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We feel that to "better" American poetry is to jam dominant systems of taste to the best of our abilities, and to resignify the very phrase "American poetry" with the languages that it so desperately lacks. We intend to center voices of resistance, subjectivities that emerge from the radical margins, artists whose Americanness transcends nationalism and other borders, perspectives historically denied institutional backing--in short, poets and poetries that are urgent and necessary but do not get along nicely with Power. "Soaring and raw, these poems 'better' American Poetry by battering down racial pieties of our white neoliberal nation. This anthology is an explosive Cri de Coeur of these times." - Cathy Park Hong "Resistance and action have always been key elements of progress, and I'm so encouraged that Bettering American Poetry exists and super humbled to be a part of it. We need this poetry, these voices, this perspective--and the poems are just really freaking good!" - Tommy Pico "Bettering American Poetry is verse of the most urgent kind. In this moment of rising fear and resentment these poets write with a deep regard for all peoples. This is the kind of work that will take us through the next 4 years and the next 100." - Nate Marshall
In this his fourth collection, award-winning poet Kyle Dargan examines the mechanics of the heart and mind as they are weathered by loss. Following a spate of deaths among family and friends, Dargan chooses to present not color-negative elegies but self-portraits that capture what of these departed figures remains within him. Amid this processing of mortality, it becomes clear that he has arrived at a turning point as a writer and a man. As the title suggests, Dargan aspires toward an unflinching honesty. These poems do not purport to possess life s answers or seek to employ language to mask what they do not know. Dargan confesses as a means of reaching out to the nomadic human soul and inviting it to accompany him on a walk toward the unknown."
In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself—confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY “Outstanding . . . the poetry in these pages is intelligent, lyrical, as invested in the past as the present and future with witty nods to pop culture.” —Roxane Gay, author of Hunger “I’ve never read anything like it. Truly a sublime experience.” —Jason Reynolds, author of Ain’t Burned All the Bright A groundbreaking collection about Afropioneerism past and present from Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and New York Times bestselling author Rio Cortez From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures. In poems that range from wry, tongue-in-cheek observations about contemporary life to more nuanced meditations on her ancestors—some of the earliest Black pioneers to settle in the western United States after Reconstruction—Golden Ax invites readers to re-imagine the West, Black womanhood, and the legacies that shape and sustain the pursuit of freedom.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY The astonishing second collection by the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away? In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels,” with Corral’s seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral’s place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.
Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. Nothing that is complicated may ever be simplified, but rather catalogued, cherished, exposed. THE MISSING MUSEUM spans art, physics & the spiritual, including poems that converse with the sublime and ethereal. They act through ekphrasis, apostrophe & alchemical conjuring. They amass, pile, and occasionally flatten as matter is beaten into text. Here is a kind of directory of the world as it rushes into extinction, in order to preserve and transform it at once.
The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man—available for the first time in the United States “i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative.” Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is “a prayer against breaking,” writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. “By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we’ve been waiting for.” Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside.” Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.” Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn—sometimes all at once.
Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. In Lebanon during the civil war, a teenage boy and his family witness leveled cities, displaced civilians, the aftermath of massacres. Resources are scarce and uncertainty is everywhere. What does it mean to survive? To leave behind a home torn apart by war? To carry the burden of what you've seen across an ocean? These poems follow a man in search of security as he leaves his country for America, falls in love, and becomes a single father to three daughters. Through the perspective of one man, his family, and even his country, SET TO MUSIC A WILDFIRE explores the violence of living, the guilt of surviving, the loneliness of faith, and the impossible task of belonging.
Ocean Vuong meets Natalie Diaz in dreamlike, blood-soaked verse that explores the cost of memory and mourning. Swallowed Light begins at the opened clearing of myth, at the mouth of history. In his breathtaking debut poetry collection, Michael Wasson writes into the gaps left by a legacy of erasure—the wholly American fracture of colonialism—where the indigenous tongue is determined to bloom against its own vanishing. These poems mourn and build with pattern and intricacy, intuition and echo, calling ocean and heartbreak and basalt, monsters and bullets and bones, until they form one vibrant song.