As restless, reckless, and precise as the Colt revolver for which it is named, Robyn Schiff's ""Revolver"" 'repeats fire without reloading' as it reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later.A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren's silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection's exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can't be contained as what can.This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman's knife also described here, ""Revolver"" keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation - 'Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.'

Michele Glazer’s poems take on questions of being and value, exploring not just `what’ is, but `how’ it is. The poems trouble borders—between self and other, old and young, sick and well, stranger and intimate; between physical states in processes of decay; and between line and phrase, sentence and interruption, prose and poem, resisting the desire for something irrefutable with an abiding scepticism. The poems are drawn to missteps in perception and in language, those fractures that promise to crack open a surface to yield some other, greater meaning: “What is looked at is changed - what is looked for is gone.” From this collision of passion and severity come poems that are strange and darkly beautiful.

Anthem Speed affirms Christopher Bolin’s emergence as a singular stylist in twenty-first century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic, and visionary, Bolin’s poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: “among / the disinformation of the distress feeds,” Bolin writes, “a pilot hears his coordinates / being called by other planes.”This collection evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water, and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Bolin tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms, and mountainsides, and envisions—with animal acuity—a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths.

The lyrics in All Black Everything shine with work and the freedom of young people. Full of menace and humor, objects of warfare and luxury consumption are transformed with Shane Book’s blade of caustic irony against the worldwide nihilism of cash payments, guns, and disease. In their syncopated, slangy, and musically enjambed flow of the digital world, a poet known for singular collections has produced his most inventive and uncompromising volume yet.The political sublime of Caribbean poetics ebb and flood in this contagious new voice of borrowings, hijacking the trap house. This is an original collection, daring to assume the voice of the system and its death drives, having fun, mixing it up, throwing hands too. If old pirates rob I, then Shane Book has stolen back something from them. All Black Everything is a redemption song.

Salms navigates the ancient, vexed lyric landscape of the biblical psalm, where gratitude is arrived at through complaint and yearning is smuggled in alongside tribute. Formally restless and diverse, Aaron McCollough’s style moves from flinty Anglo-Norman terseness through folktale to long-lined, journal-like confessional. The poems’ sounds and forms bind to the divine histories of the Western lyric tradition at points of fragility and potential disintegration.

Jessica Laser has given her generation a voice and a name in this masterful, funny, and heartbreaking collection, The Goner School. Members of this school, despairing and hopeful, count themselves among the self-aware, trauma-informed inheritors of a warming, warring planet. Childhood, the gym, plant medicine ceremonies, PhD programs, Jews, evangelicals, everyone you’ve slept with, Lake Michigan, the Bay Area, William James, and Taylor Swift may seem incongruous, but they all take place in one world from which, try as we might, there is no escape.

CALIBA’s 2025 Golden Poppy Book Award Winner, PoetryThe shadow of mothering has never been given a richer, fuller, more debased vision than in Youna Kwak’s For This and Other Cruelties. Kwak casts a cold eye on the splendid and cruel intransigence of maternal paradoxes in all their impossible double binds, monstrous pleasures, and profane mystifications. Shifting between lyric and prose poems, this collection throws slanted light on the ineffability of our deepest attachments, envisioning a world where mother is “a creature whose only enemy could be human.” Kwak brings us face to face with the irreconcilable facts of being mother, mothered, and alive.

As restless, reckless, and precise as the Colt revolver for which it is named, Robyn Schiff's ""Revolver"" 'repeats fire without reloading' as it reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later.A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren's silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection's exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can't be contained as what can.This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman's knife also described here, ""Revolver"" keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation - 'Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.'

Michele Glazer’s poems take on questions of being and value, exploring not just `what’ is, but `how’ it is. The poems trouble borders—between self and other, old and young, sick and well, stranger and intimate; between physical states in processes of decay; and between line and phrase, sentence and interruption, prose and poem, resisting the desire for something irrefutable with an abiding scepticism. The poems are drawn to missteps in perception and in language, those fractures that promise to crack open a surface to yield some other, greater meaning: “What is looked at is changed - what is looked for is gone.” From this collision of passion and severity come poems that are strange and darkly beautiful.

Anthem Speed affirms Christopher Bolin’s emergence as a singular stylist in twenty-first century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic, and visionary, Bolin’s poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: “among / the disinformation of the distress feeds,” Bolin writes, “a pilot hears his coordinates / being called by other planes.”This collection evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water, and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Bolin tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms, and mountainsides, and envisions—with animal acuity—a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths.

The lyrics in All Black Everything shine with work and the freedom of young people. Full of menace and humor, objects of warfare and luxury consumption are transformed with Shane Book’s blade of caustic irony against the worldwide nihilism of cash payments, guns, and disease. In their syncopated, slangy, and musically enjambed flow of the digital world, a poet known for singular collections has produced his most inventive and uncompromising volume yet.The political sublime of Caribbean poetics ebb and flood in this contagious new voice of borrowings, hijacking the trap house. This is an original collection, daring to assume the voice of the system and its death drives, having fun, mixing it up, throwing hands too. If old pirates rob I, then Shane Book has stolen back something from them. All Black Everything is a redemption song.

Salms navigates the ancient, vexed lyric landscape of the biblical psalm, where gratitude is arrived at through complaint and yearning is smuggled in alongside tribute. Formally restless and diverse, Aaron McCollough’s style moves from flinty Anglo-Norman terseness through folktale to long-lined, journal-like confessional. The poems’ sounds and forms bind to the divine histories of the Western lyric tradition at points of fragility and potential disintegration.

Jessica Laser has given her generation a voice and a name in this masterful, funny, and heartbreaking collection, The Goner School. Members of this school, despairing and hopeful, count themselves among the self-aware, trauma-informed inheritors of a warming, warring planet. Childhood, the gym, plant medicine ceremonies, PhD programs, Jews, evangelicals, everyone you’ve slept with, Lake Michigan, the Bay Area, William James, and Taylor Swift may seem incongruous, but they all take place in one world from which, try as we might, there is no escape.

CALIBA’s 2025 Golden Poppy Book Award Winner, PoetryThe shadow of mothering has never been given a richer, fuller, more debased vision than in Youna Kwak’s For This and Other Cruelties. Kwak casts a cold eye on the splendid and cruel intransigence of maternal paradoxes in all their impossible double binds, monstrous pleasures, and profane mystifications. Shifting between lyric and prose poems, this collection throws slanted light on the ineffability of our deepest attachments, envisioning a world where mother is “a creature whose only enemy could be human.” Kwak brings us face to face with the irreconcilable facts of being mother, mothered, and alive.