Mr. Akbar's poems give language and form to many experiences I thought too abstract for expression. They are at once deeply personal and about all of us.

-John Green, The Wall Street Journal

...Akbar proves what books can do in his exceptional debut, which brings us along on his struggle with addiction, a dangerous comfort and soul-eating monster he addresses boldly...

-Library Journal, STARRED review

At times conversational, at times oratorical, Akbar seems to understand that he is moving through the intimate and the cosmic with the same lingering eye for detail.

-Angel City Review

[Calling a Wolf a Wolf] is a welcome testimony to how the deeply personal can seep into and even shape our national consciousness. This is the work of great poetry.

-Seattle Review of Books

[Calling a Wolf a Wolf] is a book that whispers, that longs for connection...

-Rain Taxi Review of Books

These are meditations on life as viewed through the color-saturated prism of a self-admitted alcoholic-addict, who finds beauty in even the ugliest of experiences.

-VOGUE

If Nothing is an honest reckoning with the grip of addiction, the expectations of masculinity, and the tug of family.

When mid-life collides with the precariousness of alcoholism, the vulnerability of opening oneself to a second coming-of-age becomes an ecstatic cry in poems that confront pain and the need for forgiveness. An unvarnished and direct accounting of the journey to sobriety, of struggles with mental health, and with the challenges of longing and loss, If Nothing traverses the sting of shame, the earnestness of joy, and the desire for absolution. Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, says: Matthew Nienow shows us in If Nothing that he is a poet of birth, of making and making anew... This is powerful medicine, salve for earnest souls in an era of ethical infantilization. There is grace here, real grace made wise by having known real grief; If Nothing is a lasting book.

Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award (Poetry)

Moving between the scriptures of the Qur'an and the Bible, the poems of Theophanies arise from the speaker's tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.

Sarah Ghazal Ali's award-winning debut, Theophanies explores the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family, its poems working to spin miracles from the mundanities of desire and violence. Through art and music, Pakistani history, and scriptural stories, Theophanies struggles to envision a true self and speak back against time to the matriarchs of the larger Abrahamic faiths--the mothers at the heart of sacred history.

Theophanies asks: What does it mean to have a woman's body when that body has been hailed a vessel for the divine? Is seeing really believing, and is believing belonging? The speaker seeks to understand her own, bewildering I, to use it with reverence, and to mythologize herself and all mothers to ensure their survival in a male-dominated world hard at work erasing them. Stitched through these poems is longing--for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine.

How can we find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death? How can we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society? The keenly observant and urgent poems of The Holy & Broken Bliss are grounded in daily existence, human tenderness, the rituals of a long marriage, and the poet's ongoing spiritual quest. In the middle of a world that seems to be breaking down into suffering and anger, the spare and direct lines of these poems, surrounded by silence, offer a kind of healing. The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accepting). They call us to ask ourselves how we locate joy and even laughter when despair is ever-present. The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, satiation, rage, and acknowledgment of our collective sicknesses, along with the sacred possibilities of love, communication with nature, the power of art, and the need to praise.

Paris Review Staff Pick

A Book Riot Must-Read Poetry Collection

Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness--how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.

Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology. --Publishers Weekly

Franny Choi combines technology and poetry to stunning effect. -BUSTLE

...these beautiful, fractal-like poems are meditations on identity and autonomy and offer consciousness-expanding forays into topics like violence and gender, love and isolation. -NYLON

Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Alice James' own Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraqi war veteran Brian Turner writes power-fully affecting poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty, and skill. Based on Turner's yearlong tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader, the poems offer gracefully rendered, unflinching description but, remarkably, leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. Here, Bullet is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.

This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life--three times on three different continents--and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it's possible to truly know one's parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a greencard marriage in order to live a normal life.

One of the myths of America is that Americans are newly formed, defiant of authority, and free from old-world traditions.

This book speaks to dark side of this myth: of the legacies that my parents wished to escape but instead carried with them: their distrust of government and their desire for an authoritarianism similar to the kind they had fled. Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point-of-view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American--that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to.

