REFRAMING THE PORTRAIT OF THE POET

MAHOGANY L. BROWNE’s Chrome Valley: Poems offers an intricate portrait of Black womanhood in America, capturing the pleasures and pangs of young love and motherhood, and reveling in the beauty of the undaunted self-determination passed down from Black woman to Black woman. The poems in CHEN CHEN’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency: Poems a acknowledge and name the persistent threat of violence, while also reminding its reader of joys both small and large: West Texas sunsets, a lover’s body, family both blood and chosen. MARILYN CHIN is always reinventing herself. In Sage: Poems, she mixes Chinese poems with hip-hop rhymes, pulls farcical details from an old diary, and confronts the disturbing rise in violence against Asian Americans. PIG: Poems by SAM SAX interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble creature – farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism, and law – to reimagine various chaotic histories of the body, faith, ecology, desire, hygiene, and power.

Buy Chrome Valley: Poems. – Browne

Buy Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency: Poems. – Chen

Buy Sage: Poems. – Chin

Buy PIG: Poems. – Sax