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lifeinpoetry · 6 years

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September 2018 Books by Poets of Color

Poetry collections published or forthcoming in September 2018 by poets of color. As always, a dream list. I’ve been checking my mailbox obsessively.

AJAR

You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, by Dao Strom, tr. Ly Thuy Nguyen (September 1)

Bilingual Edition. Translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen. Dao Strom's YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen as Mình sẽ luôn là người nọ đến từ nơi nọ, is a collection and is a re-collection, a "re-membering". Caressing the fault lines of history and self, the book locates fragments and rubs them into their own wholeness. As when a camera lens zooms in, images of "memory's memories" come into focus as story. And as the lens continues to zoom, the story ruptures back into words, punctuation, slices drifting in empty space.

Alice James Books

Ghost, like a Place, by Iain Haley Pollock (September 4)

This collection highlights the complexities of fatherhood and how to raise young kids while bearing witness to the charged movements of social injustice and inequities of race in America. Memory, culpability, and our very humanness course through this book and strip us down to find joy and inspiration amid the darkness.

Isako Isako, by Mia Ayumi Malhotra (September 4)

The personal pronoun I has brinks on all sides, over which you can fall and become anyone and no one. Isako Isako deeply explores these soaring and dangerous precipices of identity through the magnetic voice of a Japanese-American internment camp survivor who is both an individual and collective, a citizen and a prisoner, broken and healing. Mia Ayumi Malhotra has written a brilliant and searing debut. (Maria Hummel)

American Poetry Review

Throwing the Crown, by Jacob Saenz (September 18)

Winner of the prestigious Honickman First Book Award from the American Poetry Review, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Gregory Pardlo, Throwing the Crown describes a boyhood on the edge. Set in a Chicago neighborhood dominated by gang life, Saenz sets the sweetness and vulnerability of youth against the cold reality of a gun pressed against a forehead. Full of accelerative sound―tight rhymes and short, percussive lines―these poems follow a fast-paced trajectory from danger to survival, pausing to acknowledge the beauty and humor in the details along the way.

Anhinga Press

Arsonist, by Joaquin Zihuatanejo (September 10)

Winner of the 2017 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Eduardo C. Corral, Arsonist is a shape-shifter of a book, a book that leaves the reader with an existential 'shivering', yet, it is on fire. Loaded with lethal chemicals, like, let us say, desire, abandonment, separation and industrialized lives without homelands, burning in their brutal severance, Arsonist is a spilling and boiling caldron of zig-zag figures, of wild colors split from their root, 'a son's desperate attempt to / clear the air' — of things that long to congeal, yet, they smash into blanks, smoke and the questions of forgiveness and birth. Here, a relentless, piercing clarity, a precious text without trappings, an examination of loss and love. I salute Zihuatanejo for this blistering beauty among the ashes. (Juan Felipe Herrera)

Bookth*g

Holy Wild, by Gwen Benaway (September 1)

In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans woman in expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans experience through autobiographical poems and continues to speak to the legacy of abuse, violence, and colonial erasure that defines Canada. Her sparse lines, interwoven with English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), illustrate the wonder and power of Indigenous trans womanhood in motion. Holy Wild is not an easy book, as Benaway refuses to give any simple answers, but it is a profoundly vibrant and beautiful work filled with a transcendent grace.

It Begins With the Body, by Hana Shafi (September 10)

It Begins With The Body by Hana Shafi explores the milestones and hurdles of a brown girl coming into her own. Shafi's poems display a raw and frank intimacy and address anxiety, unemployment, heartbreak, relationships, identity, and faith.

Accompanied by Shafi's candid illustrations that share the same delightful mixture of grotesque and humour found in her poems, It Begins With The Body navigates the highs and lows of youth. It is about feeling like an outsider, and reconciling with pain and awkwardness. It's about arguing with your mum about wanting to wax off your unibrow to the first time you threw up in a bar in your twenties, and everything in between. Funny and raw, personal and honest, Shafi's exciting debut is about finding the right words you wished you had found when you needed them the most.

Button Poetry

Date & Time, by Phil Kaye (September 18)

Phil Kaye’s debut collection is a stunning tribute to growing up, and all of the challenges and celebrations of the passing of time, as jagged as it may be. Kaye takes the reader on a journey from a complex but iridescent childhood, drawing them into adolescence, and finally on to adulthood. There are first kisses, lost friendships, hair blowing in the wind while driving the vastness of an empty road, and the author positioned in the middle, trying to make sense of it all. Readers will find joy and vulnerability, in equal measure. Date & Time is a welcoming story, which freezes the calendar and allows us all to live in our best moments.

