Was it Jung who speculated that alcoholism might be an attempt at a material solution for a spiritual problem? Kaveh Akbar seems able to contain both--he's a demotic, as well as a spiritual, poet (the only type of either I trust). Each word in this little book might rise up from somewhere deep in the earth, but they turn into stars. - Nick Flynn

In Islam prayer is not transactional, poetry is not divorced from the quotidian and portraiture is embraced only in the abstract. And yet here in Kaveh Akbar's book, entreaty is earnest, aimed at the human and particular more often than the divine but at the same time the language and form elevate themselves to the fevered register of desperation. Yes, sure, fine, you would think that a Muslim writing about being a drunk would have to adopt unconventional approaches, but drunkenness in the Islamic literary tradition is a long and time-honored metaphor. For what? Abandonment to God, a cessation of the self--but not so here; no. Here it's real, it's coarse, it's dangerous. The reason we Muslims do not pray for things is that it is similarly dangerous for one to call God's attention onto oneself. But for Kaveh Akbar, whose very name means 'poetry, ' it is a risk every poem takes with gusto. And speaking purely for myself, these poems give me life because 'for so long every step I've taken/ has been from one tongue to another.' Be careful, little brother. God's got His eye on you now. - Kazim Ali

Subject to Change is an anthology celebrating the work of five poets who are unapologetically trans: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, beyza ozer, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Kay Ulanday Barrett. Featuring poetry and interviews, this collection is a testament to the power of trans poets speaking to one another--about family, race, class, disability, religion, and the body. This anthology includes a range of trans experiences and poetics, expanding the possibilities of what it means to be both trans and a writer in the twenty-first century.

-----

Subject to Change is revolutionary, a culture and power border-smasher & a piercing examination of brilliant, painful, and transcendent Trans consciousness and experience. It is personal document, a set of trans community-journey notations and an at-the-edge howl of love for love. Each poet goes beyond poetry, that is, beyond being the gendered & genre-ed. Each writer calls out a manifesto against death, against being pulled apart, against frozen progressive social movements and the homelessness of being. What does Freedom, Bravery, Self-realization look like? Enter these five poets--their questions, their investigations, their bodies on paper, their humanity. A superb diamond, in motion. I love this book. You will too.

-- Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, 2016-17

A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures, Kay Ulanday Barrett's More Than Organs questions whatever wholeness means for bodies always in transit, for the safeties and dangers they silo. These poems remix people of color as earthbenders, replay the choreography of loss after the 2015 Pulse shooting, and till joy from the cosmic sweetness of a family's culinary history. Barrett works to build / a shelter // of / everyone / they] meet, from aunties to the legendary Princess Urduja to their favorite air sign. More Than Organs tattoos grief across the knuckles of its left hand and love across the knuckles of its right, leaving the reader physically changed by the intensity of experience, longing, strength, desire, and the need, above all else, to survive.

An essay in poems, The Donkey Elegies closely examines an animal's history, tracing how one species hauled the stones that built our civilizations, plowed the fields that fed generations, and carted soldiers and weapons from war to war. The poems undo the brunt end of every lewd joke and unearth the sacred origins of a creature we rarely consider except as melancholy cartoon or dumb, stubborn brute. In these twenty-five linked pieces, a truth is made real: that we must cherish each living thing, each animal, each human being for all their worth.

--

In The Donkey Elegies, Nickole Brown sets out to cleanse our wounded sight, nourish our withered assumptions, and crack open the narrow cage of our souls. By restoring dignity to our misunderstood kin, she asks us to explore along with her the origins of humans' selfserving stories and reflect on the ways clich s of language and thought perpetuate violence and diminishment. True seeing, addressing occlusions of one's own moral sight, requires a concerted vulnerability on the part of the writer, and here, Brown's gorgeous language is infused with radical tenderness, authentic surprise, and restless curiosity. As acts of rescue, reclamation, and repair, her poems serve as extended heart-songs to all of us, and especially to the least of us.

-- Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers and Rough Likeness

--

We no longer live lives close to those necessary others who are here with us, the animals, and so there is in us a great lack--of wisdom, of empathy, of attention. For this, Nickole Brown's book-length poem The Donkey Elegies might well be first remedy. With great wisdom and empathy, and with exquisite attention to history, culture, language, gender, memory, and the beautiful, weary world about us, Brown allows us to truly see and for a blessed
moment be with that most humble of beasts, and in so doing she challenges us to turn to the holinesses in our own worlds, to hold them close--closer yet.

-- Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and When We Were Birds

In the lurid and ash-bound dreamscapes of Ian Felice's The Moon Over Edgar, sleep conjures the dangerous and darling vertex of surprise. These linked sonnets chart the uncanny pursuits of an insurance salesman named Edgar, inviting us into realms of the strange-fairy tales, prophecies, premonitions-with a powerful sense of beauty and candor, ultimately delivering a fantastic and frightening world of infinite possibility. By the book's end, we find ourselves in Edgar's shoes, asking: Well-dressed skeletons, spinning carelessly, / Transport me to that happy place.

Bushra Rehman's debut collection singes in its interrogation of the American dream while capturing the lives of a neighborhood in transition. These sly, adept poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and wonder. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. Simply and profoundly, her book is a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving.

- Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and Imago

Savannah Sipple's debut is proof of a woman rising--up from the strung-out, Christ-haunted carcinogens and violences of a land stripped of its coal; up from
nine-hours on her feet followed by the extra work back home of picking gravel out of pinto beans; up from a return visit to the honey-suckle sweetness of good
church folks who whisper 'backslider' and 'quare.' Purging shame with every line, these poems love the Kentucky from which they rise as much as they reject the
self-hatred that place instilled in a girl neither thin nor straight, and ultimately (and yes, even miraculously), emerge blatant about desire and body-proud. 'I want to
be marbled, so that if you were to slice me, you'd know what a good cut I am, ' Sipple writes. Open this book to any poem to get a taste of exactly what she means.
- Nickole Brown, author of Sister & Fanny Says

Fire--its light and passion, is an apt metaphor for these rich, compelling, and deeply felt poems. It takes its form in many ways in these resonant, powerful, and completely riveting calls for justice, kindness, and attention to those parts of ourselves that illumine the dark we live in today. These are poems that activate every page, with guttural imagery and sure craft of the form. Whether limning the course of a deep love, providing a safe space to children learning poetry for the first time, shouting the proud acknowledgment of the body, or examining the ruins of terror's aftermath, Kai Coggin proposes--no, urges--that we use that inherent fire within us, to grow not only our own lives, but to illumine and help the lives of others. These are poems of protest and praise, poems of a unique and adamant voice, who shows us what we can hope for, as well as what we can truly achieve in loving one another. - Philip F. Clark, author of The Carnival of Affection

Poetry must be honest and precise, yes--but it must also dare us to see what we are invited not to see and say what seems easier not to say. In Killing Summer, Sarah Browning writes what is difficult but essential in a time when buffoonery in our nation's highest office tempts us to shake our heads and close our eyes. Perhaps the first step in asserting the need for a new paradigm is finding the words that reveal the brokenness of the current one. These are those words. With both tender ferocity and subtle elegance, this book helps to sustain us. - TIM SEIBLES

Nickole Brown writes in a voice that is simultaneously vernacular and lyrical. It is a voice thick with the humidity and whirring cicadas of Kentucky, but the poems are dangerous, smelling of the crisp cucumber scent of a copperhead about to strike. Epistolary in nature, and with a novel's arc, Sister is a story that begins with a teen giving birth to a baby girl--the narrator--during a tornado, and in some ways, that tornado never ends.

In the hands of a lesser poet, this debut collection would be a standard-issue confession, a melodramatic exercise in anger and self-pity. But melodrama requires simple villains and victims, and there is neither in this richly complex portrait. Ultimately, Sister is more about the narrator's transgressions and failures, more about her relationships to her sister and their mother than about that which divided them. With equal parts sass and sorrow, these poems etch out survival won not with tender-hearted reflections but by smoking cigarettes through fly-specked screens, by using cans of aerosol hair spray as makeshift flamethrowers, and, most cruelly, by leaving home and trying to forget her sister entirely. From there, each poem is a letter of explanation and apology to that younger sister she never knew.

