Cynthia's Poetry Picks

Salt Is for Curing is the lush and haunting full-length debut by Sonya Vatomsky. These poems, structured as an elaborate meal, conjure up a vapor of earthly pains and magical desires; like the most enduring rituals, Vatomsky's poems both intoxicate and ward. A new blood moon in American poetry, Salt ... Read More about

Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses. In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we kno ... Read More about

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours." A ... Read More about

Poetry. This debut collection explores what it means to be biracial in America, and asks why our culture demands that violence pervade its eery model and moment of growth. Says Jeanne Dubrow, "The speakers of these poems receive lessons in cruelty, tutorials in deracination, bodies split from themse ... Read More about

In her first book of poetry since 1993's groundbreaking The Book of Medicines, Linda Hogan locates the intimate connections between all living things and uncovers the layers that both protect and disguise our affinities. like the tree I can lose myselflayer after layerall the way down to infinityand ... Read More about

Effusive new poems by Stephanie Burt, “perhaps our greatest poet of having yet more to say” (Boston Review) Stephanie Burt’s poems in We Are Mermaids are never just one thing. Instead, they revel in their multiplicity, their interconnectedness, their secret powers to become much more than they at f ... Read More about

What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer As ... Read More about