RaveBookPageNicole Sealey navigates heavy ideas with felicity and skill in her hotly anticipated debut collection ... Though the world her poems inhabit is marked by violence and confusion, they counter this chaos with humor and clarity; her language is plainspoken, exacting and beautiful, often leading to linguistic pearls of surprising wisdom and depth ... Sealey\'s poetry is most striking when she plays with forms ... Ordinary Beast is full of these neat devices, but they never distract from the core of warmth and familiarity that drives these poems to the heart.
Jos Charles
RaveBookPage\"... a wholly avant-garde book of poetry that reveals a queer history embedded in the castaway detritus of our language ... By the end of the collection, one is struck by how perfect the title feeld is: the book is both a fertile, untrodden space and a flurry of emotion warped through the past tense, less felt and more feel-ed.\
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
RaveBookPage\"Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a collection rooted in the imagery of a fading natural world, wielding lyrical language to break down the barrier between ourselves and what we consider nature ... With a book so invested in nature, one might expect a flood of gorgeous imagery. Here, Oceanic delivers; these poems are lush and dreamy ... But what really stitches Oceanic together is Nezhukumatathil’s musical voice. These poems feel crystal clear in their logic and construction, walking carefully from the metaphoric and imagistic to something more transcendent and strange, reminding us that we are linked to the natural world in deep and surprising ways.\
Jenny Xie
RaveBookPage...a stunning collection—part travel narrative, part kaleidoscopic autobiography ... Eye Level works in contradictions: It speaks from solitude yet dwells in an array of communities; it ties itself to concrete places but has deeper psychological concerns ... Xie’s imagery is like an Etch A Sketch being shaken and redrawn, moving rapidly through gritty scenes in miniature ... what makes Eye Level such an enchanting read: its ability to be everywhere and do everything at once. It draws its energy from all over and then finds its way directly to the heart.
Danez Smith
RaveBookPage\"Vivid, unsettling and uplifting all at once, the second full-length from award-winning poet Danez Smith is part elegy, part celebration and part poetry-as-witness ... Smith is a poet famous for fiery performances and their passionate confidence bursts through the seams of these poems, whose subjects range from police brutality, to the complexities of queer eroticism, to the very experience of living in a country tha threatens the lives of queer people of color daily ... Not content to merely allow us to play witness to the horrors of oppression, Smith’s poems pull us into it; they brim with blood, violence, aches and broken bodies. But there is humor, too, and hope, and it’s this hope that elevates the book to its crucial contemporary importance: \'but today i’m alive, which is to say / i survived yesterday, spent it ducking bullets, some / flying toward me & some / trying to rip their way out.\'\
