“This trilingual poetry collection is truly a remarkable landmark. […] Sánchez’ poems are transfixing and invigorating. Her recitation in a language spoken by an estimated 100,000 people is rhythmic and fluid, giving listeners a beautiful introduction to the meter and intended emotion of each poem and essentially functioning like music in a language unknown to listeners. The Spanish serves as a more familiar bridge from the Indigenous language to English. Each English narration that follows, whether by Call’s warm, high tones or Shook’s deep voice and poetic cadence, audibly empathizes with the poem’s Zoque origin. A compelling and storied audio with appeal for those who appreciate international poetry, Spanish speakers, and listeners from Indigenous Mexican communities seeking literary representation.”—Booklist, starred audiobook review

“Poet Laureate Limón’s sixth collection offers a layered and accessible cycle of poems that wrestle with womanhood and personhood and continually seek the self while speaking to the complexity and depth found even in the mundane. That contrast is echoed in the narration. Limón’s clear, sweet voice may seem a mismatch for the darkness [ …] but within that discongruity, the listener must reckon with the reality that we are constantly awash in the contrast of sweetness and ‘tiny terrible things.’”—Booklist, starred audiobook review

“Kamara performs the audio of her Jake Adam York Prize–winning first full-length poetry collection (after the chapbook A Brief Biography of My Name) with elegance and restraint. Born in Oakland, CA, to a Sierra Leonean family, Kamara pens a love letter to her hometown, “the bucktoothed city that made you wish you never wore braces.” She celebrates Oakland not as the media often portrays it, as a place of danger, but as a nexus of family and friends, good food, sunny warmth, and joy. The poet explores the nuances of language and words, illuminating the impact of casually misspelling a name and the hurt that comes from consistently being misheard and misread. With playful fluency, Kamara creates a seamless tapestry, reveling in the rhythms of different languages as she threads her poems with Sierra Leonean Krio, English, and French. The collection’s title is a newly coined word synthesized from “be safe, dude,” spoken quickly. This gentle benediction, which Kamara musically repeats and layers, embodies the care that people extend to their families and their communities.

This brief, quietly gorgeous audiobook reveals new meaning with every listen. A radiant addition to any poetry collection.” —Sarah Hashimoto, Library Journal, starred audiobook review

“Indigenous Zoque poet, translator, and activist Sánchez’s vital English-language debut features translations of some of her previously published Zoque and Spanish poems. The collection presents each poem first in Zoque, then in Spanish, then, for the first time, in English, thanks to translators Call and Shook. In their illuminating foreword, the translators note that out of an estimated 110,000 Zoque people, who are primarily located in the Mexican state of Chiapas, only 15,000 speak Copainalá, the dialect spoken by Sánchez and her family. Zoque is an endangered language, and its presence here is a gift. Sánchez’s poems speak of enslavement and resistance, of environmental activism, community, and, above all, the power of women’s voices: “I am woman and I celebrate every vein/ where I guard my ancestors’ secrets/ every Zoque man’s word in my mouth/ every Zoque woman’s wisdom in my spit.” The audio offers listeners incredible access to the Zoque language, narrated by Sánchez herself. Some might want to listen and read at the same time, if only to see the orthography of a language without an established written tradition.

A groundbreaking and deeply passionate poetry collection that celebrates language and feminine power. Not to be missed.”—Sarah Hashimoto, Library Journal, audiobook review

Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry
A New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Poetry” Selection

“Sometimes,” Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.”

In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love couple with moments of wrenching grief. Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.

Punctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, Winter Stranger also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.

Winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Poetry Collection”

“Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying. Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance.

A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. “Fine then, / I’ll take it,” she writes. “I’ll take it all.”

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.

Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don’t exist. Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: “I want to say better.”

A 2023 Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
The 2023 Williams Carlos Williams Award Recipient

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.

“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. While John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: what is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused?
 

Winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, North American Stadiums is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.

A map “bleached / pale by time and weather,” North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.

A subversive, daring, and at times satirical novel exploring privilege, humanitarianism, white supremacy, and the absurdity of American exceptionalism.

Assigned to write an exposé on Richmond Hew, one of the most elusive and corrupt figures in the conservation world, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But when he meets Sola, a woman searching for a rootless white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon, he slowly uncovers a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making.

At once a highly unconventional portrait of the artist as a young man and an extraordinary family story, Cures for Hunger is a deeply affecting memoir.

Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Ellis Béchard believes his charismatic father is infallible. Wild, unpredictable, even dangerous, André is worshipped by his young son, who believes that his father can do no wrong. But when Deni’s mother leaves his father and decamps with her three children to Virginia, the boy learns of his father’s true identity.