Composed as a long text message, this poem asks what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancesters were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history.

"Edgar wants nothing more than to live his life out loud. But telling the truth about his sexuality isn't so easy in his traditional Mexican-American family, and his Amá has made it clear she won't accept who he is. Things get even harder when Edgar's macho father returns home after months away, and the house erupts into fighting and simmering tension. Edgar worries what would happen if he told his father the truth about who he is, and feels he'll...

How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, and their bodies, to express ourselves?--Publisher website.

"Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty: about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise: the poetry...

"The third book in Tommy Pico's Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger...

"No one will protect you. Months after being named the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. announced his decision to leave the public school system. His career as a high school English teacher had spanned more than a decade but ended abruptly-another casualty of the cruel and dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination that is creeping back into the halls of government and the homes of Americans. At the beginning of Carver's...

"Eduardo C. Corral is the 2011 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, joining such distinguished previous winners as Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, and John Ashbery. Corral is the first Latino poet to win the competition. Seamlessly braiding English and Spanish, Corral's poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience. He employs a range of forms and phrasing, bringing the vivid particulars...