I Don't Want To Be Understood is a work of resistance against the conventional trans narrative, and a resistance against the idea that trans people should have to make themselves clear and understandable to others in other to deserve human rights. This is a compelling, urgent collection about the body and survival that asks how we learn to love in a culture where normal is defined by exclusion and discrimination.

These poems stretch from childhood to the present day--resisting typical narratives of self-discovery, resilience, and personal growth--and instead asks what it means to be granted or denied personhood by the world around you. It is a personal archive of a trans life laid out in all its messiness and unknowability, and is a book for anyone who has questioned why we place so many limitations on who gets to be considered a human being. These poems do not celebrate survival, but rather ask why transsexuals and other gender non-conforming people must fight so hard to survive in the first place.

A Finalist for a 2025 NAACP Image Award (Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry)

The raw poems inside Song of My Softening study the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. Poems open wide the questioning of how we express both love and pain, and how we view our bodies in society, offering themselves wholly, with sharpness and compassion.

Split crosses borders, exposing truths and dreams, violations of body and mind, aligning them until the deep push-pull of silence and song become a bridge. And here we cross over into a landscape where beauty interrogates, and we encounter a voice that refuses to let us off the hook.--Yusef Komunyakaa

Perhaps the writer's most difficult task is to render the catastrophic linked non-stories that comprise transgenerational trauma. Cathy Linh Che's collection Split accomplishes this nearly impossible challenge with uncommon grace and power. Each poem unwinds the cataclysm of personal wounding by making itself irresistibly beautiful. --LA Review

In this stunning debut, we follow one woman's profoundly personal account of sexual violence against the backdrop of cultural conflict deftly illustrated through her parents' experiences of the Vietnam War, immigration, and its aftermath. By looking closely at landscape and psyche, Split explores what happens when deep trauma occurs and seeks to understand what it means to finally become whole.

Pomegranate

pointing back.
I am Persephone,
a virgin abducted.

In the Underworld,
I starve a season
while the world wilts

into the ghost
of a summer backyard.
My hunger open and raw.

I lay next to a man
who did not love me&emdash;
my body a performance,

his body a single eye--
a director watching an actress
commanding her

to scintillate.

I was the clumsy acrobat.
When he came, I split open
like a pomegranate

and ate six of my own ruddy seeds.

I was the whipping boy.
Thorny, barbed wire
wound around a muscular heart.

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles, CA. She has received awards from The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Residency, and Poets & Writers. She is a founding editor of Paperbag.

The poems pay homage to horror movies, riff on childhood mad libs, and scatter Vietnamese diacritics over text about iPhones, neurotransmitters, phobias, substance abuse, fleas, and vomit. The stakes are high: these pages are preoccupied with suicide from the start, especially with the deaths and legacies of poet Anne Sexton and Hong Kong actor/singer Leslie Cheung, but they also find ways to smile and serve from fixed narratives, which is where the zombies come to the forefront, wandering through a world where our only shared experiences are fading memories of the final times we encountered chance momentousness in our lifetimes.

Macabre humor is combined with formal inventiveness.

Drawing from broad swaths of history, literature, and pop culture, the forms in this book and the rewriting of conventional zombie narratives enable the poems to avoid the presumptuousness of wisdom. The poems instead expend their energy through playfulness, unassuming declarative statements, and sparse questions.

Folks who love horror movies, especially the little theaters of love and friendship in these films, might appreciate the candor and arrangement of data in lieu of insight and wisdom.

Autobiomythography of sifts through Nigerian stories and mythologies, both inherited and invented, to explore the self, family, and nationhood.

In an attempt at decolonization, it is an exploration of what it means to be a subject--a person, yes, but also a literary subject--in the wake and afterlife of colonization. Intimate and personal, it is interested in figuring out how to wrest subjectivity--one's notion of self--from this failed project of modernity.

As the title suggests, the book spans and swirls together autobiography, mythology, biography, history (shared and personal), and geography. Amidst myriad speakers in the collection, there is a prominent speaker who, in search of his self/voice, tries on multiple voices--including Frederick Lugard's--and other personas: some closer to who/what he is, whatever that is, and others diametrically opposite.

