In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful is a meditation on water, land, women, and violent environmental changes as they affect both the natural world and human migration. The poet reckons with the unsettling realities that women experience, questioning the cause and effect of events and asking why stories of oppression are so often simply accepted as the only stories. Alutiiq language is used throughout these poems that are in conversation with history, ancestors, and an uncertain future, in imagery that moves in waves, returning again and again to the ocean, and a deep visioning of the "current. "

Territorial explores the bargains that women make to stay safe from violence. Set in a landscape of looming ecological ruin, the poems bear witness to the effects of drought on the California chaparral region and delve into difficult personal terrain to reveal patterns of abuse we inflict on the earth and each other. How can we emerge from a devastated landscape into a sense of healing and repair? Using the characteristics of violence - repetition and escalation - the collection connects subjects that range from the dawn of recorded sound to the mapping of myths onto constellations, the ecosystem of a leach pond, and the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz. In tracing the ways narratives of predation imprint onto the body, memory, environment, and future generations, Territorial finds resilience in the powers of language to reshape experience.

Stylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins's eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book. She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal - first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present. Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.

"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." - Harvard ReviewAn iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

New poems from the author of Imperial, and Blood Pages.

The poems in Paul Hlava Ceballos’s debut collection banana [ ] reveal the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and personal memories. At the heart of the book is a long poem that traces the history of bananas in Latin America using only found text from sources such as history books, declassified CIA documents, and commercials. The book includes collage, Ecuadorian decimas, a sonnet series in the voices of Incan royalty at the moment of colonization, and a long poem interspersed with photos and the author’s mother’s bilingual idioms. Traversing language and borders, history and story, traditional and invented forms, this book guides us beyond survival to love.

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.

In Lapis, poet Kerri Webster writes into the vast space left by the deaths of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. Using a wide array of lyric forms and meditations, Webster explores matrilineages both familial and poetic, weaving together death, spirituality, women, and a sense of the shifting earth into one "doctrine of Non-linear Revelation."

Belly to the Brutal sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation. This poetry edges into the borderlands, touching the realm of chora - humming, screaming, rhythm - transporting the words outside of patriarchal and racist constructs. Drawing from curanderisma and a revived wave of feminist brujería, Jennifer Givhan creates a healing space for Brown women and mothers. Each poem finds its own form, interweaving beauty and devastation to create a pathway out of the systems that have for too long oppressed women. The poems dwell in the thick language of "motherfear," "where love grows too / in the shining center of the wound." This poetry of invocation moves toward a transformation of violence that is ultimately redemptive.

First published in 1937, Hounds on the Mountain evokes Still's personal experiences of Eastern Kentucky through reflective folk poems describing Appalachian mountain life from birth through death. Written during the Great Depression, the collection emphasizes a collective reliance on the earth and the primacy of nature that Still observed from the seclusion of his thirty-one acre home in Knott County, Kentucky. The "Dean of Appalachian Literature" describes the changing landscape of his adopted community as a tale of personal and environmental erosion. In many ways the author asks his readers to better protect this fragile ecosphere and set the stage for his rise to eminence in the literary field. Still's regional focus on the self-made authenticity of community artisans also reminded American readers during the Great Depression that local economies needed to be supported just as much as those at the national and global level. Both in prose and product, Hounds on the Mountain allows today's audiences to appreciate the book as both literature and cultural symbolism of Appalachian life as it exists then and 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.

When former Kentucky Poet Laureate Richard Taylor took a job at Kentucky State University in 1975, he purchased a fixer-upper - in need of a roof, a paint job, city water, and central heating - that became known to his friends as "Taylor's Folly." The historic Giltner-Holt House, which was built in 1859 and sits close by the Elkhorn Creek a few miles outside of Frankfort, became the poet's entrance into the area's history and culture, and the Elkhorn became a source of inspiration for his writing. Driven by topophilia (love of place), Taylor focuses on the eight-mile stretch of the creek from the Forks of the Elkhorn to Knight's Bridge to provide a glimpse into the economic, social, and cultural transformation of Kentucky from wilderness to its current landscape. He explores both the natural history of the region and the formation of the Forks community. Taylor recounts the Elkhorn Valley's inhabitants from the earliest surveyors and settlers to artist Paul Sawyier, who memorably documented the creek in watercolors, oils, and pastels. Interspersed with photographs and illustrations - contemporary and historic - and intermixed with short vignettes about historical figures of the region, Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape delivers a history that is by turns a vibrant and meditative personal response to the creek and its many wonders. Flowing across four counties in central Kentucky, Elkhorn Creek is the second largest tributary of the Kentucky River. Known for its beauty and recreational opportunities, Elkhorn Creek has become an increasingly popular location for canoeing, kayaking, and camping and is one of the state's best-known streams for smallmouth bass, bluegills, and crawfish. Like Walden Pond for Henry David Thoreau, the Elkhorn has been a touchstone for Taylor. A beautiful blend of creative storytelling and historical exploration of one of the state's beloved waterways, Elkhorn celebrates a gem in the heart of central Kentucky.

Sylvie Kandé's neo-epic in three cantos is a double narrative combining today's tales of African migration to Europe on the one hand, with the legend of Abubakar II on the other: Abubakar, emperor of 14th-Century Mali, sailed West toward the new world, never to return. Kandé's language deftly weaves a dialogue between these two narratives and between the epic traditions of the globe. Dazzling in its scope, the poem swings between epic stylization, griot storytelling, and colloquial banter, capturing an astonishing range of human experience. Kandé makes of the migrant a new hero, a future hero whose destiny has not yet taken shape, whose stories are still waiting to be told in their fullness and grandeur: the neverending quest has only just begun.

What will we call the last generation before the looming end times? With Finalists Rae Armantrout suggests one option. Brilliant and irascible, playful and intense, Armantrout nails the current moment's debris fields and super computers, its sizzling malaise and confusion, with an exemplary immensity of heart and a boundless capacity for humor. The poems in this book find (and create) beauty in midst of the ongoing crisis.