Sister recounts a return to a place that Brown never truly left. It is a book of forgiveness, of seeking what is beyond mere survival, of finding your way out of a place of poverty and abuse only to realize that you must go back again, all the way back to where everything began--that warm, dark nest of mother.

Karl Tierney was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana. He became an Eagle Scout in 1973. Poetry fascinated him, even as a teenager. He received a Bachelor's Degree in English from Emory University in 1980 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1983. That same year, he moved to San Francisco, where he dedicated himself to poetry. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a 1992 fellow at Yaddo. Though unpublished in book form during his lifetime, his poems appeared in many of the best literary magazines of the period, including the Berkeley Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He published more than 50 poems in magazines and anthologies before his death. In December of 1994 he became sick with AIDS and took his own life in October of 1995 by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. He was 39 years old.

The book that Karl Tierney didn't live to see has now been published nearly a quarter century after his tragic death. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? is a witty, biting, well-crafted time machine to another era and a reminder of the talent and promise of a generation of artists taken from us too soon by HIV/AIDS.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? is the second title in the Arkansas Queer Poet Series as published by Sibling Rivalry Press.

---

I met Karl Tierney in the 80s, when we were both in Bob Gluck's legendary gay men's workshop held in the back room of Small Press Traffic, in San Francisco's Noe Valley. That workshop, like most back rooms, made for instant intimacy. Have You Seen This Man?, skillfully edited and introduced by Jim Cory, shows us the full range of Karl's talents. Despite its mordant provenance this is a fun book, radiant with emotive power. - KEVIN KILLIAN

-----

Reading Karl Tierney's collection is like entering a portal into San Francisco in the 80s and 90s, a time when it was still dirty and sexy and alive, even as men across the city were dying. With sharp intimacy, Tierney's poems had me laughing and crying in recognition for all that we lost. And I'm deeply grateful to the editor and publisher for rescuing his work from the dustbins of history. This is vital reading. - ALYSIA ABBOTT

Like a prose version of a chatty Frank O'Hara poem, Tim Dlugos' New York Diary is dense with the goings-on of a crush of proper names we normally might not care much about. Yet-again like O'Hara-Tim, in his accurately super-speedy rendering of the summer and fall of the now-historical year of 1976, makes them and theirs magical, intimate, and fully alive. -Brad Gooch

Tim Dlugos was one of the smartest, wittiest, most socially dynamic presences on the New York poetry scene of the 1970s and beyond. And these diary entries capture his voice at its most intimate and perceptive. As well as displaying the deep delight he took in being a gay man and an out poet at a time and in a place where that was finally seen not as transgressive but as celebratory. Well, a little of both. As with New York poet and predecessor Frank O'Hara, many of Tim's friends thought they were his best friend, I certainly did. He had the ability to make you confess things to him and look for his approval. Which usually meant his matching your confession with his own. Everyone I know who knew him loved him, and many of us adored him. These glimpses into his life and mind show why. -Michael Lally

In the resplendent Revelations, Ruben Quesada grants us a voice that feels both current and ancient. Continuous in its current of devotion, rich in its understanding of the ways we survive both beauty and difficulty, the soft-edged sharpness and sensuality of these poems feel seamlessly at home alongside several of Quesada's elegant translations of the incomparable Luis Cernuda. 'Already the jacarandas have started to push their tongues against the window, ' and we as readers are invited to inhabit that space between outside and in--where the best poetry conveys us. -- KHADIJAH QUEEN, author of I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On

I trust Luther Hughes with the body. In Touched, Hughes is careful with it, he handles the body as deliberate and tender as one would a poem. The bodies here, be they black, queer, animal, living, or recovering, are given an authority only possible in poems, and only executed right in the handles of a capable poem. Hughes is more than capable though. Here is the first announcement of a bad one, y'all. And I mean black people bad. Good bad. Bad bad. When you reached the bladder, / there was God. Yep. Hughes said that. I didn't know I was waiting on someone to say all these things until I opened them up and lived them. And it took living to make these poems. And it is our pleasure to live in them now. Touched is only one thing this book will leave you. Let it leave you these ways also: awed, floored, stunned, healed, shaken, still, better, clean, ready to read it again.
- Danez Smith