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My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy
“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.
Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.
GRIME (City Lights Spotlight, 25)
GRIME is the underbelly of the city and the dirt found in the human psyche. These poems explore the dichotomous gravity of despair and desire, apathy and protest, defeat and survival. They trace San Francisco's skyline to encapsulate being born and raised in a metropolis that has grown increasingly strange to its native citizens, even as it serves as a mnemonic for past trauma and death.
Part elegy, part call to resistance, GRIME chronicles Matthews' childhood growing up in the Tenderloin, amidst the glamour and allure of its drug-fueled street life and the squalor of its poverty and addiction, even as the poems veer off from the autobiographical into portraits and dramatic monologues, on the one hand, and experiments with traditional forms like ghazals and pantoums, on the other. The poems hold grit and anguish in one breath, marrying an unflinching eye to a rare formal assurance. As austerity pushes the margins of each page, in poem after poem, the setting shifts, the characters assume different names, yet every moment interlocks to expose the grime of living in the city.
Yet GRIME is also a story of triumph and resiliency in the face of insurmountable odds, an assertion of the power of poetry in wrestling with grief, addiction, and calamity. It seeks moments of healing based on interpersonal connection and faith. GRIME is a poetics of survival and defiance.
New Cemetery: Poems
From the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, a poem sequence that considers our use of the land that surrounds him, and recounts the personal tales of beauty and loss that play out on it
In the poet's home county of West Yorkshire a few years ago, the Local Authority began converting a series of cow fields at the top of the road into a new cemetery. These poems, in regular, cascading tercets, sparked into being as Simon daily walked the site, with moorlands rising beyond it and the wind turbines of Brontë country to the north, watching the land tamed: eventually the muddy construction scene gives way to fresh headstones and mown lawns, and, during the Covid-19 lockdown, the spectacle of grave-diggers in Hazmat suits and socially distanced funeral services.
These terse, sharply observed lyrics—each fancifully named for a species of moth, a creature whose numbers the poet sees dwindling across a lifetime of night walks—remind us to turn a cool eye on the doings of man, and yet to embrace all we love while we still can, as "Time, what else," stands "propped in a corner / like a cricket bat."
Archive of Desire: A poem in four parts for C. P. Cavafy
The National Book Award, PEN/Voelcker, and NAACP Image Award winner returns with another inventive and boundary-breaking book: a sensual journey ignited in the archives of iconic queer Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy.
In her first book, Robin Coste Lewis's poems exploded the imagery of the Black female figure from antiquity through the present day; her second was an expansive hybrid photographic-poetic study of human migration and the human family; now she delivers a slim “performance in four parts,” which originated as an actual sound performance with the composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu. With Lewis as the speaking voice, the quartet reflected on desire, diaspora, and the liminal spaces where art asserts itself, ignited by their encounters with Cavafy's archive in the heart of Athens. Lewis weaves in and out of Cavafy's rooms, notebooks, and the suppressed erotic need underpinning his work, conversing directly with him: “often you/ reminded us/ the only true // barbarians/ are the ones raging in silence / inside // of our own / minds.” But she brings equal parts of herself to this study of artistry and sensuality, as in the short, tender section entitled “Cavafy in Compton: Self-Portrait at 16.”
As in all Lewis's works, she reaches across centuries here to express what is timeless and not bound by our current moment or our single selves: the discipline and glory of art, the give and take of love, the kiss that lives in the moment, the unfolding journey of being human whose contours only become clear with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.
The Asking: New and Selected Poems
Now in paperback, the long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed lives
In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.
In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection—drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing—brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap. With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.
Death of the First Idea: Poems
From Whiting Award–winner Rickey Laurentiis, a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of trans/formation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love
When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy with Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. “Call Rickey Laurentiis’ stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,” Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.
Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, “New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.” With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. “You see something in me,” she writes, “something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.”
In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.
Night Watch: Poems
From the award-winning poet at the height of his career, a book of personal and American experiences, both beautiful and troubling, touching on the generative cycle of loss and renewal
Following on his exquisite Stones, Kevin Young’s new collection, written over the span of sixteen years, shapes stories of loss and legacy, inspired in part by other lives. After starting in the bayous of his family's Louisiana, Young journeys to further states of mind in “All Souls,” evoking “The whale / who finds the shore / & our poor prayers.” Another central sequence, “The Two-Headed Nightingale,” is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American “Carolina Twins.” Born into enslavement, stolen, and then displayed by P. T. Barnum and others, the twins later toured the world as free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonizing their own way. Young’s poem explores their evolving philosophical selfhood and pluralities: “As one we sang, /we spake— / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole.”
