Glass Houses, Hells, And Phantom Limbs: Seven New Poetry Collections To Read In May

“To what purpose, April, do you return again?” Edna St. Vincent Millay asks successful “Spring.” “Not only nether crushed are nan brains of men / Eaten by maggots. / Life successful itself / Is nothing.” But don’t despair, chap readers, it is May now, when, for immoderate of us, nan trees are yet (finally!) coming into bloom. While Millay doesn’t fresh nan clip play for this month’s Super Gay Poems from Stephanie Burt, Angie Estes, whose Last Day connected Earth successful nan Eternal City drops this month, makes nan cut.

This stack of May books offers nan unsettling balm you whitethorn request correct now, from nan imaginative mythologies of Lee Min-ha and Yuki Tanaka to Shane McCrae’s consolidated epic Hell, to a caller postulation from Henri Cole and a debut from Jess Smith from University of Akron Press. This period besides delivers Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s Mothersalt (Alice James Books) and a fewer titles I covered earlier this year, Rob Macaisa Colgate’s Hardly Creatures and Jim Moore’s Enter. Happy Spring, chap poesy readers!

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Stephanie Burt, Super Gay Poems
(Harvard University Press)

Welcome to 2025’s Super Gay poesy party, hosted by professional and writer Stephanie Burt. Frank O’Hara’s “Homosexuality,” kicks disconnected her fifty-one choices for this anthology of “Super Gay” post-1969 poems, each followed by her commentaries, while The Cyborg Jillian Weise closes nan book retired pinch nan last statement of “So Your GF Wants to Come Out arsenic Bi and Polyamorous to Her Very Conservative Family”: “Come retired alive.” Amidst nan generational dispersed of expected figures successful American poetry—from Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Audre Lorde to Carl Phillips and D.A. Powell, and from Jericho Brown to Danez Smith and Chen Chen—readers will find plentifulness to discover, specified arsenic Aotearoa New Zealand trans writer essa whitethorn ranapiri and, done a lively ode to nan solid dildo successful “Glass Orgasm,” Jee Leong Koh, laminitis of Singapore Unbound.  “Super Gay” stands arsenic nan catchy umbrella for nan scope of intersexual and gender identities reflected, and Burt conscientiously embraces “how nan words successful poems tin bespeak our inner, not only our outwardly visible, lives.”

Why these poets and these poems? Burt notes, “All nan poets successful this book do thing memorable and moving and acoustically absorbing pinch nan shapes of queer lives.” Part of nan nosy of reference this is considering nan poets and poems you mightiness person fto in, aliases near out, while besides enjoying Burt’s astute and personable criticisms that corroborate her choices. Pick this up successful clip for summer; arsenic O’Hara concludes, “It’s a summertime day, / and I want to beryllium wanted much than thing other successful nan world.”

Henri Cole, The Other Love: Poems
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Henri Cole’s eleventh postulation follows Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022; not everything successful this caller postulation is simply a Cole sonnet, but capable are to transportation nan tune. These are besides American odes—conversational, erudite, and a small earthy—with titles ranging from “Guns,” “Mouse successful nan Grocery,” and “Daffodils” to “Figs”: “Overnight nan figs sewage moldy and look for illustration small brains—/ aliases ids without structure—that opportunity thing dark/ astir our type not really laying down a plot / but surviving retired nan convulsive myths.” This speaker observes arsenic he talks backmost to T.S. Eliot from his Gloucester summertime location successful “Young Tom’s Room,” and to James Merrill from Merrill’s model successful “107 Water Street.” In “Sow pinch Piglets,” he muses, “But here, nether a dispassionate nighttime sky, / successful pig time, pinch bluish moonlight filtering / done nan cedars, I ask, Why do you time off /for happiness? Why not enactment astir awhile?”

The vantage is clear—this is simply a speaker moving into later chapters of life—while nan gracious questioning lyricism is simply a continuance for Cole. In “No One Over Fifty, Please,” nan speaker turns, “Since we don’t cognize if we unrecorded beyond this life, / let’s springiness ourselves to loving—/to eyes, hands, lips, and ears. / Do you perceive those birds talking—/ is location thing much ravishing?”

Angie Estes, Last Day connected Earth successful nan Eternal City
(Unbound Edition Press)

“Mother whitethorn I / satellite glow, Mother whitethorn / I cognize who bruised nan moon, near / its scar connected nan backmost of my limb for illustration immoderate /celestial heirloom.” This is simply a book of air—birds, nan abstraction wrong nan poems, unexpected kinds of flight: “If only/ representation would descend for illustration snowfall / coming down connected each broadside of Philip Johnson’s/ Glass House: he said that lying wrong pinch / snowfall falling each astir made it look arsenic if you were / rising connected a “celestial elevator.” The capacious mind and representation of these poems moves betwixt Tintoretto, Cole Porter, Huck Finn, Dali, Faulkner, Michelangelo, and “In nan Lover nan Leaves You,” “her creation / for Lady Macbeth’s dress: 1 heavy reddish drip of humor sewn successful from waist to floor.”

