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D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.

Following several of his internationally acclaimed, beloved novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes wittily funny, moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and abandoned landscapes we hold onto to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.

"Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca" ("God squeezes, but He doesn't strangle")—the epigraph of Machete—sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an invisible hand at your throat. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore.

In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limon illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the US and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure.

From NPR correspondent and New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander, comes a powerful and provocative collection of poems that cut to the heart of the entrenched racism and oppression in America and eloquently explores ongoing events.

Winner of the 2023 Trio Award, Christian Gullette's critically acclaimed Coachella Elegy explores the queer promised lands and poolside utopias of the American West even as they are threatened by environmental destruction. With precision and clarity, Gullette's poems wander the desert landscape of California, reveling in its beauties and challenging its sacred myths. His speaker seamlessly transports us from a hospital room where his husband battles cancer to the Palm Springs oasis where the vacationing couple celebrates survival.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life. The opening sequence, "Endpoint", is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of writing, and he finds endless delight and solace in "turning the oddities of life into words".

This poem was written by Wordsworth after a walking tour through the Welsh Borders. As usual with many of Wordsworth's poems, it opens with a description of the countryside which is then developed into a philosophical reflection about beauty and the suggestive power of recollection.

TEA TIME POETRY is a wide assortment of poems compiled by Author Brenda Mohammed. She has expressed her thoughts on almost every subject in her poems, such as doubts, money, friends, truth, rumours, passion, celebrations, literary celebrities, and much more. A top reviewer in India had this to say about the book: "Reviewed in India on 19 February 2023. It was a pleasure reading the book Tea Time Poetry written by popular Trinidadian author Brenda Mohammed. What I got to know from her author bio is that Brenda Mohammed is an ex-banker and a prolific author who is at the same time an expert ...

Whilst the notion of the Mystic East and Oriental wisdom was greatly romanticised by the Victorians and others, the shadow of Colonialism has smudged the view. These great cultures are some of humanity’s earliest, their works, their art some of its most daring and most accomplished. In these 50 poems across 50 poets we hope, at least in part, to rebalance our view of this subject. We begin in the 6th century BC and travel with a poet’s words and eyes across India, China, Persia and many other places in between.

Through poems of immense emotion, and the use of alluring form, Abraham crafts work that examines what we come to own by existing.

woke up no light is a Black girl’s saunter turned to a woman’s defiant strut. These are the hymns of a new generation of poetry. Young, alive, yearning. A mouth swung open and ready to devour. A quest for home in a world that knows only wasteland and wanting.

In his debut full length collection, Junious ‘Jay’ Ward dives deep into the formation of self. Composition interrogates the historical perceptions of Blackness and biracial identity as documented through a Southern Lens. Utilizing a variety of poetic forms, Ward showcases to his audiences an innovative approach as he unflinchingly explores the way language, generational trauma, loss, and resilience shape us into who we are, the stories we carry, and what we will inevitably pass on.

In this work, I am inviting you to embark on a journey with me. That journey is poetry—the story of my life.

Anne Waldman takes the opportunity with this 20th-anniversary expanded edition to add 20 poems to this collection that brings into focus her lifelong engagement with “chant” as central to contemporary performative poetry.

Strange Beach is the debut collection from poet and choreographer Oluwaseun Olayiwola. Intimate and erotic, ecological and philosophical, the poems in Strange Beach illuminate the body as a porous landscape across which existential dramas, filial fractures, and sexual reckonings occur. The collection ventures across the same ‘Atlantic Ocean’ as Claudia Rankine's ‘Citizen’, which is the same ‘Atlantic Ocean’ in Lowell's ‘Life Studies’, to reveal a queer consciousness deeply steeped in poetic traditions of nuanced confession and moving abstraction.

Fever of Unknown Origin opens at a remote crossroads, where the speaker considers the intersection of history, beauty, and destruction: “the past / is paper / and the present, a match . . .” What follows is an urgent tour of landscapes—environmental, political, and personal—that reframes our perception of modern America and leads the listener into “An empire of rags and photons” where we must look to the past to clarify our futures.

Willie Perdomo, a native of East Harlem, has won praise as a hip, playful, historically engaged poet whose restlessly lyrical language mixes "city life with a sense of the transcendent" (NPR.org). In his fourth collection, The Crazy Bunch, Perdomo returns to his beloved neighborhood to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a "crew" coming of age in East Harlem at the beginning of the 1990s. In poems written in couplets, vignettes, sketches, riffs, and dialogue, Perdomo recreates a weekend where surviving members of the crew recall a series of tragic events.

A Choir of Honest Killers, Buddy Wakefield's 2019 release of prose and poetry, is a staggeringly honest account of life alone on the road, the prolonged agony of a failed relationship in the midst of public shame, and frequent specific serendipity. No matter how brutal it gets, this story rockets forward in a one-man relay race to the light with refreshing humor, keen insights, and a single sudden moment of bliss, revealing more than Buddy bargained for.