Cardboard House Press

Testimony of Circumstances, by Rodrigo Lira, tr. Thomas Rothe and Rodrigo Olavarría (September 18)

“The true heir of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn’s protégé, Rodrigo Lira is still considered a cult author in Chile. Halfway between the figure of the madman and the genius, halfway between the myth and the legend, Lira wrote poems that were authentic, weird and precious gems. Owner of a unique style, combining irony, intertextuality, and a sharp sense of humor, Lira was an absolute underground poet, whose work was circulated by hand in thousands of Xerox copies that flooded the most notorious university campuses in Santiago de Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Now, for the very first time, his poems are available in English thanks to the bold, delicate and meticulous translation of Rodrigo Olavarría (the only authorized voice of Allen Ginsberg in Spanish) and Thomas Rothe (translator of Jaime Huenún’s Fanon City Meu). I don’t think there is a way to fully understand contemporary Chilean poetry without having read Rodrigo Lira’s exquisite and extravagant poems.”—Carlos Soto-Román

Coffee House Press

Spectra, by Ashley Toliver (September 11)

Precise, taut, minimalist poems are Toliver’s Yellow Wallpaper, using the thud and drone of language to evoke the suffocation of a marriage gone sour, sound bouncing back, and creating patterns that are an inhibiting force in themselves. There’s a pulse to her work, one that harnesses the energy on the page to transcend binaries and boundaries of the self.

Commune Editions

Cruel Fiction, by Wendy Trevino (September 11)

Cruel Fiction brings together new material with celebrated work published here for the first time in book form, including the provocative and charged "Brazilian Is Not a Race," a sonnet sequence meditating on race, nation, and history seen from the author's native Rio Grande Valley; it also includes widely-circulated "128-131," a caustic, hilarious, tender account memorializing three days in jail during the Occupy movement, one of the many insurgencies that provide the context and kinesis of this powerful collection This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle though our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle.

Duke University Press Books

Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems, 1994–2016, by Rafael Campo (September 7)

Comfort Measures Only is the exploration of the sonic life of the body synthesized through the pumping amplifier of left and right ventricle. These nearly two hundred pages of twenty years of poetic witness provide a human swallowing test: How hard can we bite down on bone and not break a tooth? How much rose water and blood can we take in without drowning? Rafael Campo believes grace and levitation are possible until the last breath. (Nikky Finney, author of The World is Round)

Ecco

A Cruelty Special to Our Species, by Emily Jungmin Yoon (September 18)

In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on Korean so-called “comfort women,” women who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II.

In wrenching language, A Cruelty Special to Our Species unforgettably describes the brutalities of war and the fear and sorrow of those whose lives and bodies were swept up by a colonizing power, bringing powerful voice to an oppressed group of people whose histories have often been erased and overlooked. “What is a body in a stolen country,” Yoon asks. “What is right in war.”

Moving readers through time, space, and different cultures, and bringing vivid life to the testimonies and confessions of the victims,Yoon takes possession of a painful and shameful history even while unearthing moments of rare beauty in acts of resistance and resilience, and in the instinct to survive and bear witness.

Four Way

Forgive the Body This Failure, by Blas Falconer (September 4)

Engaging the past and present, these poems attempt to reconcile loss and longing while also seeking to understand our own impermanence. Written in a plain-spoken voice, they are meditative, elegiac and tender.

You Darling Thing, by Monica Ferrell (September 4)

The speakers in Monica Ferrell’s You Darling Thing are so effusively unreliable the experience of reading her poems is like walking through a cosmos of brilliant women describing themselves in exaggerated bravura even when danger looms. ‘I feel the feral marble machine of my heart leak mercury,’ says the Tourist Bride, who is only one of many variations of bride that populate this noir collection filled with persona poems spoken in the voice of Emma Bovary, a tiger ‘abandoned at the hunt’s end,’ and a fifteenth-century Italian princess who died in childbirth, among others. Ferrell’s poems are a force field of anachronism, lush irony, and an almost self-denying violent wit fueled by juxtaposition. Though the men in this collection are often dangerous, their blue eyes ‘malevolent as the circles of gas on a stove, as the blue kiss on the matchstick / That drags a house down,’ these are poems investigating love, where love is vexed, elusive, threatened by violence. ‘Love is a currency everyone wants,’ writes Ferrell, and we watch the shady transactions with guilty pleasure. Despite the eros and the sensuality in these gorgeous otherworldly poems, human touch is still a distant country and ‘what you so often think / Belongs to you does not belong to you at all.’ Brides and grooms in all their ventriloquy speak to and past each other while ‘Desire keeps rippling their transparent skin.’ (Catherine Barnett)

