"Cynthia Manick's latest is a playlist of everyday life, introverted thoughts, familial bonds, and social commentary. In piercing language, she traces the circle of life for a narrator who dares to exist between youthful remembrances and adulthood realities. Each poem in No Sweet Without Brine is a reminder that a hint of sorrow makes the celebration and recognition of the glory of Blackness in all ways, and through all people, that much sweeter."...

"In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection's center sits "On the Overnight from Agadir," a poem that chronicles the poet's survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother's...

Karisma Price's stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone "Autocorrects 'Nigga' to Night'," If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence--"We...

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...

A Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. In Derricotte's own words: "How do you gain access to the / power of parts of yourself you / abhor, and make them sing / with beauty, tenderness, and compassion? / This is the record of fifty years / of victories in the reclamation / of a poet's voice." The story of Toi Derricotte is a hero's odyssey. It is the journey of a poetic voice that in each book earns her way to home, to her own commanding...