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Because A Month of Someday doesn't waste a word, I'm tempted to quote lavishly from these wry, economical, limpidly attentive urban observations recorded during the most frightening month early in the pandemic. But I won't. Every poem here merits quoting-and rereading. Gerald Wagoner's eye misses nothing; his quiet voice is a chorus of one that reaches beyond self to his city. This is a book that remembers, and also a book to remember. Read it.-Rachel HadasStrolling daily through altered and stunned Brooklyn neighborhoods in A Month of Someday, Gerald Wagoner is our perceptive weatherman and curious guide to the monstrous first April of New York City's pandemic, where "Mary Shelley, anime monster in her pocket, gathers fresh flowers to toss down a well." Wagoner maps the missing city and its transformed condition that includes us, in reverent lyrics and vivid micro narratives, with a keen and attentive negative capability.-Amy Holman

This anthology includes 73 poems by 73 poets, written over the 73 days between President Donald Trump's election and inauguration. It remains as relevant in today as it was during the transition. That's no cause for celebration, of course--a clear majority of Americans never wanted this transition to happen in the first place. Most of us wanted a different result. But we got what we got. As an entire nation, in different ways, to different extents, we did this to ourselves. And so here we are. If, as Santayana argued, those of us who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then Poems in the Aftermath and other books like it stand as invaluable reminders. For me, however, the questions remain: Do enough people want enough change badly enough to make it happen? Do enough people love justice enough to finally complete the bending of Dr. King's arc? Can those of us who do love justice overcome enough of our differences to work together and realize the visions of our most inspired dreamers? So much remains to be seen.

"It is difficult to get the news from poems," wrote William Carlos Williams, "yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." In Headline News, John Deming gives us the news and makes a poem of it, springboarding into a prosody informed by brevity, clarity and precision, a kind of decalinear sonnet unfolding itself into blossom. Deming's great gift here is a capacious and capricious mindfulness, improvising and responding to the deadpan lunacy of newspaper headlines in such a way as to make them seem almost mystical. --D. A. POWELL In Headline News, John Deming makes us feel the strangeness of what we've been hearing and seeing in 21st century America. Reading these poems, "I'm feeling weirder/and clearer tonight." Quoted headlines appear in all caps, but the rest of the writing is equally telegraphic and punchy--until we get punch drunk, wondering what's real news and what isn't. This mix-up seems telling and inevitable now. --RAE ARMANTROUT

Wit and nihilism, deadpan intelligence, and candid examinations of human hungers abound in J.G. McClure's The Fire Lit & Nearing. McClure's smoldering poems take on the grind of time, obsessive love, manliness and its illusions, alternative fates, being and nothingness, and much more. His is a winning voice, dark and self-critical, a bit reminiscent of John Berryman's, a brave and true voice one might dub melancholic/comic/heroic. AMY GERSTLER The recurrent mode of J.G. McClure's The Fire Lit & Nearing is a version of lament and complaint (both with long distinguished poetic traditions), but this tone is relieved and complicated and enriched by McClure's distinctive zaniness and invention, which gives the reader great enjoyment in this kind of "gaiety transfiguring all that dread" À la Yeats. This inventiveness also makes use of McClure's intelligence in a fundamentally writerly way and communicates the mind-of-the-writer at work in an exhilarating act of making that extracts beauty even from human pain and despair. MICHAEL RYAN J.G. McClure's first book, The Fire Lit & Nearing, is a wild cosmically inclusive, sometimes surreal, sometimes hilarious but always compelling thought experiment about contingency as both a source of freedom and inescapable pain. These poems embody an irrepressible charm, a formal poise and wit that I find welcoming, even life affirming, even in the midst of sorrow. A truly beautiful book. ALAN SHAPIRO

This poetry collection weaves together the stories of three African American women--two historical figures, the third a fictional character--who share the same first name. From the ballads of blues-singer Bessie Smith, the triumphant flights of aviatrix Bessie Coleman, and the violence faced by Bessie Mears (from Richard Wright's novel Native Son), these poems give voice and power to black women past, present, and future.

