Timothy Donnelly

Matt Lord

Stefania Heim

B. K. Fischer

"A new poetry chapbook from Boston Review featuring work commissioned after the election as well as selections from our archive. Introduced by U.S. Poet Laureate and political activist Juan Felipe Herrera, the volume will include poems from Major Jackson, Carolyn Forché, Calvin Bedient, Shane McCrae, Khadijah Queen, Jorie Graham, Solmaz Sharif, Andrew Zawacki, Dara Wier, Mary Jo Bang, Ange Mlinko, Wendy Xu, Craig Santos Perez, and Joshua Clover, among many others."--Publisher's website (viewed 02/13/2017).

Poems for Political Disaster

"A modern poetic retelling of a Biblical flood, a ship of refugees, a changing climate, and the struggle to survive"--

Ceive

Poetry that grapples with the intersection of natural and cultural crises. In an age of record-breaking superstorms and environmental degradation, What Nature seeks—through poetry—to make sense of how we interact with and are influenced by nature. Shifting its focus from what has already been lost to what lies ahead, What Nature rejects the sentimentality of traditional nature poetry. Instead, its texts expose and resist the global iniquities that create large-scale human suffering, a world where climate change disproportionately affects the poorest communities. The intersection of natural and cultural crises—like Standing Rock's fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—are confronted head on. These poems, lyric essays, and hybrid works grapple with political unrest, refugeeism, and resource exploitation, transforming the genre of ecopoetics. Contributors Kaveh Akbar, Zaina Alsous, Desirée Alvarez, Rae Armantrout, Aase Berg, Kyle Booten, Jericho Brown, Kyce Bello, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Jesús Castillo,, Abigail Chabitnoy,Adam Day, Camille T. Dungy, Noah Dversdall, Gyrðir Elíasson, Tracy Fuad, Carolyn Guinzio, Amanda Hawkins, Sheikha Helawy, Claire Hero, Brenda Hillman, Joan Kane, Douglas Kearney, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Nam Le, Diana Keren Lee, Adrian Lurssen, Matt Massaia, Iréne Mathieu, Ted Mathys, Christopher Nelson, Kathy Nilsson, Greg Nissan, Elsbeth Pancrazi, Sarah Passino, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Roger Reeves, Evelyn Reilly, Emelia Reuterfors, Mutsuo Takahashi, Brian Tierney, Alissa Valles, Nicole Walker, Ellen Welcker

What Nature

Poetry. A Gurlesque remix of Roland Barthes' classic study of the language of love, MY LOVER'S DISCOURSE is an eclectic handbook for desire in its many forms. In prose and verse, definition and drama, this wry compendium takes up the proposition that Barthes' treatise is ripe for a redo--whereas his is male, French, and esoteric, this one is female, American, and tacky. Fresh in both senses, it retraces the steps of an interior paramour: "She rants. She begs. She tergiversates on virginity, ceilings, maenads, blow jobs, room service, Sappho, amusement parks, and Medusa. She gets in hot water. She goes swimming."

My Lover's Discourse

A novella in verse, Radioapocrypha envisions what would have happened if Jesus Christ had arrived for the first time not in Palestine two thousand years ago but in a subdivision in Maryland in 1989, the year Depeche Mode released "Personal Jesus." In this suburban retelling of the gospel, Jesus is a hunky post-punk high school chemistry teacher and the disciples are a twelve-member garage band. The story unfolds as recorded testimony and overheard teachings, a series of alternating lyric poems, prose poems, and parables that engage the social, sexual, and racial tensions of an era. Told from the point of view of the Magdalen character, named Maren--and drawing from the Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Mary as well as other scriptural sources--these poems sample widely from popular music and 1980s culture to recast and revivify a gritty, surreal, crackpot story of loners, losers, and lovers.

B. K. Fischer

Books

Your next favorite book is out there