Alice Notley Penguin ($18) by Christopher Luna Alice Notley’s latest collection, In the Pines, begins and ends with questions. Like her previous work, it challenges preconceived notions about poetry; Notley not only deconstructs language to push against patriarchal presumptions, but her writing deliberately blurs the line between poetry and prose, forcing one to concentrate on the […]

MINE Tung-Hui Hu Ausable Press ($16) I DON’T BELIEVE IN GHOSTS Moikom Zeqo translated by Wayne Miller BOA Editions ($21.95) VELOCITY Nancy Krygowski University of Pittsburgh Press ($14) by Lizzie Hutton Tung-Hui Hu’s second book of poetry, Mine, is a confident, artful collection—sophisticated and persuasive, memorable and tight. Both the lithe phrasing and the sensory detail […]

Dan Machlin Ugly Duckling Presse ($15) by Nate Pritts Through missives dotted with lackadaisical phrases as well as more abstract convictions, Dan Machlin has written a book where the overall integrity is nested in the form itself, an epistolary certainty that this “cluster bomb of a man” can deliver a sustained and unified self (“Letter […]

Tracy K. Smith Graywolf Press ($14) by Cindra Halm Something haunts Tracy K. Smith’s second book of poems—perhaps the invisible yet palpable veil between life and death. YetDuende doesn’t present as mystical, or even morbid, although it’s often melancholy. Ordinary and varied themes of relationships, the weathers that swell and recede inside and outside of bodies, […]

Martín Espada W.W. Norton & Company ($23.95) by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez Martín Espada’s The Republic of Poetry is a moving collection that cries with outrage at social injustice and with tribute for poets whose lives have been marked by courage and humanism. It is a brave testament to both the bitterness of truth and the tenaciousness of […]

by Eric Lorberer One expects, perhaps, to engage in a bit of schadenfreude when it comes to the fiction of Chip Kidd. After all, he’s already famous for his innovative, almost idiosyncratic approach to the book jackets he has designed—primarily for the esteemed publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, where he has worked his way […]