Series: American Poets Continuum Series

In these hybrid poems, Jessica Q. Stark explores her mother's fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of the war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl juxtaposes the moral implications of Little Red Riding Hood with her mother's photography. Stark creates an...

Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain's Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political identity with intersectional awareness. These...

What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and...

Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms. Matt Donovan's The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts our country's obsession with guns to explore America's deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in...

Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon's Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorialising 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020. Epistolary in nature, these commemorative poems are "gleaned sketches" attempting to reconstruct lives and deaths from the typically scarce information made available on the internet. Interspersed with the...

Winner of the 2024 LAMBDA Literary Award for Outstanding Bisexual Poetry Consumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied. Divided into four sections and shaped by female-identified embodiment, Desire Museum touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the...

Barbara Jane Reyes answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of colour with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned B.S. detector. The Brown Girl of these poems is fed up with being shushed, with being constantly told how foreign, unattractive, and unwanted she is. She's flipping tables and throwing chairs. She's raising her...