“Movement against loss. Summer has its autumnal thoughts. / Bets made with your own body.” So begins Malgorzata Lebda’s poem “Trigger Points” in Mira Rosenthal’s translation of Mer de Glace. I keep thinking of Rosenthal’s translation notes for the collection, in which she begins with a long list of words and phrases that move from “Bright” and “Brilliant” through “Obvious” to “Of Course!” and “Sure Thing!” Words, Rosenthal tells us, “I hoped would come in handy whenever I came across the word ‘jasne’, for which all the above could be possible translations, depending on context….” She continues, “You see, the way Lebda uses it, the neuter adjective takes on the feel of an abstract noun that imbues the poems with a kind of life force related to brightness, radiance, clarity, and luminosity, carrying with it a sense of attentiveness and care.” How fitting, such granular attention and such vastness as we move past autumn towards the longest night of the year, finding light everywhere in these collections, a luminosity caught, yes, by sun and streetlights but also, mirrors, both glass skulls (Bias) and glass heads (Chabitnoy), and shadows, and in trees– “White aspens blink and flare vividly” (Gao), and humans– “How I flickered at hearing your faint voices: I am beginning to dream of spring (Bias). Our collective reaching for the light is everywhere. Of Course! Sure Thing!
November also brings a new Patricia Lockwood collection, Agate Head / Stone Soup (Penguin Poets), Jana Prikryl’s The Channel (Norton), longlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Jacob Saenz’s second collection, a substantial chapbook, Love Hound (Next Page Press). Stay tuned as Craig Morgan Teicher closes out 2026 poetry for our December column, and come back in January as we kick off 2027 with a shared Anticipated Poetry list.
Mark Kyungsoo Bias, Minor Destructions
(Gaudy Boy)
“This /morning, there is a bird thrashing about in my glass skull, but I answer only: I don’t know / who I am today.” The narrator of Seoul-based poet Mark Kyungsoo Bias’s debut collection wrestles with loss in many forms: “I once received a call that/ a friend, after months of abuse, had overdosed and died. / Waiting for deployment, as if words / weren’t already waging war on his mind.” Amidst glass, mirrors, light, “[s]hadows rally everywhere,” and the narrator’s own adoption story radiates through the collection, for “To be born, like a pistil, into something you will lose. / If I can bear it, I will see both my mothers drift away.” Loss also takes the form of dismantled ideals: he discovers of his birth father that “traffic violation” means “arrested for sex trafficking,” reflecting, “Before then, I used to imagine, / my father dying in pieces, longing in a cell for / his wife’s face. . ..” Bias forges one of the most moving and controlled debut collections of the year: “The poem is not art; it is violence. There is no washing away / the blood, only drawing with it.”
Mark Anthony Cayanan, Miracle Fever
(Northwestern University Press)
Miracle or hoax? At the heart of Cayanan’s Miracle Fever is Nieva, a fourteen-year-old of unspecified gender, whose miracles of Mary are shot down by a church investigation in her small town in the Philippines. Cayanan moves between poems spoken by a collective “we” and “dramaticules,” complete with dramatis personae and stage directions, alongside of hagiographies, visions, and timelines across just one century of invaders and disasters. In “Miracle Town: A Timeline of the Twentieth Century” the town, in 1904, populated by American soldiers, “Bops its heads to the music” in 1942– “is chased up the mountains by new invaders” and in 1943, “Ambushes a Japanese patrol and, stealing from house to house, slits the throats of local collaborators, ” surviving on through earthquakes and dictators of the 90’s. Anachronism is necessary amidst the parade of colonizers: “Passing on the birthright of unease about one’s body / they made it a punishment we deserved, and so / they gave our grief a shape they called faith” by “the priest who doesn’t possess the angel’s tongue, “ where “god is never palliative but sword.” Displacement and deaths are one in a world in which colonizers “removed the name of a boy who like all the best boys was a dead boy / and planted it down another coast.” By imaginatively bringing together the life of a town as symbol and record, Cayanan delivers a revelatory poetic performance.
Abigail Chabitnoy, Love Like a Body Carried to Shore
(Wesleyan University Press)
“Isn’t this what the poem does :: what singing? The speaker of Abigail Chabitnoy’s gripping follow-up to How to Dress Like a Fish and In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful keeps turning to song–“and again I am finding myself asking / can we not sing the world down this time,” and building from dream– “i hung the birds in churches / before industrial fans in the ceiling /in the rafters above the old women singing /where they might give the illusion of flight” – while also staying grounded in the transactions of climate change and other consequential ecological disasters, via the ark: “the second bought for insurance claims inevitably to sink / into such scorched earth.” Harnessing the dualities of agency and inevitability, the speaker notes, “the devil gets what it wants / if you believe each crack a sign / the rules of the game change nightly,” and tackles what it is to look forward, to imagine a future for more than ourselves, as a mother says of her daughter, “I tell her stories / of the sea / of her own / violent arc she must inherit / and shape with her small hands to buoy the barrel.”
