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.
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,” (acco
Extract — continue reading at the source.
