Happy New Year, Poetry Readers! I am happy to welcome as the new co-curator of this monthly poetry round-up. This year promises new collections from poets such as Henri Cole, Shane McCrae, Allison Benis White, Mónica de la Torre, Harryette Mullen, Cedar Sigo, and Martin Espada. Rest assured, we will continue to seek out a range of voices and presses all year long.
For now, join us as we kick off 2025 with a closer look at a few of the forthcoming titles that have already made it our way. * , the resonant title of Mia S. Willis’s debut collection, might suggest spaces of safety and freedom, hard-won havens in a patriarchal South: “i was born under a north carolina wind bloated with acid / where women forge brave lacquered armor of constraint.
” Or it might be the outer space of astronomy and astrology, of natural recurrences and utter oblivion, as in a partly blacked-out triptych of elegies “ ”: “uranus. / my capricorn and i don’t remember my sister’s face anymore. / when the sun sets on earth, it does not disappear from the sky.
” And in poem after poem, “the space between men” is some space within everyday and literary language for queer communities of Black bois and femmes. It’s a space Willis helps build with their spilling-over toolkit of poetic forms, including newly canonical African American forms like the kwansaba, the bop, and the eintou. And it’s a space Willis studies with a researcher’s remove and a linguist’s ear for sound and situat.