In “Darkling,” a cycle of poems inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Young expands and embroiders the circles of Hell, drawing a cosmology of both loneliness and accompaniment, where “the dead don’t know / what to do / with themselves.” Young writes of grief and hope as familiar yet surprising states: “It’s like a language, / loss—,” he writes, “learnt only / by living—there—.” Evoking the history of poetry, from the darkling thrush to the darkling plain, Young is defiant and playful on the way through purgatory to a kind of paradise. When he goes, he warns, “don't dare sing Amazing Grace”—that “National / Anthem of Suffering.” Instead, he suggests, “When I Fly Away, / Don't dare hold no vigil . . . Just burn the whole / Town on down.”
This collection will stand as one of Young’s best—his voice shaping sorrow with music, wisdom, heartache, and wit.
Perishable
Poems exploring the relationship between joy and elegy.
In Perishable, Stelios Mormoris asks incisive questions about the nature of human connection: Where does memory live—in the body, in the mind, or elsewhere? What happens when the objects that surround us—a wedding ring, an empty purse, a harp—reveal necessary truths about ourselves and those we love? As the book unfolds, lush sensory details and unmatched lyricism are brought to bear on these lingering concerns in a style as neoclassical as it is contemporary. In poems that radiate with intelligence, Mormoris combines understated elegance with finely tuned music and evocative imagery.
The Portrait Gallery Called Existence Neeli Cherkovski
In his final book, poet Neeli Cherkovski paints a portrait of his life through luminous details of encounters with his illustrious comrades.
"A prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture."—New York Times
To be published on what would have been his 80th birthday, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence finds the poet and memoirist combining these twin vocations in intimate depictions of his fellow artists and reflections on his family. The book follows Cherkovski from his early encounters in L.A. with poets like Wanda Coleman and Jack Micheline to his youthful heyday among the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The passage of time is inevitably marked with the loss of beloved friends, recorded in elegies for recently deceased poets like Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, and Jack Hirschman, as well as a series of poems celebrating his close friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Join Neeli as he drinks whiskey with Bob Kaufman in Chinatown, visits his gentle and impoverished hero John Wieners, and takes a terrifying drive through San Francisco with Ferlinghetti. Also included are several portraits of key poetic forebears, like Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and especially Rimbaud, examined from Cherkovski's perspective in 1959 and 2023. The book ends with memories of close family members and a number of moving self-portraits, as the poet confronts his own mortality and impending death. A powerful final statement from a master poet.
word time
"This former San Francisco Poet Laureate and worldly cosmonaut handles politics, war, and love in equal measure as the best poets of the people do. Pablo Neruda. Bob Kaufman. June Jordan. Wanda Coleman. Ears to the ground and eyes to the sky."—Giovanni Singleton, author of Ascension
A cosmic vision of the nature of being, wedded to a streetwise indictment of the post-colonized world.
Hearing Osage Indian artist Duane BigEagle pose the question "How old is your language?" set devorah major thinking about language and what language was "hers." The result is word time, a collection of poems organized around grammatical categories. The book creates connections, not through the traditional meanings of the parts of speech that become phrases, sentences, lines, poems, but through the relationship between infinite time and the finite human endeavors of healing, and of assault. It interrogates the birth and rebirth of humankind, and specifically of humans born of Africa and the African diaspora, a subset and superset of that humanity, grounded in the planet, galaxy, and universe where humanity was born.
Juxtaposing the archetypal with the specific, word time ranges in scope from Yoruba fertility myths to the racist justification of slavery in Florida's social studies curriculum, traveling through space and time as it contemplates the horrors of ecological destruction and the perpetual capacity of humanity to survive, heal and move forward in a universe that is constantly transforming. It takes a circular view of our species from its origins to the fact of its inevitable future demise, telling the story of humans then, as spirit and myth, now, as war and oppression, and in the future, as memory.
Enter: Poems
In Enter, poet Jim Moore navigates the public spaces of his neighborhood―parks, boardwalks, piazzas, even parking garages―and encounters people negotiating mortality in the pandemic age just as he is coming to terms with his own long story. In his signature lucid and wry voice, Moore acknowledges suffering while making room for joy and for moments of peace. These poems offer shelter to readers and, in summoning poets like Rilke and Tsvetaeva, remind us that poetry’s tenderness can be repaid in tenderness. “Please show me how to be you,” he writes in deeply intimate lines revealing a poet tapped into the networks of human connection vibrating under the surface of all the places humans gather.
Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems far-fetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being “grazed upon by earth.” Yet Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting hours: “I find words. I write of love.”