Ultramarine is the chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum's acclaimed trance poem trilogy, distilling gleanings from four years of his trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. 
 

An American travelogue that unfolds in a series of darkly comic episodes, with allusions to Dante as a thread throughout. Constantly unsettling the rhetoric of inherited forms, this collection of miniature epics asks if grace can be found amid disarray, and opens strange spaces for us to re-see, lament, and re-sing the stories we tell.

Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined, and honors the transformative power of anger and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.

Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while rising toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.

We are living through an unprecedented, revolutionary era. Across the country, people have lost loved ones, livelihoods, homes, and their own lives to Covid-19. In the midst of the pandemic, historic protests erupted in the summer of 2020 over the constant brutality against Black Americans. Galvanizing and lyrical, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, captures and gives voice to all of the roiling sentiments of the moment in an anthology for the ages.

At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, a soundscape, and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their “old appetites as chronic as tides.” Recognized for his “wildly original” poetry and his “uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,” Atsuro Riley gives us a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.

The illuminated medieval manuscripts known as Books of Hours have been used to guide contemplation and prayer for centuries, with their intricate designs and exquisite coloring. Devotional poet and priest Spencer Reece has revived the tradition with a collection of vibrant watercolors inspired by his life journeys and reflections on faith. The evocative images and accompanying texts in All the Beauty Still Left are sure to provoke contemplation and reflection for readers of all faiths.

Taking inspiration from medieval sea charts—portulans—these poems bring a fresh variation to the ancient metaphor of life as a journey. Portulans guided mariners from port to port weaving paths at the threshold of the open sea. Similarly, the course of these poems navigates familiar mysteries and perennial questions through times of unbelief, asking whether consciousness is anchored in the transcendent, and if the universe can be accounted for by physics alone.

In the searing ecological and love poems of his new collection, Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and on the tradition of Sangam literature, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illumines our deep-tangled interrelations. 

Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney's Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony.