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Danez Smith’s fourth book of poetry, Bluff, is a robust and inventive read, with poems ranging from essayistic to wordless. (One piece, “METRO” is a QR code that takes readers online to over two dozen pages that didn’t make it into the printed collection.) Bluff begins with a personal query: Has the poet betrayed their community by making art about Black pain? This is a topic the speaker returns to again and again in early pieces, where they critique both white audiences’ appetites for anti-Black violence and the rewards that come to those who can satisfy those cravings. At the same time, there are poems about the persistent beauty of Black communities, even in the face of generational violence and the unfulfilled promise of progress: Neither exoduses from the Jim Crow South nor the first Black president have improved the lives of most Black Americans.

In “Minneapolis, St. Paul,” and “My Beautiful End of the World,” two mini-essays that cordon off the center of the book, Smith delves into the problems plaguing America’s heartland, ones that are in fact happening all over the country. “Minneapolis, Saint Paul” describes the protests following George Floyd’s murder in diaristic fashion, while “My Beautiful End of the World” chronicles how gentrification is killing the land and restricting access to what remains of its natural beauty. Later poems make clear that the dream of peace and the possibility of a utopia can exist, if in no other place, then in the poetry, right alongside an unabashed reckoning with poverty and racism. Bluff asks, “What shall we do with this land we were never meant to own?” and “How shall we live on it together in the little time we have left?” The answer may lie in the final lines of the book, where the speaker awakens next to a lover and is reminded of the power of the love they make together.

Bluff is a book that indicts and inquires: It interrogates the poet’s past work and revises it, while resisting the powers that threaten to sell us out and sell us short. In the end, it offers joy and hope, but not without the sober warning that we are running out of bluffs, out of delusions, out of land and perhaps out of time to right our wrongs.

Published after poet Kelly Caldwell’s death in 2020, Letters to Forget is assured, electric and devastating. The collection comprises three sections: the first and third contain short poems written in one of two forms, either prose poems titled “[ dear c. ]” and addressed to the poet Cass Donish, Caldwell’s partner, or poems composed entirely of end-stopped lines, with titles like “[ house of rope ]” and “[ house of bare life ].” The middle section contains three long poems that engage with the story of Job through a lens of queerness, transness and mental illness. 

Within these constraints, Caldwell’s imagery and imagination soar. The epistolary “[ dear c. ]” poems were written during time Caldwell spent in a residential hospital receiving treatment for suicidal depression. There is deep sorrow in these poems, and a sense of restlessness—as if the lines are trying to break out of the page. Caldwell leaps from image to image, her mind and body constantly in motion. “Here are some awkward questions, and you can say what you’re thinking. How many bruises can I put on the scale before it tilts? How much does a marriage bed weigh? How to place this body on an actual body?” she writes in one. In another: “I wish starlings carpeted the floor of this rainy April morning instead of a beige spread.” 

There is a delicate playfulness in Letters to Forget, despite the severity of the subject matter. Caldwell writes with intellectual curiosity and emotional vulnerability, pondering the heaviness of memory, the power of claiming her own self and body, the balm of loving and being loved, and the often dark reality of living with bipolar disorder. Her inventive use of end-stops is nothing short of stunning; she divides sentences into new worlds with periods, creating a thudding, propulsive intensity that is hard to look away from.

“What comfort does, we mimic, and we hope for marvelous clouds, and burned fog, and lovers’ spit,” Caldwell writes. It is heartbreaking that this debut will not be followed by other books, but the words that Caldwell has left us are not mimicry. As much as any poetry can be, they are the living stuff of the world.

In his 17th book of poetry, Scattered Snows, to the North, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips gazes both inward and outward. His work carries a signature heft, a musicality and syntax that seems to rewrite itself with each read. Phillips tangles his sentences like few other poets working today, and often, rather than untangling them, he lets the tangles linger, clause-heavy and potent, wordy but exacting. The knots he makes with lines, stanzas, images and always-startling juxtaposition are graceful but not easy. One of the distinct pleasures of reading his work is getting lost in the questions it poses, and Scattered Snows, to the North is full of questions.

The speaker of “Searchlights” embodies the contradictions at the heart of this work: “I can see the words, though I can’t / hear them, finding shape first, then meaning, the way smoke does, / Don’t, which is not a question; then just the smell of the rain, which is.” How does the memory of a relationship, or a place, or a particular moment reshape it? Can the present change the past? Why do we fixate on memory, rework the contours of a life over and over again in the mind? What changes as we age, and how do we reckon with what doesn’t? These questions hum through the poems, surfacing and retreating. Always, Phillips engages with them at a slant: “Why not call it love— // each gesture—if it does love’s work? I pulled him / closer. I kissed his mouth, its anger, its blue confusion.”

Phillips beautifully articulates the thorny conflict between reflecting on and being present in: reflecting on time passing while being present in your body; reflecting on the cyclical sameness of human history while being present in the specific ecstasy of a season, a love, a quarrel, the beach at night. The settings of these poems often feel mythological—fields and forests—but they also feel distinctly current. Nature is everywhere, and always changing; there are animals in various stages of life, the turbulent sea, weather, light.

The titular poem, “Scattered Snows, to the North,” is a poignant meditation on loss both intimate and universal. In considering the people who lived during the failing years of the Roman Empire, the speaker muses: “If it was night, they lit / fires, presumably. Tears / were tears.” In “Stop Shaking,” Phillips asks, “What if memory’s just the dead, flourishing differently from how they flourished alive?” Over and over the poems echo one another, alighting on some philosophical truth and then returning, humbled, to the material world.

