Like Robert Frost's North of Boston, David Yezzi's Birds of the Air intersperses charged lyrics with longer dramatic narratives. His monologues explore the frenetic pressures of urban life, as a number of memorable characters take stage: the guy who is hired to clear out a dying man's apartment; the actor stuck in an inadvertently hilarious production of Macbeth and his estranged girlfriend's tragic end; and the short-order cook who elevates his work to an art form. Like the birds of the air described by St. Matthew, these threadbare denizens of the modern city subsist on the few scraps that...

These poems both celebrate and question the psychological existence we give to the objects that define our lives: the silver spoon from which the speaker sips, during each Epiphany, the sacred Borscht which she later catches her mother, after guests have left, pouring down the drain; the acoustic guitar on which the speaker's father strums his minor-keyed songs from Ukraine; or the granite bust of a national poet that, in the hot sun, fails to inspire. With heart and humor the speaker examines what stays, goes, and how every object, once illuminated by the past, has the ability to take on new...

From the opening poem, we follow a narrator through the loss of an Edenic life and its manifestations, from personal loss to the extinction of species and--looming in the future--the threat of our own extinction. In the process we range from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the worlds of literature, science, culture, politics, and religion.

In Alexandria, Jasmine V. Bailey has written a string of love poems, islands in an archipelago that emerges with each poem's brief story. In a voice at times detached and wistful and sometimes ringing with ardor, these poems keenly remember sexual desire and male beauty, weaving them into observations that are quietly political or fiercely existential.

Pretenders interweaves narrative, lyric, and fable in poems that tell their magical stories with revelatory rhythms and precise diction. Surreal and darkly funny, these powerful poems create a dense world full of pretense, menace, deception, and double truths--in which we are all struggling to love each other enough to survive another day.

Here is poetry of subtlety and scale: it's a record in equal measure of the sweeping and of the small. We are given a view of the world through a time-lapse camera, a pair of binoculars, a glass-bottomed boat, and we are made to see the movement in what we thought was stillness.