Jay Gao, The Dead One The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber: A Poem
(Nightboat Books)
Let’s get this out of the way: Nightboat has been making some gorgeous looking books, and this is one of them. Oriented as landscape to encompass Gao’s long lines spaced out in what was “a promise of a sentence without end,” (according to the acknowledgments), that lasts over 100 pages, the poem circles around the refrain “Bark, archive, splinter,” ebbing and flowing with occasional epigraphic interruptions—Alejandra Pizarnik, Paul Valéry, Peter Larkin, C.D. Wright–that serve as section breaks of sorts. The natural world and enduring human formations join in play and pun to capture observation, agency, plasticity, such as with “Sloe film of itinerant poplar fluff” and “To save a grafted tree from its own mutant plot.” Reversals abound—“Video surveillance rewinded. The cypress trees are caught fumigating their storage units”—and are caught embedded in twists of idioms “sleeping like a stone.” Gao’s riffing and gasping and gapings accumulate into a poetic questioning, caught by the address to a “you” “travelling to a conference concerning the pastoral. You pass shepherds on the train, a cadre of bridge translators / Why are you here.” Perhaps this book’s poetics are caught in what follows: “Translating, in the last minute, an infinite poem you remember only inside this train carriage . . ..”
A Bowl of Goodness: Nourishing Poems with a Side of Soup, ed Major Jackson
(Storey)
Poems and soup? Edited by Major Jackson? When this landed on my doorstep, I had to open it. Somehow fifteen years have passed since the Kevin Young edited The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink, and we are due for some comfort food as we head into the elections. Complete with an introduction by cookbook author Michael Ruhlman and illustrations by Hélène Blanc, the anthology delivers poems you might expect (the odes of Pablo Neruda and Kevin Young), poems by married poets (do Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman make one another soup?), new voices (Asa Drake), voices of poets no longer with us (Robert Creeley), and Vievee Francis’ knockout love poem, “Beast and Beauty,” with its cameo by tomato soup. Then there are the poets you might not expect to find here: see Mary Ruefle’s “Blood Soup.” (Here a poem, not a recipe.) Perhaps you, readers, will let us know the outcome of your soup if you follow through on “How to Throw a Soup Party” (neither poem nor recipe). Though Jackson shares, “I do not eat soup alone,” you can happily pair solitary soup with a book or “Dish it up and eat it with a spoon, sitting on a poncho in the dark,” per Gary Snyder’s poem “How to Make Stew in the Pinacate Desert: Recipe for Locke & Drum.”
Malgorzata Lebda, Mer de Glace, trans. Mira Rosenthal
(Fitzcarraldo Editions)
“Today, the body was obedient,” opens the first of a series of poems titled “From the Body” that thread through Mer de Glace, Malgorzata Lebda’s Szymborska Award winning collection that follows her 1, 113 kilometer running journey along the Wisla, the longest river in Poland. But don’t be deceived, these are not primarily poems of the body, though the animal body–the dog, the human, meat– return throughout. The runner/speaker observes the natural world and those who watch her, commenting on a woman in a window: “I know a good deal about her: she tilts her head when smoking / and leans on the frame, she cares about diffuse light / for the fuchsia, chose to hang it in an eastern facing spot. / She recognizes things. She eats alone.” The narrator encounters “some local men grubby with dirt: they slice bread, squint in the sunlight, stuff their mouths / with meat, offer some, as if the body’s not a stranger.” Compelling, sparse, these poems stay grounded while tracking the mind’s wanderings along the river: politics, childbirth, poems and their making, various deprivations and hungers, reading: “And here we reach for books that help us close the mouth of night and open our own–bulky tomes where loss is conceived as / a canticle. Beechwood blaze.”
Colin Pope, Losers
(University of Wisconsin Press)
“I recognize with a jolt / I have been doing it all wrong,” the speaker of the opening poem of Colin Pope’s candid and meticulously crafted Losers concludes. “[W]aiting for the vehicle instead / of playing the arc of the horizon, / the spot where things are bound.” The “it” being, as the title tells us, “Spitting off the Overpass in December.” Poems such as “The Ways They Die in Saranac Lake,” which begins “They drink too much and pass out in a snowbank,” establish the geographical and cultural rural landscape within which the speaker comes of age, as Pope examines histories of learned masculinity and violence, including abuse at the hands of the father, revealed through the act of telling someone that history: “I could be in jail, I tell her. // That’s what happens to boys like me.” Like Edgar Kunz’s narrator in Fixer, Pope brings his narrator’s range of jobs to the forefront, but in his staggering title-producing poem, “On the Various Disciplines of Losers,” Pope directly and deftly interrogates the tie between labor and class and agency, of ways of protecting and developing a self: “I developed the economic theory / of identity invisibility” wondering “Can two men fit inside / a single body?” The speaker asks, “Locked into a daily routine / that you did not choose, for example, at what point / do you claim yourself, do you feel condemned?”
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