Every poet is so different—their language and their grammars so uniquely their own—that while there are usually threads connecting them to others, what attracts a reader to a particular poet’s book is a response as sui generis as the poet’s to the world.

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s debut book of poetry, Salaam of Birds, is a fundamental reckoning between the intensity of life in Israel and the earthy beauty of the desert: water, sand, flowers, fruit. The poems within the collection speak to the transformation that comes from holding disparate elements that comprise a homeland like the Jewish state.

Now, how many Russian novels in translation have you read this past year?
- Audre Lorde (“Notes from a Trip to Russia,” 1976)

The line above is the closing sentence of Audre Lorde’s “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” the opening essay in her renowned Sister Outsider. This essay was written during her two-week trip to Russia and Uzbekistan in 1976, before the dissolution of the USSR.

It’s possible one could go their entire lives and experience a single death, only their own. The aftermath of unpredictable tragedy, there would be nothing to observe, nothing to predicate one’s visions and versions of death.

Tropicália is a book that doesn’t pull its punches or steer away from the absurd, pulling in readers from the first line, “She devoured tiny Americans that came out of vending machines.”

Dialogues with Rising Tides testifies to how we are inextricably intertwined in a web of ecological disaster, intergenerational trauma, and a persistent murmuring chorus of our own underlying fears and anxieties.

In Amblyopia, Ananda Lima interrogates the imprecision of sight, the movement from one language to another, the blurred space in between.

At first glance, the most noticeable thing about Y el verso cae al aula (And the verse falls into the classroom) is a picture of a crying toddler on the cover of the book, along with the subtitles that say this:

I have in front of me two collections which should shake the foundations of what a person thinks they know about conception, child loss, and pregnancy—but also women’s history, women’s medicine, women’s narratives; what lore survives the dominancy of patriarchy