Jonathan Fletcher, This Is My Body (with a foreword by Chris Abani and Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb), 2023
This Is My Body readily and unapologetically examines issues of race and ethnicity, ancestry and community, mental illness and recovery, queer sexuality and identity, and the body and disability. Traditionally religious language and hopeful imagery abound; so, too, do their spiritual antagonists: doubt, loss, isolation, and despair. But even in the darkest moments of a troubled inner life, insight and triumph intervene and sometimes even linger. An intimate exploration of the human experience, this debut collection proves itself more than the sum of its interior encounters—however revelatory or transformative any one given experience might be. It is a timely and necessary exercise in faith.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Migrant Psalms (with a foreword by Ed Roberson), 2020
Written as a call to action, Migrant Psalms pulls together prayer, popular culture, and technology to tell a twenty‑first-century migrant story. Through the speaker’s quest to become an American, this collection asks: Who are we becoming as individuals, as a society, as a nation, as a world? And: Is faith enough to enact change? Or is it just the first step?
Ama Codjoe, Blood of the Air (with a foreword by Ed Roberson), 2019
Blood of the Air creates a new mythology, repurposing spectacle, stereotype, and song. Inspired by the fictions and frictions of the past, each poem in this collection complicates the next. Lush lyrical moments give way to fracture, vulnerability, and reinvention. The title poem—one of several found poems—calls attention to stories told in the wake of sexual violence. In “She Said,” the collection’s longest piece, language culled from the transcript of a seventeenth-century rape trial feels eerily familiar. Formally dexterous and refreshingly bold, the poems in Blood of the Air are urgent, moving, and fiercely imagined. Though blood can flow from the site of a wound, Codjoe seems to say, blood is also a sign of life.
Andrew E.Colarusso, Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite(with a foreword by Matthew Shenoda), 2018
In Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite, Andrew Colarusso hybridizes lost and unknown spaces, taking his title from a falconry term for the cord used to restrain a bird. The word derives from the late fifteenth century, from the French créance (“faith”), also denoting a cord to retain a bird of peu de créance (“of little faith,” i.e., which cannot yet be relied upon). Poems of personal narrative and metaphorical depth speak for the voices searching—in a world that lashes out or looks right past what remains tethered to the past—the parts that occupy the whispers of wanting, the dreams of finally being seen.
ThiaheraNurse, Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone (with a foreword by Reginald Gibbons), 2018
Opening with declarations of self-love, beauty, eulogy, and Lil’ Kim rapping in the rain, the landscape of Nurse’s poetry functions equally as underworld and imagined heaven. Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone is an ode and requiem to document the precious narratives held inside the body of a Black girl. And a celebration that the Black girl will always dance, in the church basement, a grandmother’s funeral repast—she dances until she hits the floor, in her joy . . . and her grief.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Dulce (with a foreword by Matthew Shenoda), 2017
Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems in Dulce map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions. He allows for the possibility of an and in a world of either/or. These poems enact a prescient anxiety of what is to come, “I want to say all of this is true / but we both know it isn’t…we already know what’s at the other end of this.” Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet.
Mayda Del Valle, The University of Hip-Hop (with a foreword by Chris Abani), 2016
The University of Hip-Hop is a love letter to the city of Chicago, more specifically to a particular moment in Chicago—of growth and development, coming of age, of learning how to construct a new self from old-world customs and new-school traditions. It is a meditation on movement and migration that asks what it means to leave home, how to take home with you, and how to build a new home elsewhere.
Jenny Xie, Nowhere to Arrive (with a foreword by Chris Abani), 2016
Nowhere to Arrive takes as its subjects the whiplash of travel, the shuttling between disparate places and climes, and an unremitting sense of dislocation. These poems court the tension between the familiar and the foreign, between the self as distinct and the self as illusory. They look plainly at the startling strangeness of varied landscapes and mindscapes, and interrogate a state of unrootedness—one thrown into relief by the speaker’s years abroad in Southeast Asia.
Nicole Sealey, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (with a foreword by Chris Abani), 2015
At turns humorous and heartbreaking, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named explores in both formal and free verse what it means to die, which is to say, also, what it means to live. In this collection, Sealey displays an exquisite sense of the lyric, as well as an acute political awareness. Never heavy-handed or dogmatic, the poems included in this volume excavate the shadows of both personal and collective memory and are, at all points, relentless. To quote the poet herself, here is a debut as luminous and unforgiving “as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end.”
Willie Lin, Instructions for Folding (with a foreword by Chris Abani), 2014
The voice in these poems is sometimes fervid, sometimes wry, moved to speech by the specific desire to speak to someone. The poems often progress associatively, following a kind of lyric logic of involution, disruption, and juxtaposition. They rehearse the work of learning the heft and shape of memories. They revel in failures and take pleasure in mourning. They bristle with narrative suggestiveness, weaving an austere music against a scrim of love, loneliness, secrets, and elation. Instructions for Folding is unflinching in accounting for the daily cruelties of our lives, the melancholy of it. The poems ask us to succumb to the grace of the fold, the redemption of paper, the mapping and charting of ink and joy.
Rodney Gomez, Mouth Filled with Night (with a foreword by Ed Roberson), 2013
Mouth Filled with Night employs familiar emblems of Mexican American identity to repeatedly subvert expectations while intensifying the dilemmas of affiliation. The poems run beyond more conventional ideas of agency, identity, and experience, creating a newly invigorated imaginative space. As a collection, Mouth Filled with Night gains particular momentum—a pitched anxiety that slowly grows throughout the volume—to create a poetic experience unique to the chapbook form.
Kristiana Rae Colón, promised instruments (with a foreword by Ed Roberson), 2012
Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s declaration that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” promised instruments stitches its own definitions for what is granted, what is surrendered, what is pilfered, and what is reclaimed. Colón’s poems plumb the problem of women’s mental health, their sexuality and gender identity, and their ability to make choices about sexual activity. With piercing musicality and disarming vulnerability, promised instruments invites its readers to interrogate their own complicity in these issues and to share in the healing process.