21st Century Poets – serie

Lambda Award-winning poet Remi Recchia's second full-length poetry collection chronicles the speaker's journey with alcoholism, gender identity, and faith. Weaving between drunkenness and grace, loss and desire, the book asks us what a man looks like and what he'll do when the lights go down. While Addiction Apocalypse is located in many places—including sports stadiums, bars, beaches, IHOP, France, and the Mid- and Southwest regions at large—at its basic, like all good poetry, it is located in the trembling, beating human heart.

Distributary picks up where the speaker from Quiver left off and delves deeper in that speaker’s concerns and fears around fatherhood, cultural violence and his daughter’s illness. It is a book of sirens and ghosts, of time collapse. How many moments tangle and spark in the waking moments of our lives. It houses a grainy melancholia, paradigms of grief. Houses hope.

Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell explores the boundaries, overlaps, and portals of memory and seeking. Lassell’s collection is wildly surprising at every turn, greeting readers with visceral childhood memories, gritty landscapes of climate collapse, a quirky neighbor transfixed on love, a sexual predator who breaks into homes, a bat that disrupts sleep, a llama that bites off a man’s ear, a dog that eats the family’s Thanksgiving turkey, farmers condemning their machinery to rot in fields, a cow carcass that washes up on a city’s waterfront park, a hooligan feeding possums trash, and pollen everywhere. Taken together, Frame Inside a Frame is a constellation eyed toward the exploration of distance and meanings inherent within distance and proximity.

In This Distance examines the relationship between distance and desire, the erotic and the ecstatic, pleasure and paradise. Esther Perel, Audre Lorde and the biblical figure of Eve co-exist in this collection, offering their real and imagined insight as the speaker grapples with questions such as: do we need distance in order to maintain desire? Where is paradise? What constitutes an Eden?

Randall James Tyrone’s debut collection City of Dis is a searing exploration of contemporary existence intertwined with medieval notions of damnation, invoking Dante’s “Inferno” to craft a modern-day epic. Doubling as a novel-in-verse, City of Dis follows the unnamed protagonist as they navigate a cityscape that is both a circle of hell and also the urban sprawl of 21st-century America. Amidst the cacophony of sirens, construction, and hurricanes fueled by climate change, Tyrone weaves a tapestry where pop culture, late-stage capitalism, and the daily struggles imposed by inequities of race and class in this urban inferno collide with arcane theology, existential dread, and something like divine comedy. Through forms ranging from epistolary to litany, Tyrone’s speaker charts every chaotic inch of this dystopian landscape, encountering Dante himself as they confront the personification of Suicide. City of Dis stands not only as a vivid critique of modern society but also as a haunting testament to resilience in the face of spiritual and environmental decay.

Critics describe The Cave, the long-awaited second collection from award-winning poet Ryan Vine, as “powerful and completely realized,” “profound and enduring,” and “utterly masterful and deeply moving.” The Cave contains haunting meditations on fatherhood, fearless contemplations of place and lineage, clear-eyed examinations of generational trauma, and moves—from narrative to lyric to narrative to lyric—toward a more perfect and complete clarity. The poet Dobby Gibson writes: “The Cave is an unforgettable contribution to the poetry of paterfamilias written from deep inside “love’s austere and lonely offices,” as Robert Hayden put it. These poems are indelible as scars—and just as full of ancient wisdom.”

The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey confronts religious devotion as something you grasp and something that seizes you. Rooted in the landscape of West Michigan, these poems seek traces of the divine with keen attention to the natural world, science, and personal history. Yet amid ordinary lives and crises of faith, revelation descends unexpectedly, talons extended in frightful welcome. This book offers readers the taste of belief, its texture, and the way its convicted sight both distorts and illuminates. By turns meditative, ecstatic, and snarky, Alex Mouw's poems capture the sermons and lamentations, the preachers and seekers, the politics and piety of midwestern evangelical Christianity.

Is Is Enough begins in heritage and harmony then breaks apart into the strange world and tautly stretched emotions that accompany dementia. The collection flickers through and locates in distorted realities, loss, and gentling. By haunting the past, the author reweaves and reorients against a continual vanishing. Ordinary situations begin to seem like joy in reverse, a treatise on the honesty of the present.

In American Experiment, Aaron Baker embarks on a harrowing odyssey through the depths of the American subconscious. Guided by the spirit of Walt Whitman (a character of somewhat suspect motives in this iteration), Baker's Dantean journey leads him through an ever more perilous underworld of American histories, myths, and mythmakers. Chronicling the pair's transcontinental passage from west to east (a kind of reverse Manifest Destiny), Baker offers a radical reimagining of Whitman's legacy, American poetry, and the role of the poet while inviting us to confront echoes of the nation's past and the enduring complexities of its present. With formal innovations that mirror the fluidity of Whitman's verse, Baker adds qualities of verbal subtlety and formal nimbleness perhaps more typical of Whitman's then mostly unknown contemporary, Emily Dickinson. American Experiment offers both narrative sweep and lyrical intensity, engaging deeply with literary history while relentlessly pushing the boundaries of poetic technique and form. This journey through hell is also a sustained meditation on the soul of America.

Holy the Body wrestles with ghosts and shadows, discovers Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Tennessee and Jesus's tears in a trick of light. At once dark and humorous, these poems confront the religiosity of the US and explore the experience of faithful doubt, as God himself "goes under the knife." The poems in this manuscript take the reader through the brutalities of the author losing his mother to melanoma and of resuscitating his own father, with "the cracking of sternum beneath my hands." The collection chisels out a hard-earned language for the sacred, one which proclaims that the beauty we find in the midst of uncertainties is itself a solace that, as one of the final poems in the manuscript affirms, "is more than enough."

A Brief History of Accidental Inventions explores the emotionally fraught territory of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood. By equal measures harrowing and humorous, the collection chronicles the speaker's freefall into postpartum depression against the backdrop of American gun culture and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. The poems peer keenly into texts from Kristeva to Kim Kardashian's Instagram account as the speaker searches for clarity in her new role as a mother. With a voice both lyrical and brash, Craft confronts challenges of embodiment and violence alongside the overwhelming experience of maternal love.21st Century Poets, No. 47