Migrant Psalms prays for a way to make sense of immigration to the United States—now that we realize the American Dream was always an impossible one. Both reverent and daring, this verse interrogates religion, race, class, family, and sexuality. Written as a call to...

Blood of the Air creates a new mythology, repurposing spectacle, stereotype, and song. Inspired by the fictions and frictions of the past, each poem in this collection complicates the next. Lush lyrical moments give way to fracture, vulnerability, and reinvention. The...

In Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite, Andrew Colarusso hybridizes lost and unknown spaces, taking his title from a falconry term for the cord used to restrain a bird. The word derives from the late fifteenth century, from the French créance (“faith”), also...

Thiahera Nurse’s Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone works as ode and requiem to document the precious narratives held inside the body of a black girl. Opening with declarations of self-love, beauty, eulogy, and Lil’ Kim rapping in the rain, the landscape of...

Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems in Dulce map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and...

The University of Hip-Hop is a love letter to the city of Chicago, or, more specifically, to Chicago at a particular moment in the poet's life. It is a meditation on movement and migration that asks what it means to leave home, how to take home with you, and how to...

Nowhere to Arrive takes as its subjects the whiplash of travel, the shuttling between disparate places and climes, and an unremitting sense of dislocation. These poems court the tension between the familiar and the foreign, between the self as distinct and the self as...

At turns humorous and heartbreaking, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named explores in both formal and free verse what it means to die, which is to say, also, what it means to live. In this collection, Sealey displays an exquisite sense of the lyric, as well...

In one of the poems in Instructions for Folding, Willie Lin writes, “it seemed you were away but not beyond language.” And accordingly, the voice in these poems is sometimes fervid, sometimes wry, moved to speech by the specific desire to speak to someone. The poems...

The winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, Rodney Gomez’s collection Mouth Filled with Night employs familiar emblems of Mexican American identity to repeatedly subvert expectations while intensifying the dilemmas of affiliation. The poems run beyond more...

Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s declaration that “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names,” Kristiana Rae Colón’s promised instruments stitches its own definitions for what is granted, what is surrendered, what is pilfered, and what...

Northwestern University Press is honored to publish Ed Roberson’s Closest Pronunciation. Here is a teacher of poets studying his own assignments, questioning and seeking the generative capacity in looking at and seeing things that ends in the realization of a poem. In...