If language is a space, who is allowed in? If history is a story told by the powerful, what gets left out? With her second full-length collection feeld, poet Jos Charles twists these two concepts together and bends them to her will. The result is a wholly avant-garde book of poetry that reveals a queer history embedded in the castaway detritus of our language.

A winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, Charles’ feeld is a hybrid work of medievalism and digital nativism. The numbered, unnamed poems operate in a mode that’s part-Middle English, part-texting lingo, brazenly synthesizing these two poles: in one poem the speaker tells us “it is horribel / of corse to be / tangibel,” wisdom that feels timeless; later, “thomas sayes trauma lit is so hote rite nowe,” a statement decidedly post-2010s. 

Readers looking for a historically accurate pastiche of Chaucer will be flummoxed. So, too, will those looking for the clear-eyed contemporaneity of Charles’ previous work. The obscure misspellings, surprising homophones, and wildly oscillating register of the poems work together to construct a small, hermetic world of their own. Reading this book feels like piecing together the forgotten scribbles of an alternate dimension’s literary history. 

Having remixed the past, Charles places queerness at the center and explores it from newly revealed angles. Her poems are fragmentary, beautiful, and inventive. Poem “VII” informs us “a tran lik all metall is a series or sirfase in folde / wee / call manie of these foldes identitie” and suddenly, identity is made material and pliable, likewise language. Just as the reader is able to grasp this idea, the poem ends with a surprisingly humorous turn, “u maye / be manie foldes but not / lik the waye an asse / bothe is and isnt conected to this chare / fase / layk.” 

By the end of the collection, one is struck by how perfect the title “feeld” is: the book is both a fertile, untrodden space and a flurry of emotion warped through the past tense, less felt and more feel-ed. 

Mary Karr has made a life, a brilliant one, of telling stories about herself, from her scrappy Texas childhood to getting sober and converting to Catholicism in adulthood. Karr’s fifth collection of poetry reveals one of the strongest voices in contemporary letters in conversation with itself, pushing back against the constructed self, ever more aware of the geological transformation wrought on identity by time, work and circumstance. The speakers of these poems appraise that long trajectory and are engaged in the struggle of both physical and psychic displacement.

The “scab” of a small, polluted hometown is still a presiding concern, the landscape she may know very best, but Karr has lived too long and far from that “big vacant state” not to take stock of that distance. “For years I fought/ moving to this rich gulag because I thought/ it was too white or too right or too dumb,” she writes in “Exurbia.” She dryly considers the wilds of New York City, which she now calls home: “It’s not law but the sprawl/ of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing.” In many poems, the journey reckoned with is one of faith—from the “disbelief” of hard-lived youth, “suffering the torments/ Of mine own mind,” to a new relationship with God. “The voice never/ panders, offers no five-year plan…It is small and fond and local,” she writes in “VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God,” one of a cycle of poems that borrows the books of the Old Testament as organizing principle.

Several poems ostensibly take as their subject the late writer David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008. Karr knew Wallace well, and she pulls no punches in her reflections on his life and death. Respect, grief, and anger thread evenly through these poems.

As in all her work, Karr’s genius is in creating her own music from a mashup of lexicons, daringly and often wittily infusing the lyrical with everyday vernacular. She is, at last, perhaps most faithful to her own known self. In “IX. Ecclsiastes: Amok Run,” she writes, “I myself confined/ In a subway car befumed by the farts of strangers do wish them/ Heartily dead, which I text my son who texts back,/ You are so not a shepherd.”

People often look to poetry as a space for beauty, where it can be enshrined, explored and celebrated. Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a collection rooted in the imagery of a fading natural world, wielding lyrical language to break down the barrier between ourselves and what we consider nature. 

Nezhukumatathil’s fourth book of poetry and first from Copper Canyon Press, Oceanic dowses our most human concerns (love, longing, grief, family) in a torrent of nature-oriented metaphors. “Nature” is a broad category, encompassing scallops, elephants, pumpkins and the northern lights, but as the title suggests, Nezhukumatathil tends to focus her contemplation on marine life and aquatic vistas. Overall, the subject matter is broad, from one-star internet reviews of the Taj Mahal to odes for those who “plunged over Niagara Falls with the hope of surviving.” 

With a book so invested in nature, one might expect a flood of gorgeous imagery. Here, Oceanic delivers; these poems are lush and dreamy, with “a blue jack mackerel / arranging itself into an orb of dazzle” and “dolphins leaping / into commas / for this waterprayer / rising like a host / of paper lanterns/ in the inky evening.” The emotion evoked is one of contentedness and appreciation.

