10 Books for Fall Reading
Revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness, and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to “the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” and to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”

-New Directions
Evolution , Eileen Myles’s first all-new collection of poetry since 2011, circles back to classic themes such as their love of dogs, loneliness, and parental loss. These poems, however, are also immediate and pressingly contemporary. Myles is conducting an intimate exchange with the government, peering into their computer and saying hello to whoever might be surveying them.”— Lambda Literary

“Rich in vernacular and innovative line breaks, these poems ask to be read out loud . . . Myles crafts poems of a personal nature in Evolution. In very short lines, they are also reflective, contemporary, political, erotic and even aphoristic . . . In a bold collection of poems, Eileen Myles reinforces their justifiable fame as the unabashed voice of what’s left of New York’s downtown edginess.”—

Xhevdet Bajraj is a poet, dramatist, translator, and professor. His works of poetry, which total more than twenty volumes, have been translated into English, German, Spanish, Danish, Serbian, Slovenian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Polish. He has been the recipient of many awards and honors, among them, the prize for best book of poetry (both in 1993 and 2000), conferred by the Kosovo Writers’ Society; the Goliardos International Prize for Poetry in 2004; the 2010 Katarina Josipi award for best original drama written in Albanian; first prize at the Festival of Monodrama, Vlorë, Albania in 2013; and the award for the best book of poetry in 2015, presented at the Prishtina International Book Fair.
In May of 1999, Bajraj and his family were deported from Kosovo. Through the International Parliament of Writers and their program for persecuted writers, he was granted asylum and a fellowship at the Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl in Mexico. In the years since, he has become a full professor of creative writing and literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico City and been inducted into the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In a parallel artistic universe, he appeared as a co-star of Aro Tolbukhin, In the Mind of the Killer, an Ariel award-winning film and Mexico’s submission to the 2003 Oscars.


The January Children  depicts displacement and longing while also questioning accepted truths about geography, history, nationhood, and home. The poems mythologize family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan’s history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Several of the poems speak to the late Egyptian singer Abdelhalim Hafez, who addressed many of his songs to the  asmarani —an Arabic term of endearment for a brown-skinned or dark-skinned person. Elhillo explores Arabness and Africanness and the tensions generated by a hyphenated identity in those two worlds.

No longer content to accept manmade borders, Elhillo navigates a new and reimagined world. Maintaining a sense of wonder in multiple landscapes and mindscapes of perpetually shifting values, she leads the reader through a postcolonial narrative that is equally terrifying and tender, melancholy and defiant. 

-University of Nebraska P
“That’s how one human leaves us” ends the first poem of Dara Wier’s startling new collection, a surprisingly raw and fluid exploration of grief. Wier records her thoughts with clarity and immediacy, showing us the unraveling and reconstruction of her world and consciousness after a significant loss.
- Wave Books
Brenda Hillman begins her new book in a place of mourning and listening that is deeply transformative. By turns plain and transcendent, these poems meditate on trees, bacteria, wasps, buildings, roots, and stars, ending with twinned elegies and poems of praise that open into spaces that are both magical and archetypal for human imagination: forests and seashores. As always, Hillman’s vision is entirely original, her forms inventive and playful. At times the language turns feral as the poet feels her way toward other consciousnesses, into planetary time. This is poetry as a discipline of love and service to the world, whose lines shepherd us through grief and into an ethics of active resistance. Hillman’s prior books include Practical Water and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire , which received the Griffin Prize for Poetry . Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days is a visionary and critically important work for our time.

Wesleyan University Press
Art can’t shield our bodies or stabilize the earth’s climate, but Evie Shockley’s " semiautomatic " insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century’s inescapable evidence of the terms of black life—not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, "semiautomatic" culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.

Wesleyan University Press


Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”




Celan, born in 1920 in Czernowitz (now the Ukraine and Rumania), was raised Jewish; his mother instilled in him a love of German language and culture. In 1941 he was sent by Nazi troops to a labor camp where he learned, the following year, that the SS had shot and killed both his parents. After the war he settled in Paris and wrote in German; in 1970 he drowned himself in the Seine.  Breathturn , published in 1967, represents late Celan, a departure from lush and near-surrealistic poems to tightly edited ones filled with neologisms, twisted syntax, and telescoping of words. Behind the linguistic dexterity is a concern with paradox and the play between language and thought, conscious and unconscious, sensual and intellectual. This translation -- of poems which, with coined words of multi-layered meaning often culled from technical sources, are challenging in the original German -- is a tour de force, preserving Celan's ingeniousness and the poems' deepmost ardor. 
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.  --  From The Boston Review


Indecency  is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful—the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

Coffee House Press

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