Mineral Point Poetry

At a literal crossroads in the South, there are two speakers in these poems -the descendant, who has traveled here to try to find her ancestors in the archives, records, and receipts of their violent and near-unrecorded history, and the ancestors, who are alternately bemused, angry, and tender with their descendant. Petrosino's poems argue with each other across time and seek to hear each other over the guardians and soldiers of the past who want to keep black genealogy from the descendants who would sing its truth. Interchapters illustrated by artist Lauren Haldeman reimagine the barriers of genealogical research as an enigmatic Confederate soldier with the disquieting habits and obstructive magicks of Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat.Timely, groundbreaking, and powerful, Kiki Petrosino's Black Genealogy has the weight of an instant classic.

A truly incomparable collection, The Rise of Genderqueer constructs a voice with unmitigated and authentic yearning. Its poems soak ink into page from margin to margin, pressing into the reader's assumptions about gender unmercifully. These poems demand, carry authentic wisdom, deliver keen argument, and disarm with sly wit. Wren Hanks challenges the status quo as neatly as a flower slid into the barrel of a rifle. These are utterly convincing prose forms studded with rhetoric he's deftly remastered and sampled from our culture and conversations right now. "I'll never be denatured, // I am nature," Hanks's poems insist, as the reader bears witness to a bigger world, light flooding into every corner, revealing what has always been true, vigorous, and expansive.

I realize that being a woman is a lot / like being a planet-I can't decide / what my gravity attracts. I am as helpless / as I am powerful. Poet Rita Feinstein builds a planet from twenty-five sonnets of lost love, and the astrophysics is undeniable. What has more gravitational pull than loss? What is a more alien landscape than the rearrangement of a heart? A strong narrative arc built from verse, Feinstein's debut collection crosses Shakespeare with science fiction to launch readers into a world apart where a newly broken heart is celebrated, examined, nurtured, and let to rage, as if only the atmosphere of an entirely new planet is able to bear the process of healing. This emotionally generous collection looks at pain and love-fourteen crystalline and confessional lines at a time. Dodge, as the speaker names her planet, "is not Virginia." It is "red because a horse heart / is red... Red because / that's what I was wearing when I left," and as the speaker fills Planet Dodge with men (because "there's no reason for Dodge / to be this empty"), she finds "how easy it is to hate them all / after six years of loving you too much." Life on Dodge is a powerful cycle of confessional verse, a contemporary radio signal to Plath and Sexton, utterly unafraid of the heat and danger of reentry after the fully interstellar escape that comes after heartbreak. "Next month the pain will be less, / and the next month it will simply disappear. / For example: today you are coming to Dodge. / You are coming to take me home."

I am trying to tell my unborn daughter a story. It is an old storythat hangs on the spinneret tip of a spider's abdomen,the spider's heart a bruise,each chamber a stitch that nicks the copper bloodas it rushes through, each valve sighing outlike the hush that hunglodged in everyone's lungs,a silence stacked between plates on the drying rack,a thrum that vibrated the blades of his kitchen knives. With long-limbed free verse and highly textured prose, Calf Canyon builds an origin myth with uncertain consequences and bald violence. McCartt-Jackson imagines a landscape where memories are permeable, physical places: the watersides of rural Kentucky and the Ozarks give way to the dry gulches and deep ravines of California as the speaker attains adulthood and her relationships become more fraught with danger. So, this: / you didn't mean to / tear out the part of you you didn't like / by tearing out a part of me / for the sixth, seventh, eighth, twelfth time you decided: / love was my heart, / the size of your fist. Domestic meditations vine with the thorns of the natural world in a collection that is bare-handed, wind-polished, and visceral, and McCartt-Jackson's command of imagery leaves the reader with sculptural playback of brutal love and resonant feelings. This is a collection to read beginning to end, and from the end to the first poem, interleaving the pages with marginalia, tears, and the reader's own memories. Rarely does a poet bend such gifted, formal craft to the requirements of fierce feeling.