A librarian in Buffalo, Edric Mesmer is the author of two full-length collections, POEMS: now & then (BlazeVOX [books], 2020) and of monodies and homophony (Outriders Poetry Project, 2015). He edits the pamphlet series Among the Neighbors, dedicated to conversations about little magazines and small presses. His own recent writings on small press cultures include paged like coral reefs (eohippus labs, tract series, 2023) and “Asterisms Among the Magazines” in the Post45 Contemporaries cluster on little magazines (2023). He’s thankful to everyone who reads these poems.

The lyrical poems in Wonderwork explore the pressing questions of human meaning-making, reflecting on grief, spirituality and memory. The collection offers intimate and necessary moments of curiosity, hope and possibility in a world that is at once both heartbreaking and beautiful, difficult and joyful. Drawing subtle parallels between the landscapes of self and place, Wonderwork undertakes a personal search for healing that echoes a larger planetary need for wholeness.

I had a blast swerving through this preposterous Proustian epic of poly-simultaneity. Tony Trigilio uptwists his cheezy, tee-vee subject—goth daytime soap Dark Shadows—into epiphanies of love and loss, but also fashion and history. In its own weird, OCD way, The Punishment Book vampires time itself beyond the boundaries of the undead. —Jack Skelley

Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series is an intoxicating brew of quasis: scientific, esoteric, bibliographic, geologic, lettristic. Who knows what poetry lurks in the heart of codes? It’s as if we are privy to the history of knowledge from its other side, before as much as after. These poems are an explosion in a pataquerics factory. —Charles Bernstein

Koronas makes me see words that aren’t there. Her gnōstos is mantic, and her Sophia—the liquid crystal wombed God—inseminates with ink, strumous as an ethotic alley (i.e., a post-bodied diachronic polysemic strangulation). gnōstos is our proleptic apocalypse; “the last Oedipus/licks his gonads.” —Tom Prime

"Eros, like Lear, must sometimes wander unhoused across a cruel landscape. How wonderful, then, to read the poetry of Cassandra Manzolillo, there to find desire sheltered in its brightest insouciance and in the full flourish of actual yearning. There is a tireless, guileless presence in these poems that I find both admirable and original." —Donald Revell

1992. The war rages in Bosnia and Croatia. In Slovenia, which has escaped the war’s horrors on its own soil, a high school graduate finds herself profoundly shattered. Unable to transition from the safe environment of the high school to the loosely structured student life, struggling to come to grips with an unsuccessful relationship and tormented by her helplessness in the face of the war, she embarks on a harrowing search for the meaning of her existence. But the streets of Ljubljana leave her empty-handed. Until something changes. A visitor comes by.

American Outrage provides an innovative approach to the seemingly intractable problem of gun violence in the United States. Fresh and moving, yet cerebral and somber. At a time when powerful voices are most needed, H. L. Hix has answered the call.  — Louis Klarevas

William Huhn’s Bachelor Holiday is a bittersweet, multi-dimensional recollection—of past loves, historical mysteries, moments of weather, of philosophical obsession—whose subject range and command of language dazzles. —Rachel Abramowitz

In Tender Travis Cebula transforms raw, emotional experiences into preserved moments of artful reflection. —Janaka Stucky

Like W. E. B. Du Bois finding solace in his library, Norton moves back and across “the color line,” sits with Shakespeare, Fanny Howe, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, etc., and they wince not, welcoming her into their esteemed company. —Tyrone Williams

Stephen Bett’s new book SongBu®st sounds like a ship-wrecked wit (“We are coast people”) riffing at the end of the world. Here you’ll find snippets of old American pop songs morphed into takes on gun carnage and quotes from tech bros, each separated from the other by an “infrathin delay.” —Rae Armantrout

Polaroids of Turbulence is a chronicle of culture trouble, a verse report of the unfathomable depths of our times: “barbarism’s eternal return.” Sussman’s sharp observations and linguistic play mark a “jagged trajectory” through “the outerbanks of / introspection.” —Nancy Kuhl

Epilogue is a brilliant collection of Craig Watson’s late-stage poetry. As such, it signals neither harmony nor resolution, but intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved conflict. This dazzling, posthumous work admits the reader into a shimmering, luminous present. —Kit Robinson

Mostly, Cycholl proceeds in dismay for the beggaring of his world. prairie)d is the song of a grieving poet. It tells of the water which dribbles muddily through a once-garden and into lives malformed by manias of profit. —Dennis Cooley

"In his American classic Essays before a Sonata, Charles Ives avows that 'the substance of a tune comes from somewhere near the soul.' It is Wade Stevenson's singular gift to express, with a candor indistinguishable from courage, the vivid geography of that most specific 'somewhere'. These sonatas are personal in the very largest sense. And in their expanse, we are given to see love and loss as imperishable features of a singular landscape and the departures of one soul.” —Donald Revell

Charles Rammelkamp’s exposition of the “flesh trapeze” that swings through American entertainment and culture, via the voices of some of its most prominent acrobats, is vital to an understanding of our culture. —Roman Gladstone

Mladinic gives us a world where “a man with a wooden leg/ and a boy in a white shirt/ talk weather/ and look like an argument.” The strange and the mundane combine into sharp mystery. This is exquisite poetry and worthy of your time. —Jeff Weddle

Gary Pak’s Kewalo Blues and Echoes reflects his profound, joyous, and critical grasp of Hawai’i as entangled site of local pidgin, Native Hawaiian, oceanic, and ethnic mores of world-dwelling and culture-making. —Rob Sean Wilson

Siedlecki’s poetry resonates the surfaces and experiences of Burchfield Parker paintings. The Way of the Cross is understood as spaces of time, moments of loss, forgotten destructive comforts, and nightmare memories. ... This is a tough, beautiful, provoking book of poems. —Geoffrey Gatza

David Trinidad’s Sleeping with Bashō is a masterpiece of reinvention, reimagining, and engagement with haiku’s most famous practitioner. Trinidad’s intimacy with Bashō’s 17th century work comes through as he “translates” him for a modern audience. Simply brilliant! —Denise Duhamel

McCaffery, with his customary linguistic wit, now takes [Alice] through the working-class, into the industrial revolution, where Mary Wollestonecraft is the Red Queen, and the Soviet workers’ paradise, where Lenin is the Lion and the Unicorn is Trotsky. And, horribile dictu, it works. Don’t miss the Bolshevik Jabberwocky.—Jean-Jacques Lecercle

In Ovid's Creek Sam Magavern, in paying tribute to the Roman poet Ovid, works out his own ars poetica, one that values plainness over ornament,  playfulness over solemnity, and liveliness over propriety and elevation. ... The result is a book of peculiar freshness. —Carl Dennis, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Practical Gods.

These poems invent a poetic diction, mixing heady with quaint in Land-of-Cockaigne stylistic abundance. Words current, rare, archaic, and obsolete are found in As They Say syntactically pasted together in humorous tonal blends of near and far. —Louis Cabri