coterie anthology as a site of aesthetic and ideological contestation, one through which marginalized literary communities engaged in acts of cultural self-definition, canon revision, and formal innovation. By foregrounding the coterie anthology’s role in shaping a hybrid American modernism, Peterson contributes to ongoing conversations in literary studies around race, authorship, and the politics of literary form.

The debut collection from Adroit Managing Editor Chris Crowder, The Kin of Nakedness interrogates the ethics of complaining and self-work beginning with a lens focused on body image. Structured by sections that complicate the biblical definitions of servitude—being Christ’s hands and feet—and a long ars poetica, the speaker risks toward honesty as he explores his struggles and privileges as a Black and biracial man. “Digging for everything I have to write into my flesh,” Crowder works to witness the harm done to himself and others who are competing for recognition. Seeking to understand these internal and external struggles, he embodies characters, including benched quarterbacks and Jimmy Fallon, while reckoning with fractured subjects like greedy pastors and alternate universes.

In wrestling with despair, Crowder neither refuses reality nor surrenders to nihilism. The speaker of “I’m Not Always Sulking, Resting My Elbow on a Well” admits to the temptation to surrender, saying, “I can’t trick my anxious ass into thinking that things aren’t better than this,” but the elaboration of “this” becomes a litany that contradicts the insufficiency of this life: “My corgi, Eden. My parents’ garden of beans, collard greens, and spicy peppers. Reacting to heat: it’s actually got good flavor to it. So do the worst days.” Crowder has a signature gift for distilling the bizarre beauty of this existential maelstrom, the succor beside the suffering. He achieves an astonishing inverse transmogrification that shows man capable of God’s metamorphosis: not the body into bread, but the abyss into being. “Before I had skin, I hated it. / The idea.” But, though our nakedness terrifies us, the mortification of the flesh is its capacity to feel every excruciating and ecstatic thing. “Lord, // you asked me what sense / could you not bear / to lose? My answer, now, is touch.”

A play from the inimitable Kate Hamill, based on the true story of the groundbreaking Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi

During the seventeenth century, Italian artists strove to reshape the very image of humanity. Artemisia Gentileschi—the daughter of a painter—dreams of making her mark at a time when a woman is not thought capable of being an artist, let alone one of the greats. Just as her career begins to gain unexpected momentum, a series of devastating betrayals crack the foundation of her work—and her life. In electrifying verse and gorgeous artwork, The Light and The Dark depicts the deeply moving true story of a young woman who changed the very image of women in society . . . weaving a magnetic and empowering tapestry of ambition, rage, and resilience across the ages.

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.”

A poetic journey through five decades of wonder, memory, and love, where the ordinary becomes sacred and every line leads home

Spanning five decades of poetic mastery, The Lost Book of Life: New and Selected Poems is the definitive collection from Charles Ghigna, a beloved and influential voice in contemporary Southern poetry. Drawing from fourteen previous volumes and featuring thirty-seven new poems, this landmark collection captures the full arc of Ghigna’s creative evolution, from his early meditations on nature and family to his later reflections on memory, mortality, and the enduring power of love.

With graceful shifts between free verse and traditional forms, Ghigna’s voice is both intimate and expansive—clear as spring water, alive with wit, and steeped in feeling. His poems open doorways into childhood’s bright dreaming, the quiet complexities of fatherhood, and the sacred hush of daily life. Ghigna invites readers to see the world anew, to find beauty in the familiar, and to embrace the sacred in the ordinary. For longtime admirers and new readers alike, The Lost Book of Life is a luminous testament to a life devoted to poetry. It is both compass and keepsake: a celebration of poetry’s enduring light, and a lasting gift to the literature of the American South.

In his second collection, The Marvels, David Orr writes from the conviction that the available world is enough: its worn shirts, coffee cups, rainbows, buses, obsolete machines, failed plans, neighborly borders, and minor acts of courtesy. These poems are clear-eyed without being cold, comic without being merely light. They attend to ordinary things not as symbols waiting to be elevated, but as the actual substance of our shared existence.

Praised by The Washington Post for his “quirky, engaging poetry,” Orr brings formal control, wry wit, whimsy, and an exacting intelligence to the relentless dailiness of life. In “Coffee Cups,” two mugs have been scoured blank by the dishwasher: “Nothing makes them special now. / What they do is all they are.” Yet the household still reaches for them first, “hoping to save the others.” In “Decency,” a nearly useless blue shirt becomes kin to the small social gestures that certify “this shared space as shared”: a held door, a blessing after a sneeze, the habitual signs by which strangers acknowledge one another. And in the title poem, marvels are planted along a property line, where two neighbors meet to prune, argue, trade tools, and admire what grows between them.

Unillusioned but not disenchanted, The Marvels finds its force in persistence, use, courtesy, memory, and care. The poems do not look past the real for consolation. They look steadily at the world we have — its comedy, damage, repetition, and thin but durable fabrics of connection — until its sufficiency comes into view.