Dedicated to those “Who Wrestle With God,” The Invention of the Darling by Li-Young Lee utilizes familiar language and religious motifs to depict a sprawling yet personal approach to the sacred. Lee, the son of a political exile turned Presbyterian minister, previously penned six celebrated poetry collections, many of which ruminate on memories of family and love with religious undercurrents. In The Invention of the Darling, Lee’s retrospective writing goes further, seemingly recollecting the inception of life itself.

Many poems in this collection position parents as both sign and symbol of the creator. The epic poem “The Herald’s Wand” explores various manifestations of this almighty deity, alluding to the serpents of Norse, Greek and Christian mythologies. Through the voice of a speaker that seems to hover omnisciently, Lee establishes, “Before / the serpent was a serpent / she was my mother” and “Before the serpent was a serpent / he was my father.” Over the course of the poem, these mutable metaphors continue to link parents to God. At its conclusive section, aptly labeled “Axis Mundi,” readers are left with the bones of the Jörmungandr-like serpent at the base of an Yggdrasil-like tree. In Lee’s world, the death of a parent is the death of a god, an apocalypse. The speaker describes the hope, the terror and the devastation of three beings who witnessed the death of the parent-god-serpent before reaching out to the reader with the final lines: “Of those three, which one were you? / Whether or not you remember, you were there.” This is what Lee does so masterfully: balance the grandest revelations of the universe with the gentle touch of personal memory.

While the collection explores love as expressed through grief, it also champions love expressed through awe, intimacy and worship. Countering the image of the earthbound serpent, Lee celebrates the glory of the hummingbird in the ecstatic “O, Hummingbird, Don’t Go,” and the sensual “Met and Unmet.” The ultimate image of the collection is one of hope. At the end of the titular “The Invention of the Darling,” the speaker realizes that “I thought I’d lost my mother. / It was I who was lost. / Here she is, a pure vibration / across two bridges.” This resonating image finds harmony between the many dialectics presented throughout the work: snake and bird, child and parent, ground and sky, earth and heaven, living and dead, the personal and the prophetic.

The Invention of the Darling relishes in the language and structures of religion, sanctifying parent-child relationships to depict the scale of the grief of parental loss.

In their third collection, Your Dazzling Death, Cass Donish (The Year of the Femme) grieves their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, and celebrates their love and life together—the good and the bad. These poems are raw and reaching, often addressed directly to Caldwell. They pulse with ongoing loss, as memory by memory, day by day, Donish is confronted with the fact of their beloved’s death, and their continuing love for her. 

Several poems begin with the line, “In my next life,” acknowledging how grief reforges the world of those left behind. Donish seems to reach for that remade world not only by looking back into the painful, tender memories of a shared queer life, but also by insisting on Caldwell’s continued relevance and presence. “I don’t know // if it’s then or now / anymore. If you’re here / or already gone” they write in “Agate Beach, Lopez Island.”

The centerpiece of the collection, “Kelly in Violet” is a palimpsest of The History of Violets by Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio; some traces of the source text remain in gray. This piece is rich in imagery, overflowing with the daily challenge of living, particularly with grief and mental illness. The urgency and directness of loss haunts even the most beautiful lines: “The butterflies want you back, the hawks want you back, the moon is pining.”

Donish rejects simple notions of time and loss, and instead writes into queer time and grief time, heavy with ghosts and rich with possibility. “Yet isn’t it a mistake / to say I know our story now? Isn’t that the thing? // I don’t believe in dying / fixing—stilling—anything.” This is an openhearted and devastating collection—proof that love stories do not end, but rather go on changing, even through death.

Fresh on the heels of his debut collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, the Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise is a dispatch from Gaza and a call for peace while there is still time to save his people. Abu Toha’s poems describe life in Gaza before and after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and the result is a harrowing but powerful account of surviving a genocide.

Forest of Noise begins with a tribute to several childhoods: those of Gazan children currently living under constant bombardment, and of Abu Toha himself, who recalls seeing a helicopter shooting a rocket into a building at 7 years old. The rest of the collection performs a similar act,  looking back while recounting the atrocities of the present and, at times, offering glimpses of an unknown and potentially catastrophic future. In “A Request,” written in response to a poem by the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, Abu Toha hopes for a “clean death,” one where he is not buried under rubble or disfigured by shrapnel, and where the clothes in his closet remain intact for his burial. Other “after” poems, like “After Allen Ginsburg” and “Who Has Seen the Wind [after Bob Kaufman]” rewrite the chaos of other turbulent historical moments in an attempt to make sense of the present. And yet, there are pockets of stillness and quiet reflection. In “Palestinian Village,” the speaker reclines in a peaceful town without conflict. The scene is beautiful, but the idyll is fleeting. By the collection’s final poem, “This is Not a Poem,” imagery collapses in a litany of dismembered limbs. “This is a grave,” writes Abu Toha, “not / beneath the soil of Homeland, / but above a flat, light white / rag of paper.”  

Forest of Noise is a difficult but necessary read. As good poetry often does, these poems will keep you up at night and will require you to ask some of the most difficult questions of our time: What kind of world are we living in? What kind of world are we leaving to the children?