Yes, it is that time of year again, friends….the time of ‘best of’ lists and holiday buying hives. Ok, maybe that’s not you, but you really, really want to impress that super hot poet that lives down the hall or maybe deigns to talk to you in the Starbucks line you happen to keep timing just right so as to consistently run into him/her.
Or maybe, you are married to one of these poethead monsters. Or gasp! You are one of those word-flingers.
Sexy-Christmas-Elf-me can practically guarantee to get you a good snog under the mistletoe, if you will wrap up a few of these (mostly) 2014 collections.
This is actually a Spring 2013 release that made it into my basket early this year, but boy am I glad that it did. Combining a print book with a DVD of short films, this combo from Carrie Olivia Adams (better known as poetry editor for Black Ocean) is definitely a keeper.
Love this tagline: “A woman knows her body . . . until it is exploded into a multitude of Janes.”
Ok, a bit of a cheat. This is forthcoming Feb. 2015, but I just love the Scottish hell out of Kathleen Jamie and couldn’t help but put this up even without a pre-order button. Why is there no pre-order button?
Oh well, buy this as soon as it’s out.
then there is this ball-buster from HANGING LOOSE PRESS
Sherman Alexie is hands-down the baddest NDN around with multi-genre superpowers, and I basically want to be him when I grow up, only better-looking in a dress, which should be red with imitation feathers.
from HAPPENSTANCE (another small press from across the pond)
Marguerite Guzman Bouvard‘s poems so good they should have their own shrine. And I am I totally not just saying that because this is like my favorite NOLA based press. Who Dat, Y’all!!
same goes for Ewa Chrusciel, whose latest from OMNIDAWN
contraband of hoopoe has just the right mix of art and ritual to make you want to do research and never stop traveling even if it’s all just in your mind
well, that doesn’t really do her justice. just pick up the book and work your way into her genius.
RED HEN also has a stunner with its 2013 Winner of the inaugural Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize
With the definition of “Asian-American” constantly in flux, broader and broader intersections of ethnicity have begun to fall under this umbrella. In the poetry realm, there has been a surge in new work from Korean-, Vietnamese- and mixed race-Americans. And while I’ve only just begun to investigate this fascinating universe, I’ve found some truly BadA$$ work that simply must be shared. (My picks followed by a quick list of where to find new poems.)
MY TOP FIVE:
1. Sally Wen Mao, who first came to my attention several years ago when she hit the pages of Cave Walland Drunken Boat and now has a new collection out with Alice James Books.
Under the ocean where I was created
in a womb of dancing atoms, a tectonic tale
is breaking the skin of sea floor. Dreams burn here:
lava flows underwater like bleeding fireballs,
sunless sleep disturbed as they listened
for the sound of the nightmares they dropped.
Fat Man and the Little Boy drop,
like two suns tumbling, sent to destroy creation,
no one will be left alive to listen
for the lessons we need to learn from this tale,
just a skyline made of a blossoming fireball
and a symphony of silenced screams horrible beyond…
I am also rather fond of this one, originally published at Blackbird:
PAPER SUNS
My love. I tended him
after he fell. His charred wing stumps,
his elegy of scabbed feathers. Only then
would he accept a bed, me
in it. The memory burnt into his limbs
burned me, too, so that only my negative remained
in what amputated dreams he had, what
eerie ornithology haunted him. My hybrid,
neither bird nor angel—I came
to gather what boy there was left
to salvage.
I fold him paper suns, light them
on fire, hurl them skyward,
a revenge I can offer.
For a moment, the sun in his face,
twinned in his eyes.
For a moment, not the sun, but his face,
its reflection like the sun,
like an old story. In the water,
another sky, a ghost sun.
He didn’t know at first
if he was falling or…
On the other side of the world, there is a language I have never heard
It is beautiful, and in this dying tongue, there are words for Love and God
that resemble Bread and Wing
Or another forest language in which Mother and Knife
equal Drawer and Sing
And Island Wood is somewhere Desert Milk
And Berry, elsewhere is a Door
And if you added up all these dying words, and the people who speak them
All their memories, histories, and lessons
All their gods, jokes, rituals, and recipes
If you learned and stirred them, over and again, until
each utterance became a star, a new footprint, the marrow of a poem—
*originally appeared on Broadside from Red Dragonfly Press
recently asked this question on twitter and posted a short list that included picks from Penned in the Margins, The Emma Press, Floating Bridge and Donut Press.
From AHSAHTA PRESS
also from Copper Canyon
(another small press from across the pond)
all over the Southern lit magazines. Love me some 
by 
Under the ocean where I was created
Bonespark~ 