they gave me God & gave me clout. they took my poems & took my blades. Satan, like you did for God, i sang. i sang for my enemy, who was my God. i gave it my best. i bowed &, worse, smiled. teach me to never bend again.   From “less hope”     Bluff offers an intimate and innovative rebuke of the writing industry as award-winning author Danez Smith comes to terms with both the power and limits of poetry as an act of resistance. This is Smith at their absolute best, and also at their most vulnerable. The poems in Bluff are, at times, complex; Smith extends their affai ..read more

As a child, I went to extremes. Are you listening, are you listing?   The constructions we know of holiness and madness converged   only later. Ambulances are cradled and dolls go to war for the same   reason the word elegy appears so often in poems…   From “Shakeout”   Cindy Juyoung Ok’s Ward Toward, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, is a meditative and haunting debut that confronts occupation, institutionalization, and anti-Asian violence with unflinching honesty. Ok is particularly skilled at enjambment, a technique that effectively resists the container ..read more

Every empire denies the iceberg it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.   Every empire sings itself a lullaby.   From “To Be Self-Evident” Something About Living, by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, is an impossibly timely collection—a fact that makes the poems particularly fraught and lamentable. Tuffaha centers the book on colonial empire and its effect on the Palestinian people. Though the poems resonate as a direct response to the most recent attacks on Gaza by Israel, Something About Living makes clear that these attacks are part of a long and deliberate genocide meant to eradicat ..read more

What is death but a hoax we punctuate: a comma that ascends to crown the head of memory, that takes both the left and right hand of the father, folding one into the other.   From “‘Direct Objects” Song of My Softening, by Omotara James, is a remarkable debut in which the poet, again and again, surrenders to vulnerability and fragility. The book chronicles a trajectory that would, and often does, harden survivors—James, however, moves ever closer to softening, to a heroic and profound self-acceptance that renders this one of the most important commentaries on body politics in recent memor ..read more

Isn’t a miracle that they come back? The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman bury her child. How? I lost a fetus and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week. I watch a woman and the watching is a crime. I return my eyes. The sea foams…   From “The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion”   The Moon That Turns You Back, by Hala Alyan, is so good it defies the blurb. This is an intensely emotional and inventive book, one that resonates as much with those who struggle to conceive as it does with those trying to survive under colonial violence. Alyan expertly navigates between traditional vers ..read more

This epic has no hero but flesh which defies imagination.   From “‘Dearth-light” Alt-Nature, the debut full-length collection from Saretta Morgan, presents a sharp critique of U.S.-Mexico border policies while putting those affected at center stage. Morgan composed her dream-like collection over a five-and-a-half year stay in the Sonoran and Mojave deserts, during which she focused her efforts on grassroots migrant justice and self-healing from the impact of military and carceral systems on her life. This unique and immensely empathetic perspective lends itself well to the poems, which m ..read more

Prayer can be a Black lesbian singing about taking care of everybody but herself and wanting to drive, without a nap, to the middle of nowhere.   From “‘Fast Car’ –Tracy Chapman”   Bless the Blood: a cancer memoir, by Walela Nehanda, is an unflinching and unashamed window into the author’s diagnosis and treatment for leukemia. Nehanda signals, within the first sentence of the memoir, that “this here ain’t a john green novel.” Readers are warned that they are “‘bout to step into [the author’s] world” where the author readily admits they are “indeed the bad cancer patient” and acknowl ..read more

Yes, at first you’ll be unseeing. For half a year, you’ll know only my body’s single taste.   Then you’ll encounter the world. The world will flood in.   And the world will keep flooding in.   From “Worm” Portal, winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Prize, is a profound treatment of origins perfectly befitting Tracy Fuad’s award-winning debut, About: Blank. In her second full-length collection, Fuad features sweeping lines and a liberal use of white space, a structure that highlights the author’s balance of patient, accessible language with deeply philosophical observations abou ..read more

  There comes a time for separation, and let us hope it is neither too early nor too late. Nothing split fits back the same, but I don’t want things the way they were. Perhaps a single moment of light in the family could reveal the past to have been illusion. From “Đổi Mới”   Diana Khoi Nguyen’s sophomore collection, Root Fractures, is a fraught and aching collection that explores the dynamics of a family coming to terms with suicide. The poems lay bare the generational trauma at the heart of a Vietnamese family. Nguyen explores the lasting impact of war and the rage that passes fro ..read more

  you stopped me after my reading at your school—noosed a paternal arm around my neck, wrinkled white worms applying pressure on the opposite shoulder—and encouraged me to write happier poems sure to inspire Black children. From “an open letter to “the least racist person [he] know[s]” Last year, Dr. Matthew E. Henry released a micro-chapbook titled have you heard the one about…? (Ghost City Press) as a part of their 2023 Summer Micro Chap Series. I typically read a few of the chaps in their summer series to fill out a yearly attempt at the Sealey Challenge. But I hadn’t had a chanc ..read more