Holoholo is the Hawaiian word for walking out with no destination in mind. In the three sections of this book, Barbara Hamby walks out into the current American chaos with its inferno of wars, street violence, apocalyptic fantasies, and racial tension. Fueled by an American lingo that embraces slang, Yiddish, street talk, and the yearning to be able to describe her moment in time, these poems encompass the complicated past, difficult present, and unknown future. Every foray offers a glimpse of the world constructed from one woman's collage of consciousness.

For twenty years, Ilan Stavans has been translating poetry from Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Georgian, and other languages. His versions of Borges, Neruda, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ferreira Gullar, Raúl Zurita, and dozens of others have become classics. This volume, which includes poems from more than forty poets from all over the world, is testimony to a life dedicated to the pursuit of beauty through poetry in different languages.

Acclaimed poet George Ella Lyon returns with a brilliant new collection that traces the course of a woman's life from girlhood to mature female wisdom. From the introductory poem, "Little Girl Who Knows Too Much," readers embark on a journey from youth, with its darker moments and denials of voice and story, to a place of strength and power with the poems themselves as a guide.The collection follows the narrator as she reconnects with her body and recovers memories of violence from early childhood as well as the wilderness of adolescence and of young wife- and motherhood. Gradually, a wider vision appears to her, and she turns to the Great Mother in all her manifestations -- writers, teachers, singers, Earth Herself--to reach new regions of self-knowledge and inner strength. In so doing, the narrator reaches beyond her personal experience and begins a healing process that situates her story within the larger human story.Alternately witty, charming, tender, thought-provoking, and bracing, Back to the Light expresses a vision of breathtaking breadth and depth. Following the arc of a woman's life, the collection traces the cycles of growth and change the narrator experiences in becoming more herself and finding the spirit to persevere while lyrically demonstrating the power of poetry to help and heal.

Winner of PEN America Jean Stein Award Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Be Holding connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

In Earnest, Earnest?, the speaker, Eleanor, writes postcards to her on-again-off-again lover, Earnest. The fact that her lover’s name is Earnest and that their relationship is fraught, raises questions of sincerity and irony, and whether both can be present at the same time. While Earnest can be read literally as Eleanor’s lover, he is best understood as another side of the poet’s self. The ambiguity at play in Earnest, Earnest? is embodied in the form of the “Earnest Postcards” that structure the book - these postcards are experimental in their use of images and formal in their dialogue with the sonnet. Thus, Earnest, Earnest? is a question of tone, address, and form.

Eight years before Sylvia Plath published Ariel, the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño released Poemas del Amor, a collection of confessional, passionate poetry dedicated to the novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. Both of her own merit and as part of the Uruguayan writers group the Generation of ’45—which included Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, and Ida Vitale - Vilariño is an essential South American poet, and part of a long tradition of Uruguayan women poets. Vilariño and Onetti’s love affair is one of the most famous in South American literature. Poemas del Amor is an intense book, full of poems about sexuality and what it means to be a woman, and stands as a testament to both the necessity and the impossibility of love. This translation brings these highly personal poems to English speaking audiences for the first time side-by-side with the original Spanish language versions.

What would it take to be home in one’s body, to walk around the world as oneself, knowing the pain within and without us? Jan Beatty boldly answers that question by making a fire map of the body. These roiling poems smack into walls of meditation, only to slide down the smooth concrete into the flatline of joy. These are vital poems of dimension, of both psychic and literal travel, of the elasticity of truth and struggle, of the daily nature of desire that brings us to our knees - then shotguns us back to the heart’s center.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s passionate voice has long been acknowledged as a vital force in American poetry. From urgent spiritual quest to biting political satire, from elegy to comedy, from celebration of the city street and the world “as a paradise might be / if we had eyes to see,” to the “crack in earth… crack in her mind,” from brilliant evocations of art and music to mother-daughter wrestlings, Ostriker’s poetry rings with insistence on beauty and truth. Drawing from six of her previous books, and highlighting a sequence of bold new poems exploring the challenges and absurdities of aging, The Volcano and After is a masterpiece for our time.

Black ecopoet observes the changing world from a high-rise window. Award-winning poet Ed Roberson confronts the realities of an era in which the fate of humanity and the very survival of our planet are uncertain. Departing from the traditional nature poem, Roberson's work reclaims a much older tradition, drawing into poetry's orbit what the physical and human sciences reveal about the state of a changing world. These poems entail the evolution of the traditional "nature poem,' each realizing its failure at an answer to our crisis, and even calling into question poetic form. Reflections on the natural world and moments of personal interiority are interwoven with images of urbanscapes, environmental crises, and political issues. These poems speak life and truth to modernity in all its complexity. Throughout, Roberson takes up the ancient spiritual concern—the ephemerality of life—and gives us a new language to process the feeling of living in a century on the brink.

