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.

CARE Dress like you care!Eat like you care!Care like you care! You don't thinkapples just grow on trees,do you? * A fish taps a clamagainst a bony knobof coralto crack its shell – which demonstrates intelligenceyes, butis the fishpleased with itself? * Alone in your crib,you form syllables. Are you happy when oneis like another? Add yourselfto yourself. Now you have someone Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers the emergence of new life (twin granddaughters) into an increasingly toxic world: the Amazon smolders, children are caged or die crossing rivers and oceans, and weddings make convenient targets for drone strikes. These poems explore the restless border between self and non-self and ask us to look with new eyes at what we're doing.

July 30TiānwēiCelestial AweHe carried no iron into battle.When he lifted his hand,he brandished the sky.How do we honor the dead? How do we commit them to memory? And how do we come to terms with the way they died? To start, we can name them. When schools collapsed in an earthquake in China, burying over 5,000 children, the government brutally prevented parents from learning who had died. Artist Ai Weiwei, at risk to his own safety, gathered the names of these children, and their names are the subject of this book. Each poem is a poetic meditation on the image and concept suggested by the etymology in the Chinese characters. This act of poetic translation is both a heartbreaking tribute to people whose names have been erased, and a healing meditation on how language suggests a path forward.

Testimonyfor Tamir Rice, 2002-2014 Mr. President,After they shot me they tackled my sister.The sound of her knees hitting the sidewalkmade my stomach ache. It was a bad pain.Like when you love someoneand they lie to you. Or that time Mikaela criedall through science class and wouldn't tell anyone why.This isn't even my first letter to you,in the first one I told you about my roomand my favorite basketball teamand asked you to come visit me in Clevelandor send your autograph. In the second oneI thanked you for your responsible citizenship.I hope you are proud of me too.Mom said you made being black beautiful againbut that was before someone killed Trayvon.After that came a sadness so big it made everyonelook the same. It was a long time before we couldgo outside again. Mr. President it took one whole dayfor me to die and even though I'm twelve and not afraid of the darkI didn't know there could be so much of itor so many other boys here. Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes - linguistic, cultural, racial, familial - of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.

Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new - and in his own words "dangerous" - hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, the textual equivalent of the city scenes of the Impressionists. In this compelling new translation, Keith Waldrop delivers the companion to his innovative translation of The Flowers of Evil. Here, Waldrop's perfectly modulated mix releases the music, intensity, and dissonance in Baudelaire's prose. The result is a powerful new re-imagining that is closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation.

Hailed by Milan Kundera as “an heir of Joyce and Kafka,” Prix Goncourt winner Patrick Chamoiseau is among the leading Francophone writers today. With most of his novels having appeared in English, this book opens a new window on his oeuvre. A moving poetic essay that bears witness to the forgotten history of the French penal colony in French Guiana, French Guiana: Memory Traces of the Penal Colony (Guyane: Traces-Mémoires du bagne) is accompanied by more than sixty evocative color photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi and translated, here for the first time, deftly by Matt Reeck.

In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.

North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like the earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, and many more. A companion web site will present audio of each poet’s work.

Mezzaluna gathers poems from all nine of Michele Leggott’s prior books. In complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision, Leggott creates lush textured soundscapes. Her poetry covers a wide rage of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal.

Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds’ nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. Experimental and deeply grounded, its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.

For more than a century, Friedrich Hölderlin has been considered one of the key figures in modern European literature. The translations in Odes and Elegies, including poems never before available in English, render forcefully and directly the deep longing and heartbreak of Hölderlin's poetic world. A bilingual edition, this book is the first major translation of these poems since the 1960s. Odes and Elegies opens to the English reader the unique poetic voice that marks Hölderlin's achievement and continuing influence on poetry and philosophy today.