RaveBooklist...as dazzling as it is bighearted ... a love-drunk ode to and celebration of Black culture, queerness, and the redemptive power of friendship ... Dynamic, breathtaking, and utterly brilliant, these poems are not only most magnificent weapons but also salves to share and songs to shout at the top of one’s lungs.
Shelley Jackson
RaveBooklist OnlineCleverly mimicking the often discordant communications of the dead .. Jackson spins not only an incredible yarn but a delightfully strange, wondrously original, and dazzlingly immersive gothic love letter to storytelling itself.
Diana Khoi Nguyen
RaveBooklistHaunting, incisive, and exceptionally spare, Nguyen’s shape-shifting poems confront death, displacement, and the emptiness within and around us ... Nguyen also employs incantatory repetition to chilling effect ... A soaring tribute, a mesmerizing visual feat, and an all-around astonishing debut.
Kiki Petrosino
RaveBooklist\"Petrosino’s third collection does unfold much like a magic-tinged fever dream, traversing forests, \'fairy house[s],\' and the \'war zone\' of the body to conjure up mothers and wives, daughters and ghosts. Delivering intoxicating variations on the sestina and villanelle, Petrosino employs repetition to spectacular effect ... In Petrosino’s singular world, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, suddenly irresistible, settles deep in the bones. Sparkling with sly wordplay and fantastical imagery, these are not only masterful poems but mighty incantations. Utterly spellbinding.\
Pénélope Bagieu
RaveBooklistBagieu’s writing is clever and concise, and panels brim with sly subtleties; Bagieu delivers laugh-out-loud one-liners in bitsy speech bubbles, and summons tragedy with no words at all, and her fine-lined figures are by turns playfully expressive, fierce, and reverent ... This dynamic paean to women’s flair for fearless resistance will have readers happily sifting through history—and tackling the future with renewed verve.
Danez Smith
RaveBooklist\"With piercing precision and striking formal variation, Smith grapples with America’s insidious past and present, pangs of desire (\'if love is a room / of broken glass, leave me to dance / until my feet are memory\'), and an HIV-positive diagnosis. The poet summons hope, too, in a movie dubbed Dinosaurs in the Hood, the modest promise of tomorrow, and, in \'little prayer,\' a most divine demand: \'let ruin end here.\' Part indelible elegy, part glorious love song to \'those brown folks who make / up the nation of my heart,\' Smith’s powerhouse collection is lush with luminous imagery, slick rhythms, and shrewd nods to Lucille Clifton, Beyoncé, and Diana Ross. Incandescent, indispensable, and, yes, nothing short of a miracle.\
