Rustlings, Gabrielle Tse (Verve Poetry Press, April 2025)
Dreamy and playful, Gabrielle Tse’s debut pamphlet Rustlings speaks to memory and domesticity, maintaining a balletic lightness above fractures in language and heritage. With all its subtle sounds and textures, Rustlings is a sensuous exploration of the absences and complications of daily life.
Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman, Zilka Joseph (Mayapple, February 2024)
Who are the Bene Israel Jews of India? Where did they come from? How did they survive in India? Sweet Malida is a moving, multi-layered, richly sensory and informative collection of poems and short prose inspired by this ancient community to which the poet herself belongs.
Mattress Makers, Sasenarine Persaud (Mawenzi House, June 2023)
This new collection of poetry celebrates the music in the seemingly mundane. Imbued with a deeply philosophical consciousness, and the questioning spirit of the ancients, it engages in the pleasures of technology, while ever cognizant of its drawbacks in its assault on the personal. As always, with this poet, there is an Upanishadic, yogic, and quantum search for truth and the essence of reality—the ancient Indian concepts of multiplicity, multipresence, and simultaneous existences finding support in cutting- edge quantum physics.
Shawn Hoo’s debut poetry chapbook, Of the Florids, begins with an inability to speak of the natural world in the urban fortress of Singapore; a tropical island’s fading romanticism for a city boy.
Muscle Memory, Jenny Liou (Kaya Press, October 2022)
In Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter’s cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history.
The All-Seeing Eye: Collected Poems, Shang Qin, John Balcom (trans) (Cambria Press, November 2021)
Shang Qin (1930–2010) is widely considered one of the most influential and original modern Chinese poets. His critical acclaim was earned not only as a modern master of the prose poem but also as one of Taiwan’s leading surrealist poets. This book is the largest selection of his poetry available in English.
You, and Others, poems, Devendra Bisaria (Kitaab, November 2021)
Devendra Bisaria’s first publication contains poems written over a period of almost thirty years—from his teens, when he started writing, to twenty years ago. The poems in this collection bear witness to Devendra’s own internal evolution as a person as well as his keen observation of the external environment and circumstances that fueled, and frequently provoked, that process.
Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays, Yu Xiuhua, Fiona Sze-Lorrain (trans) (Astra House, September 2021)
Born in 1976 in Hengdian village, Hubei Province, Yu Xiuhua is a poet from an impoverished rural background who was born with cerebral palsy. She began writing poetry in 1998. Her poetry collection Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm sold over 300,000 copies in China. Yu received the Peasant Literature Award in 2016 and the Hubei Literary Prize in 2018.
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