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A dazzling debut that blends folklore with the everyday

Drifting between the past and present, the material and the otherworldly, Who Follow the Gleam melts lore and magic with history to shape distinctive narratives of childhood, fatherhood, and personhood. In his debut poetry collection, Christian Wessels crosses centuries and takes his readers with him to Germany’s Black Forest, burning hotels, chromatic casinos, and Long Island’s dazing Sound. Uncanny elements of folklore and dreamlike stories are grounded in the atmosphere of the natural world as Wessels turns the sun, moss, and clouds into characters connecting his poems: “maybe I myself am the sun; am / the brilliant silence engraved / in stone; am the arc / through which the future becomes / legible.”

In the world of this collection, intuition, feelings, dreams, and spells mimic cycles, patterns, rules, and structure as the speaker disappears in the magic of language, only to resurface in the everyday. In four sections, Wessels reckons with a changing world, evolving and sometimes unfamiliar, while coming to terms with the uncertain future: “The cloud looks / like me, it looks like me because / the present moves, the present moves.” This collection is a sensitive meditation on the power of passed-down knowledge—personal and collective, factual and mythical—and how such knowledge finds its embodiment in the world.

In Wild Delicate Seconds, Charles Finn captures twenty-nine chance encounters with the everyday—and not so everyday—animals, birds, and insects of North America.

Information science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted readers access to and acquired. Wild Intelligence traces a different history of information management, examining the privately assembled collections of poets and their knowledge-building practices at midcentury.

Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, including Charles Olson (1910–1970), Diane di Prima (1934–2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928–2018), and Audre Lorde (1934–1992), M. C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet’s library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload. Exploring traditions and systems that had been overlooked, buried, occulted, or censored, these poets sought to recover a sense of history and chart a way forward.

From the Kansas outdoors to Oregon classrooms, William Stafford (1914–1993) led a vibrantly original life navigated with ambition and mission. In poetry crafted in everyday language, a conversational tone, and richly accessible introspection, he invited readers to question and explore nature, humanity, and the American West. After he won the National Book Award in poetry and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a role known today as US Poet Laureate), his talent became recognized around the world. The accolades and achievements continued, including Stafford later spending fifteen years as the Poet Laureate of Oregon. 

A character shaped by duty, adventure, a sharp sense of humor, and a strong moral compass, Stafford remains a beloved American poet. In William Stafford: The Shadow Poet, the first comprehensive biography, Steve Paul shares fascinating stories and frequently surprising accounts of Stafford’s life and work. The book traces Stafford from his humble origins through periods of social courage, the complications of his wartime alternative service, dedication to writing, and family tragedy. It explores how his pacifist world views and eco-consciousness continue to inspire those returning to his work or discovering it for the first time. Paul uncovers various layers of the poet’s life—through his philosophy, friends, family, teaching, and writing—and contemplates how Stafford’s metaphoric shadows, found frequently in his poems, figure into his life and career.

A sophisticated literary analysis positioning Emily Dickinson’s poetry within the framework of democratic thought and individual sovereignty.

In this study, Paul Crumbley asserts that, contrary to popular opinion, Emily Dickinson consistently communicated political views through her poetry. Dickinson’s life of self-isolation—today her most notable personal characteristic—by no means extended into the political sphere, he argues. While she rarely addressed political issues directly and was curiously disengaged from the liberal causes and female reform movements of her time, Dickinson’s poems are deeply rooted both in matters of personal sovereignty and reader choice. The significant choices Dickinson extends to the reader underscore the democratic dimensions of reading her work, and of reading itself as a political act.

Crumbley employs close readings of Dickinson’s poems and letters, highlighting the many changing—and often contradictory—voices in her work, both throughout her oeuvre and in individual poems themselves. In Dickinson’s letters Crumbley finds just as many unique and conflicting voices; thus, both her personal correspondence and the poems make political demands by placing the burden of interpretation on the reader.

Rather than reflecting explicit political values, Dickinson’s work chronicles an ongoing decision-making process that magnifies the role of individual choice, not the advocacy of specific outcomes. In the end, Dickinson’s readers must either accept an isolated lyric subjectivity or invest that subjectivity with the substance necessary for engagement with the larger world.

When she arrived in Palestine in 1935 at the age of twenty-four, Leah Goldberg was already known as a significant emerging poet in contemporary Hebrew literature. Today, mention of her name is apt to evoke a nostalgic sigh among Israelis who have grown up hearing her poems read, quoted, recollected, and—having been set to some four hundred melodies—sung on the radio. In the wake of overwhelming new attention on Goldberg's work in Israel, With This Night makes available for the first time in English the final collection of poetry that Goldberg published during her lifetime.

Diane Seuss's poems grow out of the fertile soil of southwest Michigan, bursting any and all stereotypes of the Midwest and turning loose characters worthy of Faulkner in their obsession, their suffering, their dramas of love and sex and death. The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation.

With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension— state lines, lakes' edges, the space “between the m and the e in the word amen.” From what she calls “this place inbetween” come profane prayers in which "the sound of hope and the sound of suffering" are revealed to be “the same music played on the same instrument.”

Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. “We receive beauty,” Seuss writes, “as a nail receives / the hammer blow.” This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open—the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.