From a tiny volcanic island, a biologist obsessed with saving coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband. Intellectually precocious and moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her schoolteacher stepmother, Kate, together into near total isolation. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia—and questions her own ability to become a mother—one of her sixteen-year-old students, Athyna, is already caring for a toddler full time and finding herself more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave. When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. 

Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi’s DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a “magnetic field of memory,” proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.

Through sprawling poems, the town of Youngsville, North Carolina, where Daye's family has lived for the last 200 years, is reclaimed as “Ritual House.” Here, “every cousin   aunt   uncle    ghost” is welcome. Daye invokes real and imagined people, the ancestral dead, land, snakes, and chickens, to create a black town on a hill. Including dreams, letters, revised rental agreements, and “a little museum in the here & after,” where collaged images appear besides documents from Daye’s ancestors—census records, marriage licenses, and WWII Draft Registration cards—the collection asks if the past can be a portal to the future, the present a catalyst for the past. a little bump in the earth explores what it means to love someone, someplace, even as it changes, dies right in front of your eyes. 

In the luminously told Still As Bright, the story of the Moon traverses time and space, rendering a range of human experiences—from the beliefs of ancient cultures to the science of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, from the obsessions of colorful 19th century “selenographers” to the astronauts of Apollo and, now, Artemis. Still As Bright also traces Cokinos's own lunar pilgrimage. With his backyard telescope, he explores the surface of the Moon, while rooted in places both domestic and wild, and this award-winning poet and writer rediscovers feelings of solace, love and wonder in the midst of loss and change. Simultaneously steeped in rigorous cultural and scientific history, as well as memoir, Still As Bright is a thoughtful, deeply moving, evergreen natural history.

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkelanimates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

These engorged lyrics don’t rhyme; and though each builds on a carapace of fourteen lines, many of the lines spawn additional, indented tributaries, like hoop earrings dangling from the stanzas’ lobes. Koestenbaum’s poems are comic, ribald, compressed, symphonic. They take liberties with ordinary language, and open up new pockets for sensation in the sorrowing overcoat of the “now.” Imagine: the training wheels have been removed from poetry’s bicycle, and the wheeling flâneur is finally allowed a word pie equal to fantasy's appetite. Stubble—a libidinal detail—matters when you’re stranded on the archipelago of your most unsanctioned yet tenaciously harbored impulses.

This beautiful, slender collection―small and weighted like a coin―is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. “Not the meaning,” Phillips writes, “but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life” powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza rima, rhyme royal, translation, rap), Silver reimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end, Silver is a collection that reflects Phillips’s guiding principle―“part physics, part faith, part void”―that all is reflected in poetry and poetry is reflected in all.

In this ingenious, sweeping novel, an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjuror who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own creation: a town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours. It is in this miraculous place that Saint’s grand experiment—a truly secluded community where her people may flourish—takes root. But although Saint does her best to protect the inhabitants of Ours, over time, her conjuring and memories begin to betray her, leaving the town vulnerable to intrusions by newcomers with powers of their own. As the cracks in Saint’s creation are exposed, some begin to wonder whether the community’s safety might be yet another form of bondage.

Set in November 1918 on the opulent, castle-like island estate of an eccentric millionaire, Claude Arkel, this atmospheric, compellingly readable novel reimagines the life of Anna Filing Fort―whose husband, Charles Hoy Fort, was the most famous “anomalist” of the early twentieth century. Settling in as guests on Prosper Island, the young couple find themselves quarantined in a shabby outpost far from Mr. Arkel’s mansion―from which, they learn, three girls have gone missing. After she encounters a figure in the woods that may be the ghost of her long-lost friend Mary, Anna resolves to find out who Mr. Arkel really is, and what has become of the missing girls.

Sante’s memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. Sante brings a loving irony to her account of her unsteady first steps; there was much she found she still needed to learn about being a woman after some sixty years cloaked in a man’s identity, in a man’s world. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond.