Featured Books
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13th Balloon
By Mark Bibbins
Published by Copper Canyon Press
In his fourth collection, 13th Balloon, Mark Bibbins turns his candid eye to the American AIDS crisis. With quiet consideration and dark wit, Bibbins addresses the majority of his poems to Mark Crast, his friend and lover who died from AIDS at the early age of 25. Every broken line and startling linguistic turn grapples with the genre of elegy: what does it mean to experience personal loss, Bibbins seems to ask, amidst a greater societal tragedy? The answer is blurred– amongst unforeseen disease, intolerance, and the intimate consequences of mismanaged power. Perhaps the most unanswerable question arrives when Bibbins writes, “For me elegy/ is like a Ouija planchette/ something I can barely touch/ as I try to make it/ say what I want it to say.” And while we are still searching for the words that might begin an answer, Bibbins helps us understand that there is endless value in continuing—through both joy and grief—to wonder.
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Guillotine
By Eduardo C. Corral
Published by Graywolf Press
Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself–great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?
In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels,” with Corral’s seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral’s place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.
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Un-American
By Hafizah Geter
Published by Wesleyan University Press
Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter’s debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes–linguistic, cultural, racial, familial–of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother’s death and her father’s illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.
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Stereo(TYPE)
By Jonah Mixon-Webster
Published by Ahsahta Press
Newcomer and Sawtooth Poetry Prize winner Jonah Mixon-Webster urgently considers the poetics of space and body, of race and region, of sexuality and class in the present day– the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; systemic racism–within the architecture of the current collective crisis and imagination. To take up space in an experimental way, through lyric, sound and conceptual art, this collection activates the contentious trope of “The Real Nigga” as zombie (embodiment of the thing already dead), linguistic substrata (the basis and site of identity through language formation and synthesis), and as precursor for colonizing archetypes (in the Jungian sense–an unconscious, collectively inherited idea that develops into socially constructed and consciously typified symbols of human identity and function). He challenges current stereotypes through the character’s experience and through mythology; “Now this nigga Niggaphus was the darkest ‘mortal’ anybody had ever seen in Greece.”
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