Once a blue moon, a love like this comes along. This collection of love poems draws us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens "to swivel out and magnify" the beauty in "the little glints, insignificant" that catch her eye: "The first flowers, smaller than this s." She also chronicles the quiet rooms of "pain and the body's memory," bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, "What's the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain," the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: "Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us." This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death.

A mystical masterworkThis book by the great Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange, exhibiting ornery bravura. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the 'sycorax video style' he's been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: that of the afterlife. Brathwaite performs a kind of spiritual/aesthetic GPS in his poetry and is is a poet of undeniable stature, writing the final poems of his career. Central to the book is a series of poems outlining the speaker's (the poet's) experiences with what he calls "Cultural Lynching." These poems speak of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies the racial politics and ageism underlying the events described. The speaker's pain and outrage are almost overwhelming. Filled with longing, rage, nostalgia, impotence, wisdom, and love, this book is moving in every sense of the word.

from Okazaki Fragmentsby Kanika Agrawal These proceedings in natureThese proceedings in cold biologyThese proceedings in chemical societyThese proceedings in physical communication We refer to the concentration of residuesWe observe that one sedimentsfaster than the otherWe presume as fact that most of what we dois in growing incompleteshort chainsWe further support the conclusionWe indicate direction alsoby another method We are grateful to Drs. BAX 2020, guest-edited by Joyelle McSweeney and Carmen Maria Machado, is the sixth edition of the critically acclaimed anthology series compiling an exciting mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and genre-defying work. Featuring a diverse roster of new and established authors - including Anne Boyer, Alice Notley, and Raquel Salas Rivera - BAX 2020 presents an expansive view of high-energy writing.

SOME JOY FOR MORNINGNow the connection with springhas dissolved. Now that hysteriais blooming.Says every day I want to fly my kite. Says what's a grammar when you is no longer you.My world is hydrogen burning in space and inthe fullness of etc. I have read the news andlearned nothing.I try to understand thewhooshing overhead. But for alittle light now.I didn't realize the treewas weeping. How was I toknow I am not alone. Wildlight.The poems in this brilliant follow-up to the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, "Gizzi's poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion." With litany, elegy, and prose, Gizzi continues his pursuit toward a lyric of reality. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom.

Priest’s debut collection, Horsepower, is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter’s waywardness as aspirational. Across the book’s three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self - a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky’s world-famous horseracing track - before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances. Across the collection, Priest writes a horse that acts as a metaphysical engine of flight, showing us how to throw off the harness and sustain wildness. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Priest presents a non-linear narrative in which the speaker lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South, and must instead, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of “the horses & their restless minds.”

CAMINO IMAGINADO Blue leaves, hojas rotas in the shape of stars.Ni un "no" en tu vocabulario but for others;blue in place of green in the shape of Spain.Ojos the color of dirt, chocolate, coffee, time,azules las horas, hojas de horas van y se van,ni una palabra, ni una queja, nor broken bita tu lado beside me andamos walking, sí walkingcaminamos caminos like these, such streets, whatcity. 7/15/95 Paris Xicancuicatl collects the poetry of leading avant-garde Chicanx poet Alfred Arteaga (1950–2008), whom French philosopher Gilles Deleuze regarded as "among those rare poets who are able to raise or shape a new language within their language." In his five published collections, Arteaga made crucial breakthroughs in the language of poetry, basing his linguistic experiments on the multilingual Xicanx culture of the US Southwest. His formal resources and finely tuned ear for sound patterns and language play remain astonishing. His poetical work, presented as a whole here for the first time, speaks more than ever to a moment in which border-crossing, cultural diversity, language-mixing and a multi-cultural vision of America are critical issues.

"Forgive state poet #289-128 / for not scribbling illusions / of trickery as if timeless hell / could be captured by stanzas / alliteration or slant rhyme," remarks the speaker, Maryland Department of Corrections prisoner {#289-128}, early in this haunting collection. Three sections -- {#289-128} Property of the State, {#289-128} Poet-in-Residence (Cell 23), and {#289-128} Poet in New York -- frame the countless ways in which the narrator's body and life are socially and legally rendered by the state even as the act of poetry helps him reclaim an identity during imprisonment.These poems address the prison industrial complex, the carceral state, the criminal justice system, racism, violence, love, resilience, hope, and despair while exploring the idea of freedom in a cell. In the tradition of Dennis Brutus's Letters to Martha, Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Etheridge Knight's The Essential Etheridge Knight, {#289-128} challenges the language of incarceration -- especially the ways in which it reinforces stigmas and stereotypes.Though {#289-128} refuses to be defined as a felon, this collection viscerally details the dehumanizing effects of prison, which linger long after release. It also illuminates the ways in which we all are relegated to cells or boundaries, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.