Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2016. 89 pages.Mohsen Emadi writes a poetry of borders and crossings (WLT, March 2015, 42–44). His poems lay bare a world dissected by boundaries both real a…
VERSE
Norman, Oklahoma. Mongrel Empire Press. 2016. 80 pages.Each of us has a familiar universe that we hide from everyone else. Erika T. Wurth’s collection A Thousand Horses out to Sea is an invit…
Carouge, Switzerland. Editions Zoé. 2016. 200 pages.Western Europe is usually credited with inventing expressionism and surrealism at the end of the nineteenth century, but both artistic movement…
Lyttelton, New Zealand. Cold Hub Press. 2016. 173 pages.Blanca Castellón’s use of language in the collection Water for Days of Thirst is at times sparse and direct and occasionally disorienti…
Norman, Oklahoma. Mezcalita Press. 2016. 96 pages.Contemporary poetry can be formulaic: the vague flow of emotion Mary Kinzie calls the “Rhapsodic Fallacy,” the neoconfessional anecdote Donald Hall re…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 111 pages.From shards of a “hand-me-down life,” “sufficiently tragic,” Safiya Sinclair conjures poetic magic, casting a spell whereby “cannibal master…
Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press. 2016. 286 pages.América Invertida owes its name to the well-known 1943 drawing in which vanguard painter Joaquín Torres García turned the map of t…
New York. Knopf. 2016. 96 pages.Published posthumously, The Last Shift is and will be the last book of new poetry by Philip Levine, his “last shift” of turning the scrap metal of the inescapa…
Hexham, UK. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2016. 80 pages.Widely recognized as Malawi’s most celebrated poet, Jack Mapanje belongs to the generation of Africa’s renowned writers imprisoned…
Notre Dame, Indiana. Action Books. 2016. 77 pages.In her epilogue to Cheer Up, Femme Fatale, translator Ji Yoon Lee asserts that this book is “crawling with things that go missing.” Indeed, i…
Montréal. Editions Druide. 2016. 123 pages.Hélène Dorion’s two latest volumes are autobiographical prose poems written in homage to her dying parents. In Recommencements (2014), Dorion o…
Sydney. Pitt Street Poetry. 2016. 77 pages.Eileen Chong identifies writing as “an act of recovery, of piecing together, of recording, re-ordering and re-inventing.” In Painting Red Orchids…
Honolulu. University of Hawai’i Press. 2016. 170 pages.Korea’s rapid ascent to first-world status in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is astonishing. In addition to economic and political…
New York. Knopf. 2016. 108 pages.This latest book by Sharon Olds, Odes (a near perfect rhyme), contains sixty-four poems of praise. They are not written in the traditional English form of the…
Toronto. Mawenzi House. 2016. 78 pages.Innu Assi means “land of the people” in the language of the Pessamit Innu. Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s Assi Manifesto grounds itself in Innu land…
Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2016. 90 pages.According to the back cover of Watch Out, “Many critics count [Raeber] among the more significant writers of the second half of the twentiet…
Hexham, UK. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2016. 70 pages.In Net Needle, poet Robert Adamson spans the range of contemporary English prosody with poems that tenderly attest to an e…
, 
Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2016. 80 pages.In a Drunken Boat interview by Rebecca Seiferle, Mexican poet and translator Tedi López Mills states, “I don’t know if it pertains to the more ‘pers…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 83 pages. The futility of rage in the face of violence is among the many threads running through Fuchsia, winner of the 2016 Sillerman First…
Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2016. 246 pages. It was not until Wisława Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in 1996 that Polish women poets began to achieve national as well as international vi…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2016. 263 pages.Raised in a progressive, prosperous Cuban family, Dulce María Loynaz (1902–97) gained a reputation for innovative writing. But after refusing to join the C…
Munich. Carl Hanser Verlag. 2016. 94 pages.The earthly and the man-made interact with one another in Proben von Stein und Licht, a debut collection of poetry by Anja Kampmann that testifies t…
North Adams, Massachusetts. Tupelo Press. 2016. 91 pages.One Hundred Hungers is a book of exile, faith, and acceptance. Of flavor, desire, and violation. Poet Lauren Camp confides in us what…
Paris. Éditions Grèges. 2015. 108 pages.“Poetry, including the poetry I write, is of no use, no help to anyone. It is theodicy without an object, communion without lips. It is a pure parlance of obvia…
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Cissus World Press. 2015. 88 pages.Dike Okoro’s recent collection of poems, In the Company of the Muse, is a work of substance in which the poet deploys versatile techni…