Cord Swell (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025)

Brittny Ray Crowell’s Cord Swell is an ancestral altar of poetry created by patching together memory, dialogue, and experience with tangible family ephemera, from journals and obituaries to home videos. In “Down 59,” Crowell writes:

“speak home, and watch memory splinter into clover
watch as your hands spin shadows into silk webs
translucent and thin
but broad enough to cross over”

And every poem feels like another thread in that web bridge Crowell builds to gap the space between past and present, living and dead:

As She Appears (YesYes Books, 2022)

In As She Appears, Shelley Wong explores identity—as a queer woman of color and post break-up—through imagery and language plucked from the world around her: the ocean, seasons, landscapes, specific colors, contemporary culture, artwork, fashion . . .

"On land I can still lose
my boundary, identifying

with the ocean & not the lake."

(from "The Ocean Will Take Us One Day")

"I wear pale pink to bloom—a pastel queen, soft sight."

(from "Pandemic Spring")

I don’t know if I have the eloquence or skill to give As She Appears the proper review it deserves, but it’s a stunning collection, and I read each poem two to three times, in awe of them all.

Cataloguing Pain (YesYes Books, 2023)

Allison Blevins’ Cataloguing Pain reads like a worship of pain, which is a nod to the poet’s ability to morph agony into pleasure by shaping and re-shaping language—how, in a poem in which the speaker recalls that first “small burning” of desire between her thighs when she was a child thinking “just right about that girl on TV,” the only solution “was to rub the pain away.” (from “Pain as Caged Birds”)

Little Beast (Riot in Your Throat, 2023)

From the opening poem “Wolf,” Sara Quinn Rivara’s Little Beast reads like the fairy tales we know flipped on their heads. And I don’t mean the watered-down versions. I mean the Brothers Grimm versions. The fairy tales elders once told children to scare them into behaving. Only Rivara is a witch burned at the stake returning to teach women how to misbehave, thus coming home to themselves.