Ghost City Press

001 by Dior J. Stephens (September 15)

The first in an anthological collection of poetry by Dior J. Stephens a.k.a. Dolphin, 001 captures and conveys the mind of the young writer from the years of 2014-2016. Spanning several continents, lovers, experiences, and woes, 001 is a reflective piece meant to expose the writer in full. This first edition, taken directly from the pages of the journal that housed the original words, shows the writer in all blazingly brutal, occasionally distressing honesty. A work of labor, contemplation, and healing, 001 is meant to be viewed as Stephens' first words as a poet, creating the foundation of what is to come.

Haymarket Books

Black Queer Hoe, by Britteney Black Rose Kapri (September 4)

Black Queer Hoe is a refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation.

Women’s sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.

Citizen Illegal, by José Olivarez (September 4)

In this stunning debut, poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch.

House of Anansi Press

river woman, by Katherena Vermette (September 25)

Award-winning Métis poet and acclaimed novelist Katherena Vermette’s second work of poetry, river woman, examines and celebrates love as postcolonial action. Here love is defined as a force of reclamation and repair in times of trauma, and trauma is understood to exist within all times. The poems are grounded in what feels like an eternal present, documenting moments of clarity that lift the speaker (and reader) out of our preconceptions of historical time, while never losing a connection to history. This is what we mean when we describe a work of art as being “timeless.”

Like the river they speak to, these poems return again and again to the same source in search of new ways to reconstruct what has been lost. Vermette suggests that it’s through language and the body ― particularly through language as it lives inside the body ― that a fragmented self might resurface as once again whole. This idea of breaking apart and coming back together is woven throughout the collection as the speaker revels in the physical pleasures of learning Anishnaabemowin (“the language / I should have already known”), as she contemplates the ongoing negotiation between the natural world and urban structures, and as she finds herself falling into trust with the ones she loves.

Kaya Press

I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara by Lalbihari Sharma, tr. Rajiv Mohabir (September 25)

Award-winning Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir (born 1981) brings his own poetic swagger and family history to a groundbreaking translation of Lalbihari Sharma's Holi Songs of Demerara, originally published in India in 1916―the only known literary work written by an indentured servant in the Anglophone Caribbean. Sharma, originally from Chapra in the current Indian state of Bihar, was bound to the Golden Fleece Plantation in British Guyana. His poems about the hardships of "coolie" life on the island were originally published in the Bhojpuri dialect as a pamphlet of spiritual songs in the style of 16th-century devotional poetry. I Even Regret Night brings Mohabir's new translation of Sharma's text together with a contextualizing introduction by Gaitra Bahadur, who found the manuscript in the British Library, and an afterward by Mohabir exploring the role of poetry in resisting the erasure of this often-overlooked community.

Les Figues Press

adagio ma non troppo, by Ryoko Sekiguchi, tr. Lindsay Turner (September 1)

Ryoko Sekiguchi takes the letters Fernando Pessoa wrote his would-be fiancée Ophelia Queiroz as her subject matter in adagio ma non troppo. adagio’s 36 prose blocks – appearing in Japanese, French, and English for the first time in the 2018 Les Figues Press trilingual edition (trans. Lindsay Turner) – echo the 36 letters Pessoa addressed to Queiroz dated from March 1, 1920 until January 11, 1930.

Sekiguchi reconceives the Lisbon Pessoa and Queiroz describe in their correspondence as a map over which rendezvous, affairs, and liaisons can be continued through writing. “Written words,” she asks, “do they erase themselves? […] or instead do all words, once read, never disappear?” Sekiguchi superimposes objects over a landscape where names carry shapes, directions, and the places to which they refer. In her Lisbon, a chair slid into daylight or set before a window punctuates time like comma in a sentence. An old couple contemplating ducks indicates a line between two points like a parasol taken from its stand announces a departure. As love establishes boundaries and relationships between people, if our objects convey our love for one another, then Sekiguchi traces the paths and perimeters lovers leave behind.

Originally published in a bilingual edition containing Sekiguchi’s self-translation into the French (Le bleu du ciel éditions, 2007), adagio ma non troppo belongs in the same category as the modernist works of Franz Kafka and Pessoa – as well as the recent epistolary work of Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Maggie Nelson, and Claire-Louise Bennett – writing as a philosophic and aesthetic act that reshapes our notions of time, space, translation, and love.

Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company

Dark Testament: and Other Poems, by Pauli Murray (September 4)

With the cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. and the lyricism of Langston Hughes, the great civil rights activist Pauli Murray’s sole book of poems finally returns to print.

There has been explosive interest in the life of Pauli Murray, as reflected in a recent profile in The New Yorker, the publication of a definitive biography, and a new Yale University college in her name. Murray has been suddenly cited by leading historians as a woman who contributed far more to the civil rights movement than anyone knew, being arrested in 1940―fifteen years before Rosa Parks―for refusing to give up her seat on a Virginia bus. Celebrated by twenty-first-century readers as a civil rights activist on the level of King, Parks, and John Lewis, she is also being rediscovered as a gifted writer of memoir, sermons, and poems. Originally published in 1970 and long unavailable, Dark Testament and Other Poems attests to her fierce lyrical powers. At turns song, prayer, and lamentation, Murray’s poems speak to the brutal history of slavery and Jim Crow and the dream of racial justice and equality.

Metatron

Ambient Technology by Ashley Obscura (September 22)

Poetry. Women's Studies. In this passionate sophomore collection of poetry, Ashley Obscura's poetry explores the function of connection in a post-digital age and how one situates the self and creates meaning within the unions and chasms of our physical, virtual and spiritual selves. AMBIENT TECHNOLOGY occupies a space that bridges that gap between our visible and invisible worlds, between sentiment and emoji, between the opening and closing of heart matter. With great lust and desire, Obscura unearths something indestructible within ourselves, and lands amongst new tones of being and belonging in the sparkly lining of a too-real world.

Red Hen Press

Red Channel in the Rupture, by Amber Flora Thomas (September 18)

Red Channel in the Rupture is a gathering place for the troubling abuses of the past. Looking through the lens of the present moment, Thomas shows us the open palm necessary to embrace change, as she finds beauty in bodies gnashed, trapped, and crushed into change. Images and experiences bleed together as we confront with the poet the animal of loss and death. Moving through the aperture of landscapes and moments that have defined this poet, we discover the rupturing territory of time and change. We recover absolution for what has tried to kill our very souls. Here is the “endless rope” thrown out to all of us in our shame and fear; we would be wise to snatch this coil from the air.

The Song Cave

The Desert, by Brandon Shimoda (September 1)

Brandon Shimoda’s The Desert, a sequel to his William Carlos Williams Award-winning book Evening Oracle, guides us deep into, and then back out of, a rich yet desolate North American landscape. Divided into seven sections—featuring poems, letters, diary entries, and photographs—the desert’s multiplicity emerges through a ranging exploration of its Japanese American incarceration sites, homeless population, flora and fauna, violence, beauty, and how it all combines to reflect this poet’s contemporary view of history. Written over three years in the deserts of Arizona, the poet introduces us to the souls of the living and dead, their shadows still residing over the landscape and its mythology.

Thoughtcrime Press

Don't Get Your Hopes Up / Moon Woman, by courtney marie and Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi (September 1)

Poetry. Women's Studies. This is a book of two books of poetry that stand alone, yet are in conversation with each other. There are two front covers, as internally the books are back to back.

DON'T GET YOUR HOPES UP is a collection of declarations rounding corners, running to embrace. These poems hold monsters next to notes. Together, they say, "i build myself a deep nest," as though to imagine an ever-shifting space of both reckoning and healing in times of despair. It is precisely here, in "the place just behind the eyes," that seeing becomes a political act, as clear as the avowal to never look away. The poems of DON'T GET YOUR HOPES UP work through nothing less than magic.

MOON WOMAN begins "beholden to a body," at once lyrical and sharp, an incredible collection of poems that span intimate terrain to collective memories. With deftness, Fatima floats, submerges, and comes up for air. Her words, like testimonies, skim horizontally across the surface of her skin. There's a tenderness that is also critical and self-aware, calling for witness after trespass. Sit with MOON WOMAN under a tree. Breathe in these poems, as she whispers, "feel most free beneath my gaze," and then exhale.

Tin House Books

When Rap Spoke Straight to God, by Erica Dawson (September 18)

A book-length poem navigating belief, black lives, the tragedies of Trump, and the boundaries of being a woman.

