At its best, After the Point of No Return gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.

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In this collection, Chaple successfully fuses the personal with the spatial. As a result, an awareness of the way poems, by airing out the rooms of stanzas, can provide at once solace and disarray comes into terrible focus.

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Alexis M. Smith’s Glaciers is a story for daydreamers, for people who see a story where others do not. It is not epic and it won’t change your life, but it has affected me greatly. I love when a short, seemingly simple novel can surprise me. It has been a month since I’ve read Glaciers, but parts of the book still linger with me. …more

The emotional theme of the volume, the nostalgia and death that is announced in the book’s title and reaffirmed in almost every poem to some extent, is what I know I will carry with me for a long time.

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Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence of image and text, of history and the present, of evocation and concrete image.

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In the mid-1980s, I fled Ronald Reagan’s America for the jungles of Costa Rica. Before leaving–forever, I thought–I shipped two boxes of paperbacks to the tropics. I would soon read every book from those boxes plus anything else I could grab in hopes of explaining a world gone mad. …more

Often, in contemporary literature, grief becomes clichéd; O’Rourke, however, avoids sappiness or melodrama. Instead, her poetry probes at the actualization of grief, revealing a startling emotional depth.

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Used well, the collective perspective affords the poet a wider voice, a surer sense. The reader feels present in these moments of ruin, trusting even the more fantastical occurrences.

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When Boyle is insightful, this style allows the brilliance of the insight to shine through unfiltered and unaided by the mechanisms of literature and poetry, sometimes with powerful effect.

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Now, with the Wave Books release of Aygi’s poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Valentine, audiences worldwide are able to celebrate Aygi among his Russian contemporaries.

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The poems run between lyric and narrative with many of them having a steam-of-conscious-like feel as the speaker makes leaps in ideas and imagery from line-to-line.

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This is a hybrid book that chronicles the real journey and imagines the surreal journey of Lewis and Clark, from watching a baseball game with President Jefferson and Ozzie Smith, to the narrator having a tree sprout from his penis, complete with a red bird who wants to nest in it. …more

Throughout the collection, the speaker in these poems is constantly aware of this contradiction, the intersection between life and art, perhaps frighteningly so, seeking solace in “these few things left,” trying to reconcile, like any reasonable artist, the internal with the external. …more

Schomburg’s newest book, Fjords, Vol. 1 holds true to this idea of finding familiarity in a parallel consciousness. Just because the poems often work in a seemingly private dreamscape, doesn’t mean you aren’t invited to into the strangeness, asked to ascend and descend into the illusory.

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[Peter] Gizzi’s particular gift is to posit that shifting location where senses meet the terrible and the sublime, where political portent or its brittle actualities announce themselves in various configurations.

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Based in research of museum design, and memorialization, Slot’s narrator moves inside public landmarks dedicated to various disasters—9/11, slavery, Hiroshima, the Holocaust— and explores ways memorialization acts on conscience and memory, interrogating the urge to abstract, label, and catalogue suffering. …more

Be ready for thresholds, light and dark—in both natural and fluorescent hues—and for getting high. …more

Carol Muske-Dukes’s book seems the perfect read for this time of year when the year is winding down, yet life is still rumbling forward. …more

 Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. …more

Ariana Reines’ Coeur De Lion makes me want to drink and have sex. Not frilly drinks but hard strong liquor, and not just any sex, but the stuff of human explosions. …more

In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means not to know your own momentum and position at the same time, to never see the moon from every window. …more

These poems are often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives. …more

These poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. …more

This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel. …more

These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed. …more

Goldbarth still infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals. …more

I’ve been told that it’s harder to make friends once you are an adult because in order to be close to someone you have to be vulnerable.

I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me. …more

It’s not easy to explain David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially to a co-worker or a parent, or your wife or your wife’s friend.

First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief interviews. But you don’t hear the questions and you don’t know who is doing the interviewing or why. …more

The poems are themselves stealthy, hiding but then eventually revealing themselves to the writers. Or the stealth writers, both Seaton and Ace autonomous and authentic somewhere in that collaborative voice. …more

The moment when a new book is begun it is a moment that vibrates, as potential energy (a writer’s wisdom distilled into a completed work, printed, bound, placed in your hands), converted slowly into kinetic energy (second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day) with each turn of the page. …more