John Birtwhistle has said that "one writes each poem just to learn how to write it", and insists that he "doesn't care a dried pea for Artistic Development or Finding One's Own Voice". The result, of course, is that a strongly recognisable voice come...

Slip-ups, skirmishes and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi's "Two Tongues", a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit and delicio...

Bill Manhire's Wow opens with the voice of an extinct bird, a song from anciency, and takes us forward into the present and the darkening future of other extinctions. For Manhire, the reach of the lyric is long: it has the penetration of comedy, sati...

Through the course of numerous books, Samuel Green has established his primary poetic preoccupations, and in Disturbing the Light, he continues to mine them, addressing rituals and work in a small, isolated, rural community; the influence of the past...

Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change. In this poetry collection, the goddess of spring now comes and goes erratically, drinks too much, and takes a human lover in our warming, unraveling world. Mea...

From privilege at a gas station to fraud in a memorial grove, Joyce Peseroff follows the faults of indifference and division that crack our impulses toward mercy and love. She nests fragmented tales of the overheard and overlooked – lonely widowers,...

Ideas, culture, and capital flow across national borders with unprecedented speed, but we tend not to think of poems as taking part in globalization. Jahan Ramazani shows that poetry has much to contribute to understanding literature in an extra-nati...

Tracing the conception of a child through to her birth, Quiet Orient Riot addresses birth regimes and the politics of reproduction, unspooling the many ways that liturgical commands and an intense demographic anxiety affect a journey towards motherho...

In Rise Wildly, poet and journalist Tina Kelley writes with precision, heart, and humor. Touching on matters such as marriage, child-rearing, and caregiving for her mother and her earth, Kelley's poems betray an unabashed affection for big words and...

With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win's second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt use...