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“I remember // once, turning to leave, a black purse over her shoulder. . .” Oneiric and surreal as always, Allison Benis White attempts to mediate, if not make sense of, inconceivable bereavement in her fifth collection of poetry. “A black purse, / over her living shoulder, Love said    nothing to me.”  
 
Ethereal, airy, and spare at once, A Magnificent Loneliness is a dialogue with ghosts. White, whose previous work won the Rilke Prize and the Four Way Books Levis Prize judged by Claudia Rankine, assembles these pages as an ekphrastic and epistolary record of her solitary journey through loss. These poems relate to artwork, the history of artistic practice, and inherited lore to broker an oblique and piecewise conversation concerning pain too vast to articulate all at once. “I don’t know how to love    the world but to love / her leaving.” These lyrical iterations represent White’s attempts to comprehend the individual suffering of being alive, and to metabolize the grief of women’s epidemic disappearance, literal and spiritual, through sickness and despair. Through those efforts, she illuminates a magnificent loneliness—the privilege of being alive to our anguish, of missing someone dearly because someone dear existed—and a reason for not yet departing that struggle. “How to leave / the world but to turn to leave her— / but to turn my head back / to see her.” 
 

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

“When I wake I’m in ninth grade again,” begins “Reunion,” the first poem in Caleb Nolen’s debut collection Afterlight. These haunting, tender poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Told through the voice of one of the boys who left and is later looking back, Afterlight navigates the silences left by absent fathers, early deaths, and a God who doesn't speak. Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker’s search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book’s end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.

A poetic journey through the past of the Roman Empress Agrippina looks toward the future
 
Agrippina the Younger follows one woman’s study of another, separated by thousands of miles and two millennia but bound by a shared sense of powerlessness. Agrippina was a daughter in a golden political family, destined for greatness—but she hungered for more power than women were allowed. Exhausted by the misogyny of the present, Diana Arterian reaches into the past to try to understand the patriarchal systems of today. In lyric verse and prose poems, she traces Agrippina’s rise, interrogating a life studded with intrigue, sex, murder, and manipulation. Arterian eagerly pursues Agrippina through texts, ruins, and films, exhuming the hidden details of the ancient noblewoman’s life. These poems consider the valences of patriarchy, power, and the archive to try to answer the question: How do we recover a woman erased by history? 

A feminist poetry collection re-examining the figure of the crone and upending the patriarchal expectations she embodies.

In Alchemist or Arsonist, her second full-length collection, Beth Gordon supercharges the term crone, demonstrating in image-rich poems the magical strength of older women. The Crone is frank about the realities of aging—including plucking chin hairs—yet she also surprises, warning the reader: “The tiger has always been there. . . . She is right in front of you.” Taking afternoon shots of mescal and waiting in line for Mexican street corn, she contemplates Captcha pictures, AI, and tattoos.

The book expands its concerns in several long poems and sequences, encompassing the full range of human experience. “The Secret Fate of All Life,” a series of golden shovels based on quotes from the HBO show True Detective, moves into the surreal to represent language’s failure to describe the death of an infant, and how time can be displaced by grief. Other works explore the transformation that can come from tragedy, the perils of marriage and other relationships, and the complicated conversation older and younger versions of the self would have with each other.

Gordon’s candid, wry, uncompromising voice is both refreshing and bracing, and the poems perform alchemy as they set fire to traditional expectations. With an undercurrent of violence and murder, the book reveals the ultimate consequences of patriarchy. “Alchemist or arsonist: the end is the same,” The Crone tells us. “Something becomes something else.”

Marking Aiden Heung’s debut collection, All There Is to Lose is the 2024 winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. The selecting judge, National Book Award Finalist Ilya Kaminsky, praises the resonant particularities and depth of feeling found in these poems, which convert “elegy [into] its driving force.” Poet and Critic Felicity Plunkett observes, “Dreams and memory move through these porous, venturesome poems. The spectral jostles with the sensual to tell ‘a story in which I could be found.’ Achily tender, they open to light, love and the jab of a joke.” Poet David Tait notes, “Unsettling and luminous, the poems preserve the memory of Village 915: its volatile seasons and hard-worn inhabitants, its headstones, spirits, and myriad forms of water. Here you’ll find not only poems of lyrical beauty, but of grim exactness.” The result is a stunning achievement of a first book, what Kaminsky identifies as an exemplar of “that ages-old mode of poetry wherein the poet uses language to break bread with the dead, to bring them back to life, if only for the moment, for a portion of the moment, an instant, before the line breaks.” Channeling the poet as medium, “I am the tension on the bow that draws the arrow,” Heung writes in “Epilogue.” “To lose myself — that is my destiny.” 

Finalist, 2025 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Aunt Bird is an astonishing, hybrid poetry of witness that observes and testifies to social, political, and historical realities through the recovery of one life silenced by the past. Within these pages, poet Yerra Sugarman confronts the Holocaust as it was experienced by a young Jewish woman: the author’s twenty-three-year-old aunt, Feiga Maler, whom Sugarman never knew, and who died in the Kraków Ghetto in German-occupied Poland in 1942. In lyric poems, prose poems, and lyric essays, Aunt Bird combines documentary poetics with surrealism: sourcing from the testimonials of her kin who survived, as well as official Nazi documents about Feiga Maler, these poems imagine Sugarman’s relationship with her deceased aunt and thus recreate her life. Braiding speculation, primary sources, and the cultural knowledge-base of postmemory, Aunt Bird seeks what Eavan Boland calls “a habitable grief,” elegizing the particular loss of one woman while honoring who Feiga was, or might have been, and recognizing the time we have now.

An investigation of identity as prompted by art and artists. 

In AutoPortrait (as flotsam), Kirsten Kaschock uses the words, lives, and images of other artists as springboards into the self. Arranged almost as a gallery walk, AutoPortrait alternates between masque-like encounters with art and reflective passages engaging memory and desire. Influenced by photographers Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman, Kaschock walks a tightrope between vulnerability and artifice—using lines and shapes provided by the many artists referenced here (painters, musicians, and poets) to sketch an impression of a woman artist.

The struggle she chronicles is familiar to any storyteller: an effort to piece together minor episodes to create some semblance of a whole. The question is whether such a project can ever be accomplished. Can the fragments gathered on the shore of memory be tied together, brought to life? Other artists, perhaps especially the abstract expressionists, serve her as both guide and glue. The result is an intimate travelogue—the poet’s own narrow road to an interior where she finds a meditative balance between rage and regret, sorrow and joy.