Dante Micheaux's superb poetic aptitude is wedded to an eually superb poetic amplitude. Intimate soliloquy, lyric address, and linguistic allegory merge with resonating voices and personae. This poem is masterful, paradoxical and spiritual. The "holiness in all its unholy rejoicing" is variously scored in Dante Micheaux's commanding Circus. --TERRANCE HAYESI still stand by words I wrote almost twenty years ago, when I read Dante Micheaux's poems for the first time: "I am impressed by the serious depth and masterful technique of Micheaux's poems. He is a true man of the world, mature beyond his years, one whose voracious intelligence and richly diverse background uniquely equip him for the literary vocation. Circus promises to be received as a masterpiece reminiscent of the best of Melvin Tolson's work, and some of Micheaux's poems bear an a nity to the delicate music and wisdom of Robert Hayden. But Micheaux's in uences are not limited to the stars of African American poetry; his experience and reading ranges wide. Dante Micheaux is a code-switcher fluent in many languages. Some of his lines bring this reader close to heartbreak." --MARILYN NELSONDante Micheaux's Circus commands the reader's attention. In this long poem, each line is tuned by breath and image, serious play and heartfelt critiue, but also by the modern urban motifs of grief and love. At times, signifying can get us to a desperate truth. The reader or listener has to possess a sense of history in order to be transported to the here and now. In Circus, the borders between the imaginary and the real dissolve as the poem delivers us into verisimilitude. --YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

The Inside Room, by Lisa Andrews, traces and inspects the way back to hidden places buried within ourselves. The poet invites us to get inside her "own / chariot to hell" and travel down to the rawest relationship we know. The story of mother and daughter is raveled in rage, love and desire. Her poetic vision is large yet precise. The poems sweep from myth to memory to present moment, illuminating the numinous threads which bind art and survival together. Andrews' diamond stylus etches vivid worlds into the glass walls of our imagination. This is a book you will come back to for its siren call to live your own life with more hunger, more love, more tenderness. --Carla Drysdale We, readers, exist on a spectrum of motherlessness, and Lisa Andrews' heartbreaking rendering of our cleaved state is exquisite, pitiless, gorgeous. Andrews' scrupulous eye for the exact marries the unflinching stare of the poet at her situation ("You almost had me / believing I was your audience, the one / you flowered for"). Other work here, generous, loving, and anguished, tries to recapture the father, too (the remarkable "Turkish Coffee" notes "How it blazed, / almost boiled up like oil . . . / I never told anyone how much I liked / that bitter taste"). Read The Inside Room and you will remember what you lost; these poems will return to you your memories. --Sharon Kraus "Disappoint a mother and you get winter." Lisa Andrews' coolly passionate collection, The Inside Room, submerges readers into myths you might be familiar with--such as the story of Persephone--but have never heard rendered with such intimate clarity. Longing rises quietly in these poems, and without fanfare. I love the ability of these crisp, nostalgic poems to admit their hunger, and to welcome us into the feast they deliver. --Lynn McGee

Exploring the performative complexities of female embodiment, bell lap is a gorgeous muscular surge of linguistic athleticism and sensory endorphins. Athenian, mud-streaked, and spiked with adrenaline, this smart and sexy poem cycle running the course of a cyclocross race caroms with imagistic verve and chiseled diction through rugged physical, gendered, psychological, and poetic terrains--glistening with sweat-sheened splendor and pure animal joy. Lee Ann Roripaugh What a great book [bell lap] is. It races along and is racy and exhilarating and unapologetic for flinging mud into the air. Laura Winberry is Sappho on a bicycle. Lisa Jarnot In bell lap, Laura Winberry takes you on a ride through "the carnival of cyclocross" with her badass girl gang of spandex-clad cycling Eves in tow. These poems whoosh past you at lightning speed, blowing your hair back as you cheer on their unapologetically gutsy & gritty, joyful & vulnerable version of womanhood. Marisa Crawford