These thought-provoking and spiritual poems focus on faith, relationships, and the role of God in life and in the bedroom. Female empowerment is at the heart of this collection, as well as perceptions of humanity as beings full of light.

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction—through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history. The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope. By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men—in the structures that they design and maintain.

Presents poems that reconsider the definition of nature and natural order by rendering nature queer.

A fascinating blend of poetry and science, Ben-Oni’s poems are precisely crafted, like a surgeon sewing a complicated stitch. The speaker of the collection falls ill, and takes comfort in exploring the idea of “Efes” which is “zero” in Modern Hebrew, using that nullification to be a means of transformation.

Jill McDonough’s latest collection is fiercely unapologetic, transforming mundane moments into witty and provocative insights that closely examine the flaws in our quick-moving society. Using dark humor, the poems address the impermanence of life and how we should always find reasons to re-evaluate ourselves as empathetic beings over our selfish tendencies. ”Here’s Jill McDonough, Here All Night, belting out an endearing song of herself that is, as Whitman’s is, tuned in to some thrumming undercurrent of joy in all the mess that is America. The poems’ catalogue of the unwieldy stuff of domestic life ultimately insists that things are pretty good—love endures, friends come through, there’s plenty of gin. Unabashed and boisterous, McDonough’s voice also coos with gratitude and aching tenderness. A vital book in multiple senses: read it and feel more alive.” —Maggie Dietz

"Defiant and uncategorizable, Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling, with its teeming species, battles, and passions, read like an illuminated manuscript: mysterious, visceral, awe-full. Hers are some of the most enviable poems I have ever read, and herald Mei-en as the new standard bearer for innovative structure, terrifying acknowledgment, ecstatic statement, and, I daresay, beauty."—Kathy Fagan Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling explores adolescence through a deeply moving and poignantly raw lens. As the speaker ages, so too does the poetry, creating laments for the loss of friendship, the loss of species, and sometimes the loss of humanity itself. Harsh, forlorn and yet effervescent, Mei-en's lyricism perfectly captures the ethos of youth in an unsure world. From "Rara Avis Decoy": Wild diamond rocking on the floor of a predatory boat. Point & say sweet traitor to the wood & water for wanting to be made of both. My name is I know not what I am as a country of mothers & fathers comes down. They call me sleeping beauty. I dream I am in flight, body unfolding, folding, a bullet wounding water again & again—the mysterious love of a father & mother a two-barreled gaze. The gun in my dream speaks my name & sees a beating vein. Takes aim— Lo Kwa Mei-en is from Singapore and Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals, and won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize.

These quiet, descriptive poems blaze with an inferno of lamenting and loving muses as a son helplessly watches his father suffer from a debilitating illness. The inquisitive voice of the speaker gently paints an emotional landscape ranging from childhood to the present, while trying to find glimpses of happiness in the imminent sorrow.