But there’s besides room for fungi and bees. Throughout, nan echo of a nonaccomplishment of a mother: nan one-sentence “Solstice,” unravels complete 2 pages of memory, of nan speaker’s mother’s words, of honeysuckle down nan religion wherever nan ten-year-old aforesaid is “pulling each flower’s pistil backmost done / its pharynx to drip 1 saccharine bead / onto my tongue,” of Proust, “as if nan shorter / nan days become, nan longer nan condemnation / needs to be.”

Shane McCrae, New and Collected Hell: A Poem
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

What amended move for these times than to cod each your Hell poems and make them new, and one? Fusing and revisiting caller poems and poems from The Gilded Auction Block and Cain Named nan Animal, arsenic good arsenic a chapbook, McCrae reimagines what a New and Collected tin beryllium for him. It’s difficult not to respect nan boldness of this conception and execution of this now-epic, pinch its robot vertebrate named Law astatine nan center.

The truth is: it works, this allusive compelling descent, its joints made fluid done echoes of images and actions, from splattering to climbing to laughing, each marked by nan weight of foundational lines specified arsenic “My assemblage I had been was shaped / by chaos hidden successful nan bone.” McCrae’s tenth book stands retired amongst its own, moreover arsenic it comes retired of them, and raises absorbing questions astir really much selected/collected reinventions mightiness springiness wide readers nan vantage and pleasures that poets and critics acquisition erstwhile piecing together threads crossed collections.

Lee Min-ha, Phantom Limbs, translated by Jein Han
(Ugly Duckling Presse)

“The tree’s flabby torso is covered pinch quality fingerprints / and for illustration bits of bark fallen from trees, quality palms are scattered connected /the bare road.” The opening poem of Lee Min-ha’s 2005 debut, Phantom Limbs, recently translated from nan Korean by Jein Han, catapults nan scholar into nan grotesque interventions and intersections of humanity: nan poem ends, “a man is shoving nan remainder of his hips into nan tree’s torso.” With dizzying acts of transformation—bodies breaking, morphing, bending, bleeding, Lee Min-ha blows up and estranges successful thing that explodes beyond nan play of nan astir celebrated American prose poems past.

She offers a ocular benignant of listening, moreover successful translation: deliberation Frost’s “sentence sounds” but nan group are “inside a door” while “Trapped extracurricular nan door/ I hoist my ears, ample arsenic houses, until nan time breaks // The birds that woke earlier maine are for illustration fists / that clench their beaks and sound connected eardrums.” Imaginative, speedy successful wit and pace: these are poems that will slow you down. This near maine looking guardant to much Lee Min-ha collections successful translator and much Jein Han translations.

Jess Smith, Lady Smith
(University of Akron Press)

Prepare for riffs and slippage, for romp and database successful nan general leanings of Jess Smith’s debut, Lady Smith, victor of nan 2023 Akron Poetry Prize; these are sharpened devices for dismantlings of patriarchal violences and inheritances amidst nan collection’s move towards reclamations of intersexual and intelligence power. Smith’s poems toggle from nan violating questions of “Mandatory Reporter” to nan tensions of “Training”: “For miles, my eyes / are equine not human, turning side/ and much broadside to drawback first what is trying// to drawback me,” to “Lady Smith,” successful which nan speaker holds ‘[h]is first gift. My West Texas/ protection. My pinkish grip pinch grooves // designed for smaller hands.” An underlying communicative unfolds successful this collection, culminating, unexpectedly successful life—a meditation for nan speaker’s “child / who is afloat morning, aubade, kid whose / consequence is astir often opus . . . .” Aubade. Smith locks america successful in nan swerves of this last poem: neither emotion nor weapon protects us.

Yuki Tanaka, Chronicle of Drifting
(Copper Canyon Press)

“I perceive to nan satellite but it doesn’t opportunity overmuch astir my life,” originates Yuki Tanaka’s imaginative debut collection. These poems connection a mesmerizing triangulation of imagery, intellect, and invention, nan sensibilities of a writer calved and raised connected a mini land successful Yamaguchi, Japan and whose notes uncover that 1 poem, “Discourse connected Vanishing” is an erasure of his doctoral thesis. Brief excerpts don’t let for nan slippery and imaginative modes successful which immoderate of his narratives morph from nan straightforward to nan strange, often leaping done condemnation fragments.

The title poem offers a bid of prose poems that move from nan speaker eating hotpot, reading, getting a haircut, aliases moreover attending “A agelong module gathering astir punctuation, nan aesthetics of powerpoint,” and past swerve and tumble toward specified last figures arsenic “I want to beryllium a stagnant excavation of h2o reflecting a face.” “The Body successful Fragments” originates pinch a female drinking peppermint beverage and transforms: “A spider eats clouds to make a web / successful which she is caught pinch her parents and her lover,” and “When she looks retired nan model for a caller landscape, she thinks, If I transportation that meadow, folded successful my pocket, and dispersed it backmost home, / our cows will spell mad.” If I’ve made this sound formulaic, forgive me, arsenic it is thing but: publication it.