Book Reviews

PoNW’s Favorites | Winter 2025

December, January, and February bring startling poetry collections, including several debut full-lengths:

Black Box Named Like to Me by Diana Garza Islas (translated by Cal Paule) (Dec., Ugly Duckling) makes of fragments a whole and of color a feeling in translations from Spanish alongside their originals in a bilingual editon. Both the author’s and translator’s debut, glowing poems wander and create new possibility like chewing stars or “a bicycle shadow / settling obliquely.”

the space between men by Mia S. Willis (Jan., Penguin) is an energetic and memorable new work that wanders language and its gaps: “i was cast in this role but no one taught me how to dance.” With loving care for language as more than concept, Willis is full of swift and connected moves like unionizing angels in heaven to the origin of the phrase “dead of night.”

Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola (Jan., Soft Skull) has an intense and quiet observer at the center, hand claps both erotic and daunting, the body and its language opening together and irreversibly. The London-based writer sketches and redefines desire with compact, matter-of-fact lines of lucidity like: “I thought it was this and it was.”

Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola (Jan., Scribner) does just what the title suggests: mixes myth with time, character with place, and Helen with the Internet. A cheeky but smart reimagining, the distance of the character makes possible intimate lines like “i was so hungry / in my body. i wanted more than the glut on the laminated menu.”

At the Park on the Edge of the Country by Austin Araujo (Feb., Mad Creek) curiously positions the South as both place and feeling, populated with the weeping brother, the taunting stranger, the bruised mother. Because “a mistake is how you get to know a place,” in Araujo’s careful voice, rurality is full of crossings and omissions, slips and dreams.

The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084–1151) (Feb., FSG) is the debut translation of Wendy Chen, who has published an engrossing novel Their Divine Fires and a lovely poetry collection Unearthings. In translations of the Song dynasty poetry from Chinese, Chen untangles the essences of poems into delicate, calm, and incisive moments: “I am too scared to appear, / to go out in the night. // Better to face the hanging screen / and listen to the people beyond / who talk and laugh.” The project, she explains in a thorough introduction, began as a teenager as she “became interested in reclaiming English translation of Chinese texts as a space where Chinese and Chinese American voices can be heard and appreciated.”

Several poets also add to their existing bodies of work with new books this winter:

Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó Tuama (Jan., Copper Canyon) catalogs differences between and within belief, knowledge, and memory: “A different time, a different god, a different violation.” Poems are bursting with questions like “What’s your mother like” and “When people ask where you have been, what / do you say?” In their elegant answers, the addressee of the book keeps shifting, lines crossed between desire and repulsion, concern and hope.

When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again by A. Van Jordan (Jan., Norton) takes on the form of character studies, plays, dictionary definitions, interviews, and more. The remarkable paperback edition of this 2024 poetry winner of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award considers Blackness in Shakespeare today, what we continue to watch through the theater of the dash or body cam: “no one mentioned her music,” Jordan writes about Sandra Bland’s memory, its lack of her beloved trombone-playing. Such losses in perception and memory are at the core of the volume; about an image and text project, he declares that “[c]ollaboration is a form of translation,” his translations, too, are a form of collaboration to counteract such gaps: between the reader and the writer, between the subject and their desire, between the living and the dead.

Winter of Worship by Kayleb Rae Candrilli (Jan., Copper Canyon) begins liltingly “It’s a new year, and each oyster I open re-injures / my two-seam shoulder” and, in a later poem, begins again: “It’s a new decade and a new pandemic is roaring / through the world.” These starts mark aliveness and newness but also the possibility of death, the hereafter, and the life in memory, as “Ars Poetica” reads: “When friends // die, I don’t cry until the longhand / elegy.”

If Nothing by Matthew Nienow (Jan., Alice James) is driven by hunger: toward sleep, for relief, to return to the past. This second collection feels as sturdy as it does stimulating. Counting sobriety, measuring parenthood, and recalling losses, though at the heart of the book a new world comes from the responsibility of the self: “I was inside with no story / to save me from myself.”

Sleepers Awake by Oli Hazzard (Feb., FSG) examines ways of measuring—from architecture, memory, and numbers, to premises, text deliveries, and lines. The title poem mentions “the familiar refrain // ruined by the potency / of the awkward echo,” ruins the collection prevents with a defamiliarized, constantly rewiring voice.

Out of the Blank by Elaine Equi (Feb., Coffee House) gathers domestic scenes in often short-lined poems that track changes in light, memory, and TV: “But now even the trees realize they’re naked.” Observational poems wind without obsessing and record without assuming.

Finally, anthologies include and orient poetry in meaningful ways:

Letters to Gisèle by Paul Celan (Dec., NYRB) (translated by Jason Kavette) is a momentous 500-page record of short notes and long hopes, primarily to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Surging with “My darling”s and “my dear Gisèle”s and “I hug You”s, the letters are as informative to love letter aficionados as lovers of his poems. Celan’s poems from letters appear in his French and German versions (self-translated) with Kavette’s discerning English versions.

The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry edited by Ted Kooser (Dec., Nebraska) brings together many poets in a compact, spirited volume. The style of this new edition keeps the 1980 original’s history, an anthology typeset and pasted by Kooser and published in an edition of 500 copies. With illustrations and sometimes multiple poems a page, it includes many poets in varied orders and memorializes not only a particular poet’s project, but a moment in poetry publishing as it lives on.

Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive editor Naima Yael Tokunow (Feb., Nightboat) states in the introduction: “You are now a part of the record of this book. Write your name in it.” The anthology reorients the archive with categories “mothertongued,” “file not found,” “the map as misdirection,” and “future continuous.” The book’s record, including the terrific image and text work by Douglas Kearney and Cari Muñoz, as well writes its name in its reader.

Edited by Nanya Jhingran and Cindy Juyoung Ok