But these poems don’t scan as pastorals with only calm waters and soft sentiments. Oceanic brings forth the harder ideas buried in these subjects. “Two Moths” renders the experience of a victim of sex trafficking who “will rim / the waterline of her eyes with kohl pencil” until they resemble “two popinjay moths.” In “The Body,” we learn of the plight of the sea stars in the Pacific, how something causes them to “rip themselves apart, / twist their arms in gummy knots.” The urgency in these poems adds necessary depth to an otherwise pastel-tinged collection.

But what really stitches Oceanic together is Nezhukumatathil’s musical voice. These poems feel crystal clear in their logic and construction, walking carefully from the metaphoric and imagistic to something more transcendent and strange, reminding us that we are linked to the natural world in deep and surprising ways. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Aimee Nezhukumatathil for Oceanic.

Jenny Xie’s debut book of poetry, Eye Level, aims its gaze at two concepts: time and interiority. To arrive there, her poems travel through cities, landscapes and memories, exploring them with a voice both isolated from the world and communing with it. The result is a stunning collection—part travel narrative, part kaleidoscopic autobiography.

The winner of the Walt Whitman Award, Eye Level works in contradictions: It speaks from solitude yet dwells in an array of communities; it ties itself to concrete places but has deeper psychological concerns. “Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?” the speaker asks in the opening poem. “No matter. The mind exists both inside and out.” Eye Level mediates that dynamic. Things are felt in both senses of the word.

Xie’s imagery is like an Etch A Sketch being shaken and redrawn, moving rapidly through gritty scenes in miniature. We encounter “Karaoke bars bracketed by vendors hawking salted crickets” and a “motorbike with a hog strapped to its seat, / the size of a date pit from the distance.” The speaker speaks of their “coarse immigrant blood,” their “fishbone days” and “fatty grief.” The month of a May is a “slow peach.”

These tactile moments pull us through Xie’s relentless probing of location, both in time and space. Time has a physicality throughout (“I pull apart the evening with a fork”) and is intertwined with familial history, a realm where “suffering has its own logic.” 

Xie’s lively formal approach incorporates many styles; most notable is her series of haibun, a combination of prose poetry and haiku (a form pioneered by Matsuo Bashō, another poet who traveled the outer world while exploring the inner one). That’s what makes Eye Level such an enchanting read: its ability to be everywhere and do everything at once. It draws its energy from all over and then finds its way directly to the heart.

A new volume of Lorca translations brings with it several questions. Does it offer a new angle on what is already a loved and oft-translated poet? Are the translator’s various decisions and concessions justified? And most importantly, do the poems stand on their own as poems in English, divorced from the historical intrigue of Lorca’s life? In the case of Sarah Arvio's Poet in Spain, the answer to these questions is yes.

In Arvio’s generous introduction to her translations, she explains this book’s unique focus and approach. In Lorca’s oeuvre, Arvio claims to “hear two voices and see two landscapes”: one is Lorca’s popular New York poems, full of alienation, surreality and political vigor; the other voice, and the one this volume focuses on, constitutes his “moonlit earthbound Spanish poems.” By shifting the focus to Lorca’s more overlooked works, Poet in Spain starts charting new territory right out of the gate.

Arvio's method of translation is also worthy of remark. She “wrote quickly, by ear,” and she entirely forgoes punctuation because it “hindered the flow of the language.” Sometimes this absence is keenly missed, but Arvio’s felicity with Lorca’s pliable rhythmic patterns masks the omission of commas and periods, and apart from a few blips of syntactic confusion, the decision is sound.

The effect throughout all of Arvio’s translations is swooning, romantic beauty punctuated by darker passions. Arvio captures the essence and energy of Lorca’s voice, steeped in dreamy imagery and moony sentiment. “A flock / of caught birds / swinging their long long / tails in the dark” ends the poem “Landscape,” and it’s the repetition of the word “long” that reveals the translator’s hand working the syllabically shorter English language against Lorca’s Spanish rhythms. The effect is often sublime.

Poet in Spain is a triumphant addition to the corpus of Lorca translations, due in part to its specific focus, but also to the consistency of the translations. Arvio’s mix of careful, thoughtful research and respect for the spontaneous energy of poetry makes this volume invaluable to any English-speaker smitten by Lorca’s work.

Drawing from her study of the Bauhaus movement of 1930s Germany, award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection of poetry, A Doll for Throwing, is a carefully crafted meditation on the relationship between time and form.

Bang is a poet known for her innovate technical approaches and her ability to tease dense philosophical ideas out of unexpected places. A Doll for Throwing fulfills both expectations: The poems work within a deliberate form, and they utilize a rich historical reference point to build a moving narrative.

