Each of the poems in Victoria Chang’s seventh collection responds to a painting with the same title by abstract artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004). If you aren’t familiar with Martin’s work, or typically feel unmoved by minimalist paintings, this conceit could seem like a barrier. But turn to the first poem in With My Back to the World and the magnetism of Chang’s language will convince you of the power of her project. “I learned that . . . emptiness still swarms without the / world,” Chang writes, “The best thing about emptiness is if you close your / eyes in a field, you’ll open your eyes in a field.” Should you be suddenly filled with a desire to see that emptiness swarm on a canvas, you can find the titular painting online.

Many of the poems directly reference their painting’s shape, color and structure. Martin was known for painting grids, and Chang’s accompanying illustrations evoke this: scraps of poem arranged in a grid, or obscured by ink drawings. To organize a book of poems so tightly around a concept and a form isn’t new for Chang. In her 2020 National Book Award-longlisted Obit, written after the death of her mother, each poem took the form of an obituary. Chang’s father has since passed as well, and the middle section of With My Back to the World is a guttingly specific grief sequence.

As the collection unfolds, Chang lets us in on the intense relationship an artist can form with another through their work. Some poems deliberate on Martin’s dictates about solitude, while simultaneously longing for attention, connection and an audience. Other poems describe the risk of violence that comes with being visible for women, especially Asian women. “On a Clear Day, 1973” responds to the 2021 murder of eight people, six of them Asian American women, by Robert Aaron Long in Atlanta.

Like Martin, Chang etches meaning into her chosen structure down to the smallest detail. Again and again, there’s the moment of recognition that readers come to poetry for: Here is a feeling you know well, but have never been able to witness outside of yourself. Isn’t it liberating to put these words to it? Don’t you feel less alone in your loneliness?

In her latest spellbinding collection of poems, The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan renders rich, intricate landscapes of heritage and place that arise from her own experiences. A Palestinian American novelist, poet and clinical psychologist, Alyan is familiar with diaspora and displacement. Born in America, she moved to Kuwait with her Palestinian father and Syrian mother, then returned to the American Midwest after the Iraqi invasion in 1990. She completed some of her education in the U.S. and some in the Middle East.

These poems reflect not only the countries that make up Alyan’s identity and history, but also the range of cultural ideals and differences that exist within that history, exploring the perspectives of family members such as her maternal grandmother and her mother. Alyan’s poetry draws the reader in through form, including interactive poems styled in a choose-your-own-adventure format.

Alyan tackles complex, even disturbing, topics. She writes of everyday objects using striking, vivid descriptions: “underwear the color of the summer, of the ocean, of the dead.” “In Jerusalem” employs the recurring image of a woman’s hair. It’s sensual, feminine and powerful, but it can also render the speaker vulnerable: “In Jerusalem a man blocked the door of a hostel // to tell me to unpin my hair. I did, / but then kept the story from anyone for years.”

While her succinct and candid language, arresting imagery and bold approach to form are effectively disquieting, there is also a very organic sense of hope and renewal in these poems, even in the darkest hour. There’s a hint of this in the titular line from, “Interactive Fiction :: Werewolf,” where Alyan writes: “In the / darkest dark, I wait for / the / moon // that turns you back.”

The Moon That Turns You Back is a bountiful collection of poetry, especially for those interested in diaspora and the complexity of multinationalism.