While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris.

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To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

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Kristina Marie Darling’s is a shadow box collection of antiques, each holding other worlds and histories.

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In The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, Paul Russell imagines the life of the not-famous Nabokov and delivers a novel that lives outside the legacy. …more

James Vance Marshall’s 1959 book Walkabout tells a unique story of two stranded children who are rescued from the Australian outback by another young boy on a wilderness quest. …more

Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair.

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Joseph Masheck’s lively new essay collection Texts on (Texts on) Art traces artistic influences from unexpected corners. …more

In this collection, Fisher focuses on the tensions of bringing a child into a world of war— of living your regular, daily experience while knowing that others die by violence, both down the street and across oceans.

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Tania James’s new short story collection, Aerogrammes, is infused with family discord, ethnic discrimination, and psychological trauma wrought from multicultural families in America and England. …more

The first English translation of Daniel Sada, Almost Never is a bright introduction of this Spanish star who brings humor and unmatched style to the ordinary. …more

Tanning’s poetry is as unique as the artwork she’s produced over the years. It’s real and vibrant, even at the end of her life. This last book of poems is a simple treat – an embrace.

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At her best Lehmann exhibits a depth of sympathy and uncertainty paired with keen observation.

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Bill Clegg’s new book, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery, follows the recovering crack addict as he tries – and sometimes fails – to stay sober. …more

Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans is a reissue of an anthology first published in 1975. Sacred Clowns won’t jump off the pages, but you will be reminded whose land you may be parked on—if you arrived after Columbus, that is.

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Catherine Chung’s first novel, Forgotten Country, is a captivating flux of family history and cultural folklore that examines identity, immigration, and familial obligations in the face of loss. …more

Set in South Africa, Patrick Flanery’s debut novel Absolution weaves together four stories about the guilt that we all share, and the absolution that we are all seeking. …more

In restoring the words of Jesus to their rightful poetry, and making an excellent case for this necessity, Barnstone brings their music, passion, ethics and intellectual rigor into a more complete view.

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Her new collection’s… perspectives are varied but unified by intense focus, much like the eyes of bees. Hive is a word that recurs, and the nervous energy of the poems gives the reader a non-alcoholic buzz.

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Zona, Geoff Dyer’s extended meditation on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, meanders through this complex film about avoiding a confrontation with our soul. …more

Howell surprises by not trying to surprise at all…. Once a reader takes these poems on their terms, the poems become really intricate and beautiful.

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Terry Bisson’s new novel, Any Day Now, a blend of coming-of-age tropes and alternate history, sweeps us through the turbulent ’60s and imagines a 1968 that both RFK and MLK survived. …more

Elizabeth Ellen’s Fast Machine compiles 94 of the author’s rhythmic, sprawling stories. …more

The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.

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It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different from Yau’s.

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In this intricately woven short story collection, The Greatest Show, Michael Downs tells the sad long story of crumbling American cities through the lens of a tragic circus fire of 1944. …more

Kinsella describes; he does not prescribe. He rests less comfortably in his retreat than Thoreau and without the surety that he lives an exemplary life.

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In his new history of the experimental writing movement, Oulipo, Many Subtle Channels, Daniel Levin Becker goes where few have gone. …more

Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel throws us into a complex world of a young Filipino immigrant who is unexpectedly detained by Homeland Security. …more

I found this text to be profound, relentless, frustrating, inspiring, demanding, silly, pompous, elastic, and mind-expanding. That is what poetry is for, and this is for poetry.

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With dream-like language, Miranda Mellis’s latest book, None of This is Real, gives us a fantastical world with a haunting resemblance to our own. …more