When Rap Spoke Straight to God isn’t sacred or profane, but a chorus joined in a single soliloquy, demanding to be heard. There’s Wu-Tang and Mary Magdelene with a foot fetish, Lil’ Kim and a self-loving Lilith. Slurs, catcalls, verses, erasures—Dawson asks readers, “Just how far is it to nigger?” Both grounded and transcendent, the book is reality and possibility. Dawson’s work has always been raw; but, When Rap Spoke Straight to God is as blunt as the answer to that earlier question: “Here.” Sometimes abrasive and often abraded, Dawson doesn’t flinch.

A mix of traditional forms where sonnets mash up with sestinas morphing to heroic couplets, When Rap Spoke Straight to God insists that while you may recognize parts of the poem’s world, you can’t anticipate how it will evolve.

With a literal exodus of light in the book’s final moments, When Rap Spoke Straight to God is a lament for and a celebration of blackness. It’s never depression; it’s defiance—a persistent resistance. In this book, like Wu-Tang says, the marginalized “ain’t nothing to f--- with.”

Triquarterly

Anagnorisis, by Kyle Dargan (September 15)

The poems in Anagnorisis are weightlifting; repeatedly pushing the burden of current events—the gentrification of DC, the numberless black deaths at the hands of authority, U.S./Global relations, our rapidly altering ecosystem—away from chest, trying to hold them at a distance, only to pull them back and attempt to master the muscle required to survive and write and celebrate in times like these. ‘Rage would be a word to fit in the mouth/ had the mouth not grown small from watching,’ Dargan writes, and does the work of gracefully making room in his poems to get eye-to-eye with a people’s mammoth rage, and also remind us of the daily, small, and enduring hopes we must have for a better nation and world. (Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X)

uHlanga

Zikr by Saaleha Idrees Bamjee (September 1)

To be resolute in faith – in God, in oneself – in times of grief and disappointment. To unapologetically assert one's woman- and personhood in a society that attempts to devalue both. To seek hidden parts of yourself, both new and forgotten, through the memories and words of other people.

In Zikr's beguilingly measured and covertly powerful poems, Saaleha Idrees Bamjee achieves these often difficult tasks. In doing so, Bamjee introduces new idioms and understandings of Muslim identity to South African poetry – yet not through manifesto, nor outright polemic. This is a collection of fine metaphors, concrete turns of phrase, and a refreshing specificity of image, place, and self.

University of Arizona Press

Encantado: Desert Monologues, by Pat Mora (September 25)

Inspired by Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Pat Mora brings us the poetic monologues of Encantado, an imagined southwestern town.

Each poem forms a story that reveals the complex and emotional journeys we take through life. Mora meanders through the thoughts of Encantado’s residents—the mothers and sisters, brothers and fathers in whom we see slivers of ourselves and our loved ones—and paints a portrait of a community through its inhabitants’ own diverse voices. Even the river has a voice we understand.

Inspired by both the real and imagined stories around her, Mora transports us to the heart of what it means to join in a chorus of voices. A community. A town. Encantado.

University of Nebraska Press

The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn, by Tanella Boni, tr. Todd Fredson (September 1)

Tanella Boni is a major African poet, and this book, The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn, is her first full collection to be translated into English. These poems wrestle with the ethnic violence and civil war that dominated life in West Africa’s Ivory Coast in the first decade of the new millennium. Boni maps these events onto a mythic topography where people live among their ancestors and are subject to the whims of the powerful, who are at once magical and all too petty. The elements—the sun, the wind, the water—are animated as independent forces, beyond simile or metaphor. Words, too, are elemental, and the poet is present in the landscape—“during these times / I searched for the letters / for the perfect word.” Boni affirms her desire for hope in the face of ethno‑cultural and state violence although she acknowledges that desiring to hope and hoping are not the same.

