How does the mind survive its internal battles, or a world burning around it? What angels, creatures, and songs does it manifest? In which artists and works does it find solace or reflection? And how does the lyric hold so much? How do we? As John Liles’ “Parastasis” concludes, ‘we are / not well / equipped // to handle / any of this.”
This month’s titles alone are a wee bit apocalyptic: Concerning Angels; A Magnificent Loneliness; Bees, and After– or even Salvage, The End of Childhood, Hardly Creatures. And then there’s Marianne Boruch’s hybrid collection from her time in the Cadaver Lab. Yes, that’s the mood of February 2025. Yet the hum and thrall of the lyric poem transcends, making space for the intimacies of wonder, and even humor, in these new and forthcoming releases.
This month also marks the release of a handful of books Christopher Spaide and I highlighted in our 2025 poetry preview, including collections by Annie Wenstrup, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Mai Der Vang, Esther Lin, and Rachel Trousdale. Other March titles include Farid Matuk’s Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago) and C. Dale Young’s New and Selected, Building the Perfect Animal (Four Way Books.)
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Rafael Alberti, Concerning the Angels (trans. John Murillo)
Perhaps you, like me, were already sold when you saw this was the first book-length translation by John Murillo, whose second collection, Kontemporary Amerikan won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A century has passed since Spanish poet Rafael Alberti published his first collection, Sailor on Land, selected by Antonio Machado, among other judges; soon after, Alberti was dubbed part of “The Generation of ’27” alongside Lorca. He was only twenty-five.
Murillo’s take on Alberti’s 1929 Concerning the Angels is captivating in its music and particularities of diction, leaning less colloquial in style than Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno’s translation with which some readers will be familiar. Murillo’s renderings of longing and rage embody a serious lyricism, presenting “The Ashen Angel” with “The world lurching, / rolling into the nothing, dead” to “The Foolish Angel,” “that one who denies the limbo of his photograph / and makes a dead bird of his hands.”
The poem “The Abandoned Body” depicts “light, dead on the corners, and in the houses. // The men and the women/ were no longer there,” before the first section conclude, “My body was empty, // black sack at the window. // It left / It left, rounding the streets. / My body walked, alone.” Murillo returns us to a poet who feels made for these times.
Marianne Boruch, The Figure Going Imaginary
“The arms of the cadavers keep wanting to fly up. I help tie down the right arm again.” Poet Marianne Boruch has entered the Cadaver Lab alongside of the students. One outcome from this is Marianne Boruch’s earlier collection Cadaver, Speak, and now we have this assemblage, a writer’s hybrid journal and sketchbook of sorts, which she identifies, at one point, as “a book of ammo toward poems.”
We also follow Boruch into Life Drawing classes, and weave with her through these two worlds–Life and Death– as well as off campus to the U.K. and Italy. We are privy to the wanderings of Boruch’s very alive and interesting mind, as well as her trademark poetic control and wit; across lyrical prose and poems, she watches, listens, sketches, and collects.
In reference to being asked to present at Cadaver Lab, she notes,
But I do have small prints of a nineteenth-century dissection to give out as party favors. And poems touching on injury with a medical eye—among them work by Sylvia Plath, Lucia Perillo, my brilliant late colleague Tom Andrews, Keats himself of course, and the good Doctor Williams.
A curious, lively, and captivating hybrid work.
Hedgie Choi, Salvage
Hedgie Choi is funny. In her hands, wit marries an absorbing lyricism, with endings that not only hit the beat on both measures, but reverberate and sometimes sting. Whether using the haibun to eviscerate the speaker’s friend who “didn’t (doesn’t) like snow globes because they were (are) ‘fake’”—”Do you know how precipitation works? I asked”– or savaging the rich in “Martha’s Vineyard”: “The poodles. / It is the poodles who are richer.”
But I must admit, readers, that to excerpt from these very short lyrics is to sell them short: their charm is holistic. Born and college-educated in Korea, Choi’s twenty-first-century sensibilities and poetics are expansive, both playing with the recognizable musical and structural moves of the contemporary American lyric and emerging from her experience as translator of Moon Bo Young’s Pillar of Books (Black Ocean, 2021).