Tangentially, this is a book about a son's relationship with his father. Poem after poem, the speakers interrogate the perceptions of identity, reality, and ownership, and in the pursuit of Truth they erode the boundaries between fact and fiction to show us the fragility of the lines we draw in service to these abstractions, of the beliefs we hold about them, of the acts we perform in service to them.

Captivating poems and visual art seek to bring comfort and solidarity to anyone living with Bipolar Disorder. In this remarkable debut, Shira Erlichman pens a love letter to Lithium, her medication for Bipolar Disorder. With inventiveness, compassion, and humor, she thrusts us into a world of unconventional praise. From an unexpected encounter with her grandmother's ghost, to a bubble bath with Bjӧrk, to her plumber's confession that he, too, has Bipolar, Erlichman buoyantly topples stigma against the mentally ill. These are necessary odes to self-acceptance, resilience, and the jagged path toward healing. With startling language, and accompanied by her bold drawings and collages, she gives us a sparkling, original view into what makes us human.

Multi-award winner, including a National Book Award, Jean Valentine published twelve full-length collections of poetry during her lifetime, and all of them--plus an entirely new, unpublished manuscript--can be found in this masterful collection of her life's work.

The new poems acknowledge the inevitability of death while tenderly musing on what remains from a world left behind. The poems have an intricate balance between the sadness of a life lived and illuminating how the remaining love is steadfast, irreversible, and abiding even as we transcend from this earth.

In her later years, Jean would write poems on napkins, random scraps of paper, and even on a typewriter, and those close to her would collect these writings and transcribe them into a Word document so they wouldn't be lost. Even Jean's therapist transcribed a poem that she spoke in one of their sessions--a poem that can be found in this new work. Jean was always writing poetry wherever inspiration struck her, even through the struggle of her declining health. It was Jean's wish that her work landed back at her first home, Alice James Books--back to her origin point as a writer, coming full circle.

In these last prayerful poems, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry. Spirits connect. Guides are everywhere as she is leaving all worlds behind. Love doesn't disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries. A poet of deep tenderness for everything living, from a dying cricket to her living and lost friends, Valentine is full of gratitude for this world, writing: This is happiness. Old life, / I'm glad, all my rubbed life/ I was found, / I was written on a wall in air. The reader too is full of gratitude for these moving last missives from a great poet.

Ada Limon states, The extraordinary poems of Jean Valentine have often existed in the between spaces, the caves, the secret rooms of the mind. They are gorgeous wonders and curiosities that bring us a new kind of light. The Collected Poems of Jean Valentine will no doubt serve as an essential handbook for anyone looking to lean into the knotty questions of human existence.

The speaker in Old Stranger: Poems begs to be seen and known, even when faced with her aging and her own mortality. Even as we age, there's a looming space for the mysterious stranger we embody without realizing it. Do we ever truly know who we are?

In the book, familiarity takes so many forms, as does the stranger: sometimes the stranger is a loved one, sometimes it is the speaker to themselves, and other times it's one who might seem like a stranger in the poem but turns out to be recognizable in one or more ways.

We are looking back, but at the same time we are so much in the present, there's an in-betweenness of the temporal that is so dreamlike and delicious. The poems are suspended and feel weightless even as their subjects are weighty and, at times, dark.

The family response to the sudden deaths of the speaker's two young nieces is at the center of Catherine Barnett's award-winning first collection. This series of elegies records the transit of grief, observing with an unflinching eye how a singular traumatic event can permanently alter our understanding of time, danger, the material world and family. Marked by clarity and restraint, these lyric poems narrate a suspenseful, wrenching story that explores the depths and limits of empathy.

These heart-breaking poems of an all-too-human life stay as absolute as the determined craft which made them. There is finally neither irony nor simple despair in what they record. Rather, it is the far deeper response of witness, of recognizing what must be acknowledged and of having the courage and the care to say so. -Robert Creeley

In the aftermath of best-selling Here, Bullet, Brian Turner deftly illuminates existence as both easily extinguishable and ultimately enduring. These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.