University of New Mexico Press

The Handyman's Guide to End Times, by Juan J. Morales (September 1)

These poems are imbued with the work of trying to understand the histories of broken things like unions, selves, homes, pasts. They carry strategies for survival even as they document crisis and loss. (Aracelis Girmay, author of Kingdom Animalia: Poems)

University of Pittsburgh Press

I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, by Tiana Clark (September 18)

If Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk about the Trees without the Blood were a blank book bearing that title alone, I would still feel I was in the presence of a profound lyric gift. It’s astonishing, the heft of that declaration, and the way these poems rise up to meet its rigor and clarity. The formal dexterity of these poems, the vision that takes us from Daphne to Lorca to Phillis Wheatley to Balanchine to Rihanna to Rukeyser, announces a significant new poetic talent. (Kaveh Akbar)

Refuse, by Julian Randall (September 18)

Winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Set against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, Julian Randall's Refuse documents a young biracial man's journey through the mythos of Blackness, Latinidad, family, sexuality and a hostile American landscape. Mapping the relationship between father and son caught in a lineage of grief and inherited Black trauma, Randall conjures reflections from mythical figures such as Icarus, Narcissus and the absent Frank Ocean. Not merely a story of the wound but the salve, Refuse is a poetry debut that accepts that every song must end before walking confidently into the next music

Verve Poetry Press

Besharam by Nafeesa Hamid (September 20)

Learning that your mind and body have been taken hostage is one thing. Learning how to take them back is another. What if those that are returned are different to the ones that were lost?

Besharam – Nafeesa Hamid’s glorious debut collection – asks this and many other questions. When does a girl become a woman? When does her world allow her to become a woman? And what kind of woman should she be? The answers aren’t readily forthcoming.

As she treads the shifting line between woman and daughter, between Pakistan and the West, between conservative Islam and liberal, Nafeesa has almost had to find a new language to try to communicate the difficulties of her situation. And what a language! At times hard and pointed, at other times wonderfully and colourfully evocative, erupting with femininity, empowerment and rebellion. It is this language that makes Besharam such a pleasure to read in spite of the pain it contains.

Rooh by Rupinder Kaur (September 27)

For Rupinder Kaur, writing, along with any other art form, should be azaad – free: free to express what the artist wants or needs to say, without any censorship. Rupinder is known for speaking her mind and this is reflected in her poems.

In Rooh, her debut poetry collection, she takes us on a poetic journey that transcends borders and arbitrary boundaries of subject and style. Her work straddles English and Punjabi culture – fusing words from Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu and English. Her poems look at love, religion, identity, politics, history, taboos, society – often questioning orthodox views, particularly around the roles that different genders are expected to adopt. Rooh has a grand scope, and stares unblinkingly at the world. It is a stunning first collection from this young, intelligent poet.

To reflect these concerns the poems in Rooh have been detached from their own moorings, to become and single river of verse. A river that by turns widens and narrows, meanders and charges rapidly onwards, that is contained when it isn’t breaking its bounds. The poems move with the freedom that Rupinder wishes she could see in the world around her – and with this in mind this book can be read in one long sitting or can be dipped into and out of like a cold river on a hot day, as your own rooh or soul dictates.

White Pine Press

Secure Your Own Mask, Shaindel Beers (September 18)

These poems balance between the harrowing and the beautiful, hovering at the precipice where women are both horseback riding heroines and battered mothers striving to protect their homes, their children, their identities. These poems are knives thrown with precision, fairytales rendered real through the grit and dirt of the natural world surrounding their imperfect speakers. Social media helps us grieve our losses (“suicide, suicide, suicide”) and white rabbits lead us down the winding roads of our past mistakes (“Until / a man just became an escape hatch to another man, / and all the worlds were eventually the same”). Transformations abound in this collection, though not by any conventional fairytale means, as Shaindel Beers with her knife-sharp wit and even sharper intuition unveils the nuance within the nuance of any situation. These poems don’t just seek escape―they create their own worlds within the escape hatches and (re)build from there.

Write Bloody Publishing

The Way We Move Through Water, by Lino Anunciacion (September 15)

This debut poetry collection is a faulty navigation system that guides you through the unforgiving griefwater. These poems use serene, yet haunting imagery to tackle the legacy of our pasts and the lineages we owe our lives to. He uses his experiences in loss and trauma as a black boy in America to show how long this journey towards liberation and livelihood can be. He doesn’t want you to forget the names of the things we’ve lost, the progress left to be made. Still, even though there is so much work to be done, Lino reminds us that the only way out is through. He respects his audience enough to know, that we already know how we hurt. Lino's poetry sees us and meets us where we are: proximal to the pain. He isn't crafting or crawling into the coffin–Lino is beside us, tossing his best flowers onto it. His poetry sees us in our Sunday best when we're at our worst, and reminds us that we are still alive. With poems highlighting the sea, fresh flowers, birds, and the nature around us, this collection is very much alive, and enjoying this life with you, not in front of you, but next to you.

#poetry collection recs #poets of color #book recs #poetry recs #out of my collection #chapbook recs #recs #long post

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