Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.

Calling from the Scaffold is a collection of poems about connecting and not connecting – or approaching the brink of connecting. It’s about paying tribute and salvaging and gratitude. The voices vary in their longings: we hear from men and women, the young and no longer young. Nature often is there to help them out.

Hello I Must Be Going, David Hernandez's fifth collection of poems, offers a unique take on poetry informed by works of art. With narrative and lyrical brushstrokes, Hernandez crafts vibrant landscapes that depict the chaos of the modern world and the beauty entwined within it.

Prelude explores the gay female experience through a poetic reconstruction of the girlhood and adolescence of Saint Catherine of Siena. Speaking through a poetic persona of Catherine of Siena, Prelude addresses the historical erasure of gay women’s lives, juxtaposing details from her girlhood with the terrain of the lesbian body as it relates to desire and violence.

The Thicket opens into intimate encounters with the more-than-human world - rivers, birds, stones - and with a "you" that is not a person, necessarily, but also not not a person: maybe God, maybe an aspect of the self, maybe neither or both. Often speaking of/to the small or overlooked (weeds by a roadside, an abandoned silo), the poems orient themselves toward edges, transitional spaces like the one where fields shift into woods. Where does one body stop? The Thicket takes an interest in becoming, one thing flowing into something else.

The Morning Line is David Lehman's most ambitious book to date, combining wit, quotidian charm, and off-the-cuff spontaneity of poems written with candid and moving meditations on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age. Lehman is a poetic ventriloquist, and he expertly imitates Catullus and François Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky's "Cloud in Trousers" and Hölderlin's "Half-Life." The element of joie de vivre in Lehman's work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry.

Other Worlds is true to its title, from a look at our everyday joys and griefs as interpreted by the Mars of classic science fiction and the crazy domain of quantum physics; to studies of the many conflicting realities that America uneasily accommodates in time of pandemic and protests; to elegiac poems informed by the realms of memory, ghosts, and imagined afterlives. From a poem of one line to a sequence of twelve sections, from comic hijinks to despair, and from private revelation to public declaiming, this is a bravura performance by the only poet to have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award and who, at age seventy-three, is writing at the height of his powers.

Winner of the 2020 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for PoetryThe title Little Pharma is both a doppelgänger and a cri de coeur: as the poet’s dreamlike double, the character Little Pharma navigates the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. At the same time, the poems plead for a return to a littler pharma, a space for stolen intimacy and momentary quiet amidst the impersonal and engulfing chill that floods the anatomical theater and the corridors of illness. The poems trace the arc of a young woman’s life, from being a hesitant and anxious, newly-minted medical trainee to becoming an adept of the otherworldly logic of the hospital wards. In between, interludes on love, family life, and escapes into art and history bob and weave among the hospital poems, bringing back the hot clamor of the outside world. Little Pharma is a Dantean journey from the depths of an institution, and of a pervading personal dread, to a renewed celebration of human contact, the body, and the giddy, terrifying excitement of ongoing life.

The poems of My Wilderness often take place on the wooded hillside in Oregon where Maxine Scates has lived since the mid-1970s. They chronicle how the woods, which were once a refuge, have turned into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. These poems also engage her partner's threatening illness, the death of her closest friend, and the death, at age one hundred, of her mother, an indomitable figure who led Scates through a working-class childhood in Los Angeles fraught with domestic violence. Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us.

Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize"Some writers write poetry to flex what they can do. Aurielle Marie writes reckoning poems themselves come to work. Gumbo Ya Ya kicks with this lit lit magic, this insistent electricity, pages what sweat ink, bleed it, weep it, drip it. Aurielle Marie will cuss, but an Aurielle Marie poem can curse; that what she has seen, felt, or known, is trans-amplified in the room she gives the poem to do what it’s gonna do. Gumbo Ya Ya is Aurielle Marie’s Dirty-Dirty grimoire drawn from a vernacular trickbag at once up to something and down for whatever. These poems are spell weaving. They are bound to work you." - Douglas Kearney - Final Judge CitationWinner of the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Gumbo Ya Ya is a cauldron of multifaceted poems confronting race, binaries, and violence, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. Armed with a poetic dexterity that employs urgent subject matter and sultry lyricism, Aurielle Marie’s debut is as stunning as it is timely. The collection opens with a heartrending indictment of injustice. What follows is a striking reimagination of the world, one where no Black girl dies “by the barrel of the law” or “for loving another Black gxrl.” Part ancestral and familial archival, part ethnography of Black femme resistance, Gumbo Ya Ya catalogues the wide gamut of Black life at its intersections, with cultural commentary and personal narrative. It asks us to chew upon both the rich meat and tough gristle, and in doing so we walk away, washed anew and more than satisfied. Upon both the rich meat and tough gristle, and in doing so we walk awaymore whole than we began and thoroughly satisfied.

Dark Traffic creates landmarks through language, by which its speakers begin to describe traumas in order to survive and move through them. With fine detail and observation, these poems work in some way like poetic weirs: readers of Kane’s work will see the artic and subarctic, but also, more broadly, America, and the exigencies of motherhood, indigenous experience, feminism, and climate crises alongside the near-necropastoral of misogyny, violence, and systemic failures. These contexts catch the voice of the poems’ speakers, and we perceive the currents they create.

In about:blank, Tracy Fuad builds a poetics of contemporary dissociation. Funny, plaintive, and cutting, this formally inventive debut probes alienation in place and in language through the author's consideration of her own relationship to Iraqi Kurdistan. about:blank - the title of which is the universal URL for a blank web page - complicates questions of longing and belonging. Interrogating the language of internet chatrooms, Yelp reviews, and the Kurdish dictionary, the poems here leap surprisingly between subjects to find new meaning. Written before and during the years the author spent living in Iraqi Kurdistan, the collection documents the alienation of being inside, outside, and between language(s) and the always-already terror of grammar. At once haunted and humorous, about:blank inhabits and exhibits the disorientation and fragmentation that is endemic to the internet era, and mourns the loss of a more embodied existence.

In poems of compassion and social justice, Mihaela Moscaliuc probes borders and memory to work through, and further complicate, understandings of belonging - from places (including her native Romania) and histories, to ways of knowing, loving, and grieving. If the wounded populate these poems, so too do goats, black swans, centipedes, dismembered dolls, and wandering wombs. The ekphrastic sequence on Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy honors stories of Roma people while addressing issues of (mis)representation and epistemic violence. As in previous collections, cemeteries become sites of power, holding the living accountable.

When her Florida apartment is damaged by the ferocity of Hurricane Irma, Duhamel turns to Dante and terza rima, reconstructing the form into the long poem "Terza Irma." Throughout the book she investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment, hyperaware of her own complicity, resistance, and agency. She writes odes to her favorite uncle - who was "green" before it was a hashtag - and Mother Nature via a retro margarine commercial. She writes letters to her failing memory as well as to America's amnesia. With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second story window, she bravely faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell.

In The Blues of Heaven, Barbara Ras delivers her characteristic subjects with new daring that both rattles and beguiles. Here are poems of grief over her brother's death; doors to an idiosyncratic working-class childhood among Polish immigrants; laments for nature and politics out of kilter. Ras portrays the climate crisis, guns out of control, the reckless injustice and ignorance of the United States government. At the same time, her poems nimbly focus on particulars - these facts, these consequences - bringing the wreckage of unfathomable harm home with immediacy and integrity. Though her subjects may be dire, Ras also weaves her wise humor throughout, moving deftly from sardonic to whimsical to create an expansive, ardent, and memorable book.

Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author’s hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region’s invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms - sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas - they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience.