Stitching America Back Together: A Long Late Pledge by Wendy Willis
It is late for our country. We must look back in dialogue with the founders, examine a patched-together country, an embattled flag, and consider how to stop floundering.
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Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
In Thousand Star Hotel, the bilingual writer’s struggle with expressing himself in English becomes a metaphor for the immigrant’s struggle with navigating the host nation’s hostile-yet-lucrative social terrain.
Playing with Genre: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling
Whether you read it as poetry or memoir, this collection will invite you into the delicate balance between the challenging, sometimes squalid, human condition and the beauty and sadness of the transcendent.
A Deeply Human Act: Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its humanity, and its urgency.
Reclamation and Redemption: Villain Songs by Tammy Robacker
Robacker's language, steeped in religion and myth, creates an avenue for her own salvation while invoking a timelessness that gives voice to all whose song has been suppressed.
Both Companion and Guide: Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Field Guide to the End of the World
I recommend you pull over now. Better yet, I recommend you call in sick and turn your car around. You’re going to want to read this book in one solitary burst...
Imagination Is Like Grace: Meghan O’Rourke’s Sun in Days
A poem doesn’t bring the dead back to life, but a memory has a touch of immortality: it’s a sort of recompense—forever isn’t exactly a lie, even if it’s not completely true.
Let Us Be Singing Fools: Norman Finkelstein’s The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New & Selected Poems
If poetry is to remain a bulwark against the flagrant coarseness and cruelty at work in this moment of history, Norman Finkelstein’s work belongs right here with us.
A Tour de Force of Grief: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno
The winner of the 2016 inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize, Sun & Urn is gloomy and luminous, nostalgic and hopeful, moribund yet brimming with life.
Coursing Byways and Biographical Thoroughfares: Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
I’ve long found that when reading Ashbery’s poetry it’s easy to lose track of just who the poet is.
Glimpsing the Colors of the World: Nancy Chen Long’s Light Into Bodies
As a white mother of biracial children myself, this book became for me an opportunity to glimpse, for a moment, the colors of the world, and of skin, as my children might.
Entering an Open Doorway: Marjorie Agosín’s Las Islas Blancas / The White Islands
Agosín’s poems, though quiet and seemingly simple, linger with an interior elasticity that does not break.