That historical reference point is Lucia Moholy, a Czech-born photographer and artist who became a figure in the German Bauhaus architectural movement. Bang fictionalizes details atop the bare facts of Moholy’s life, hybridizing poetry, fiction and nonfiction; when she writes, “Every day was a / twenty-four hour stand-still on a bridge from which / we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to / catch sight of the future,” we are not only hearing Moholy’s voice, but the broader lyrical “I.” The future in question is not only our future, but the past’s future—the present.

Most of the poems are tightly-wound blocks of justified text with titles lifted from Moholy’s photographs. Their shapes simultaneously suggest the blocky lines emblematic of Bauhaus and the rectangular shape of photographs, and their content borrows heavily from both disciplines while breaching into more human concerns. For example, the poem “Me, A Chronicle” starts in cold architectural language: “Shapes that begin as just one solution to a common problem / can go on to become an inflexible method.” But it develops into something more ruminative: “I see my father crossing / the room to open or close a window. My mother’s zigzag / pattern of static . . . Who hasn’t felt that in/ order to breathe, she has to splinter the first self and leave it / behind?”

Bang’s forward-thinking approach finds footing in the past to comment on our future; herein are critiques of political extremism, xenophobia and domestic trauma. A Doll for Throwing cements Bang’s poetry at the forefront of many poetic realms, all while maintaining a shape of its own.

Nicole Sealey navigates heavy ideas with felicity and skill in her hotly anticipated debut collection, Ordinary Beast. Though the world her poems inhabit is marked by violence and confusion, they counter this chaos with humor and clarity; her language is plainspoken, exacting and beautiful, often leading to linguistic pearls of surprising wisdom and depth.

Ordinary Beast’s field of examination is identity: race, wealth, family, the body, the unstable self. In “It’s Not Fitness, It’s a Lifestyle,” she muses, “I’m waiting for a white woman / in this overpriced Equinox / to mistake me for someone other / than a paying member” and then shifts from this potentiality to the image of a bird stuck in an airport: “I ask myself / what is it doing here? I’ve come / to answer: what is any of us?” Going from the personal to the universal through metaphor is a classic move, but to do so in 13 short, punchy, aerodynamic lines shows Sealey at her best.

Sealey's poetry is most striking when she plays with forms. There are traditional and experimental sonnets, a sestina about the board game Clue, an erasure of said sestina, a cento and more. Sealey comfortably colors within the lines of these forms, breaking from their constraints when her personable voice ideates a less rigid and more interesting path.

In the ekphrastic “Candelabra with Heads,” Sealey invents a form that reverses the order of the lines halfway through, a time-warp that forces the reader to relive every phrase in new contexts. Later in the collection, “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’” deconstructs the first poem, speaking to the reader directly and pointing out the original poem’s potential flaws. The reader becomes aware of the pliability of voice, and by proxy, the self.

Ordinary Beast is full of these neat devices, but they never distract from the core of warmth and familiarity that drives these poems to the heart. Technical prowess means nothing when a poet’s music can remind us who we are, “how we entertain the angels / with our brief animation.”

Vivid, unsettling and uplifting all at once, the second full-length from award-winning poet Danez Smith is part elegy, part celebration and part poetry-as-witness. Smith is a black, queer, HIV-positive poet, and these are the poems of a person not only navigating their complex place in the world, but dictating it firmly and without recourse to everyone in earshot. 

Smith is a poet famous for fiery performances—their reading of “Dear White America,” a poem included in this book, has racked up more than 300,000 views on YouTube—and their passionate confidence bursts through the seams of these poems, whose subjects range from police brutality, to the complexities of queer eroticism, to the very experience of living in a country tha threatens the lives of queer people of color daily.

Formally, the poems are deft with couplets and tightly-controlled stanzas, stringing together visceral imagery (“the bloodfat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir”) and direct, politically-charged constructions (“i’m not the kind of black man who dies on the news. / i’m the kind that grows thinner & thinner & thinner / until the light outweighs us”) while always obliged to the music of the phrase. 

Smith often employs the serialized poem to contain massive and complex subjects, and these longer works prove to be the most powerful and gut-wrenching moments of the book. This is especially true of the opening poem “summer, somewhere” which imagines an afterlife for those killed by police brutality, a place “where everything / is sanctuary & nothing is gun.” 

Not content to merely allow us to play witness to the horrors of oppression, Smith’s poems pull us into it; they brim with blood, violence, aches and broken bodies. But there is humor, too, and hope, and it’s this hope that elevates the book to its crucial contemporary importance: “but today i’m alive, which is to say / i survived yesterday, spent it ducking bullets, some / flying toward me & some / trying to rip their way out.”