Smith delves into the profound shifts in our world today with these poems, fearlessly exploring fatherhood and generational heritage as a person of color. His odes to weathering the journey of parenthood and almost lullabies to his child are telling of a world in progress.

These sometimes absurd and even slightly surreal vignettes form a weird, witty, and engaging collection that often reads like well-crafted short stories. Murray has crafted an introspective work that remains clever while never taking itself too seriously.

Mao writes to escape being "trapped in someone else's imagination," literally shaping poems that challenge empire, cultural plunder, and the ongoing violence Asian people experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, both in the U.S. and her birthplace of Wuhan.

Manick embraces Black womanhood in poems that reference personal experience, social circumstance, and sources that range from familial diaries to Jet magazine. The resulting collection is a work that makes the personal a universal read.

Olivarez reps both his Mexican American heritage and Chicago homeland in this bilingual collection that addresses immigration, capitalism, community, and belonging, writing poems that pay homage to love in all its many forms.

Quiet boldly explores Black interiority, intimacy, and selfhood, navigating the tension between guarding one's inner life and the realization that silence is not protection. The tone of these poems reflects perfectly the often-fraught negotiation between one's internal self and the surrounding world.

Combining elegy and fantasy, this collection memorializes a youthful relationship and a former lover's eventual suicide. These wistful, ethereal, and sorrowful poems are both a love letter to the Beloved and also an elegy for an imagined youth free of abuse, homophobia, and fear.

Anastacia-Reneé fearlessly explores the complexities of Black femme lives across time, space, and reality with an unapologetically feminist voice through these poems. This is an eclectic, well-curated archive of Black femme culture-making.

Phenix's poetry struts across the page in a collection that celebrates a matriarchal lineage rooted in Harlem, with a nod to bodega etiquette and summertime fire hydrants. This exaltation of the quotidian raises common city experiences to poetic heights.

Smith reanimates the static images of 19th-century photographs of Black men, women, and children in these ekphrastic poems that imagine lives of dignity and totality. The collection creates an intimacy with the past that resonates long after its pages are shut.