In Animal Purpose, Michelle Y. Burke explores the lives of men and women as they stand poised between the desire to love and the compulsion to harm. In one poem, a woman teaches a farmhand the proper way to slaughter a truckload of chickens. In another, a couple confronts the recent loss of a loved one when a stranger makes an unexpected confession in a crowded restaurant. Set in both rural and urban spaces, these poems challenge received ideas about work, gender, and place. Danger blurs into beauty and back again. Burke scours the hard edges of the world to find "fleeting softness," which...

In Doubtful Harbor, Idris Anderson turns wandering into art. From large landscapes to the minutest details, she seeks with each poem to convey the world more clearly, acutely, and exquisitely.

Andrew Collard's lyrical poems about Detroit show how the social and geographical past influences the present. Written from the perspective of a single parent raising a child amid increasing social isolation, economic insecurity, public catastrophes, and anxiety, Sprawl reminds us of the comforting endurance of communal experience.