In “Orchestrated Intent,” the speaker quips, “Milosz, do you know the sophomore girls / are also reading to be saved?” This is a refreshing debut.
Rob Macaisa Colgate, Hardly Creatures
In his debut collection, Rob Macaisa Colgate cites access symbols as he explores different vantages from within disability community. Revelatory and frank intimacies of the speaker’s own mental health provide emotional grounding points: In “Abecedarian for the Care Shift I Failed to Show Up For,” the speaker admits, “Aandon implies intent, which I must/ be honest, is correct in this case,” before revealing the context of the speaker’s own state of mind: “Wishing I were dead.”
“Nature poem” leverages anaphora with an echo of “I punch myself,” then turns: “When I get to heaven I will be bruised / and I will not answer any of God’s questions.” Colgate’s ability to capture paradox and inconsistency awakens these poems; community also shows up.
In “Eli Interprets,” the poet skillfully constructs a scene of an intimate dialogue on Facetime that moves from home – “I walk circles around my studio, a procrastinating ghost”—as the speaker attempts to speak and his friend Eli “interprets” his needs. They land in a bodega: “The bodega worker is used to this now. / As I check out, he waves hello to the tiny Eli in my phone.”
An honest exploration of the intersections of power and fallibility, of interdependence of care and community.
Allison Benis White, A Magnificent Loneliness
White’s fifth collection, A Magnificent Loneliness, opens, “What if I devoted myself / to a wave of black and green–floor-length, mid-crash, / filling my mind? To survive. Bear with me.” We are drawn into a first glimpse of Claude Monet’s The Woman in a Green Dress alongside of Emile Zola, and later, Theophile Thoré. Are we alone when viewing, does art console? What art can solace bring?
For White’s haunting, morphing lyrics encompass three pandemic-era losses noted in both dedication and the poet’s notes—two friends’ suicides and her mother-in-law’s passing from cancer—while a book of Monet’s paintings remains open on the table. We also observe “Women in the Garden,” “Walk on the Cliff at Pourville,” and “Camille Monet on her Deathbed,” but note that this is ekphrasis as survival.
Here “magnificent” is the scale of art and of grief and isolation, marked by their intersections. “Postcards to M.” embodies this: That place so close to the end of a song. / In the pause, just afterward, the silence rushing in. / Here is my mind, here is my mind (tilted into my hands). /What kind of loneliness is this, kissing every finger?”
Wayne Miller, The End of Childhood
From the aphoristic miniatures of the opening “Towards a Unified Theory,” through the closing scene of the final poem, “On Childhood,” the speaker of Wayne Miller’s sixth collection speaks not from the vantage of childhood, but parenthood, a precipice upon which, these poems remind us, one is also a child. Such duality drives poems that plumb intergenerational trauma.
A grandfather who finds his own father shot on the stoop; a father who stands up to a friend bullying the child speaker with words and bodily threat before collapsing in drunkenness; a great grandfather who drowned, drunk: these inheritances move beyond story through Miller’s trademark lyricism, his ability to embody a complex political consciousness in his poems.
The result is a compelling addition to a certain generational approach to fatherhood as poetic subject, as I touched on back in September. In Miller’s opening poem, the sections “Myth” and “Memory” and “Ghosts” each offer only one word: “Whose?”
John Liles, Bees, and After
It is hard not to think of Nick Flynn’s 2002 Blind Huber when reaching for Bees, and After, the 119th book in the Yale Younger Poet Series, currently judged by Rae Armantrout. But bees are not the only small creatures at the center of these small poems that mark the page like the route of a “waggle dance” itself, and John Liles, a naturalist at an environmental education center in California, simultaneously celebrates natural life with the precision of a scientist—think aerolites and arthropods—and, well, this may be the first time “acetyl-choline” is used in a poem.
Liles also offers footnotes that explain not only calcite and opals–complete with chemical formulas–and sea lilies, but also the heart, and his lively language makes space for “daffodil-gasping” and “my hidden girlish riblet glowing.” The intimacy of address in these poems, embodied in returns to second person, is the draw, for the speaker asserts presence in even the smallest of poetic spaces; in “My knowing better,” the speaker concludes, “every so often in the night / I look up // and hold out.”
