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REVIEWS - AUGUST 2026
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The Natural Order of Things: poems By Donika Kelly Release date October 7, 2025 Graywolf Press 72 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
Donika Kelly’s third collection, The Natural Order of Things: poems is a celebration of connection, a celebration of love, and Kelly’s introspective, first-person verse questions and wonders and reminds its reader of the reverent awe within love of all forms. The collection begins with a proem, includes 38 poems in the body of the work, and ends with an epilogue poem which can be viewed as an envoi for the collection. In the final poem, “Suicide Watch: Spring,” Kelly invites an exploration of the longterm maintenance healing and happiness require when she begins, “So much has happened / that I would never have known / I could remember”.
One of the techniques Kelly uses in The Natural Order of Things: poems to explore the wonder inside of connection is to use questions, engaging the reader into becoming a part of the dialogue of the poem and presenting the speaker as a participant in the work instead of the authority. This technique works so well for the motifs within this collection, as questioning is a major component in the natural order of human behavior, and wonder is a natural component of love, as shown in “I did not mention the moon but it too showed out” where Kelly writes:
What sound can I make
in my reeling? What rubbing wing or fluting spiracle,
what bellow or snort will reach you before its collapse?
Know that I hum for you, though you cannot hear it.
I hum into the mouth of this poem decades of light.
At times within the collection, Kelly’s verse directly engages with the reader through a question, intensifying the connection of the reader within the world of the verse, such as in “What you dare to open at the threshold,” where Kelly writes, “There is a future / in your mouth, smoky quartz on your tongue. / Where will you hold it: belly, teeth, or palm?”
Repetition, too, is used as a technique in The Natural Order of Things: poems, to help reinforce the ideas of connection and all the forms of love through which we connect to one another. Kelly repeats poem titles within the collection, such as in the two poems from which the collection’s title originates, “A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things [Observe the baby hippo]” and “A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things [ You are of a mind, a reiteration]” as well as in the three poems titled “The Bone Museum.”
In the two title poems, imagery of the natural world is used as a comparison for the human world: a newborn baby hippo whose natural environment is the water becomes a reminder that the speaker’s natural element should be love, and a jarred octopus becomes a reminder that we have all been underestimated and misunderstood. The differing examples with repeated titles reflect each other, reinforcing like different verses within one song, ending with a deep connection to both the natural world and the reader, as Kelly writes in “A Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things [ You are of a mind, a reiteration]” when she asks, “What have they taught you to settle for? / What do they know of our several minds?”
The repeated elements in the three poems titled “The Bone Museum” are layered in culture: the neighborhood or family game of Dominoes and the connection to an art exhibit wandered through slowly. The connections created through the culture build from the first “The Bone Museum” poem through the last, always aware, though, of the importance of the connection created, as Kelly writes in “The Bone Museum [I didn’t come for the bones]”:
I came for the call borne under the current,
echoing the inland hall.
An eddy of kinship,
a wave, a breaching, a slap,
swirling over and through the inland hall.
Donika Kelly’s The Natural Order of Things: poems is an insistent celebration of connection, a celebration of love in all its forms. The collection uses questions, repetition, and clear images to remind its readers lasting connection is something created over time, intentionally and with faith, as Kelly explains in “I love you. I miss you. / Please get out of my house” where she writes:
Another time,
I might have dismissed as hunger
this cataloging, this fitting, this fixing,
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling,
supple, misses the wind.
Dr. Donika Kelly is the author of three books of poetry: The Natural Order of Things, The Renunciations, Anisfield-Wolf book award winner in poetry, and Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other places. Kelly lives in Iowa City with her wife, the writer Melissa Febos, and teaches in the English Department at the University of Iowa. More information about Dr. Kelly and her work may be found on her website: https://www.donikakelly.com/.
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night myths・・before the body By abi pollokoff Release date April 22, 2025 Red Hen Press 118 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
Ancient myths decoded the mysteries of the world’s origins and natural phenomena, but what are the myths we create to speak of our individual, human origins? Of the origins of our bodies and how they move into and through the natural world? It is these myths which concern Abi Pollokoff’s debut collection, night myths・・before the body. Divided into two sections which mirror each other from a central, pivotal poem, night myths・・before the body uses natural motifs and interwoven perspectives to explore how individual moments build the myths which permeate our physical experiences. There’s a generous intimacy in these poems, whispered from the voice of a close friend; as she writes in “billow & pulse,” Pollokoff’s debut collection gently reminds readers “how to tend to / the body when all that’s left is / what’s made to bristle, to settle in.”
The natural and human worlds intertwine through night myths・・before the body, to the point of one transforming physically into the other in poems such as “to forest is to hide a woman” where the speaker becomes the forest. Pollokoff writes, “where. is the woman i. see only birch see. / only aspen see forest &. // it is night there.” Similarly to Daphne in the Greek myth of Apollo’s unwanted pursuit, Pollokoff’s speaker escapes by becoming nature; by transforming into a part of the darkened forest, she evades confusing and heartbreaking expectations of womanhood. The control of breath through the precise application of periods throughout this poem and others in this collection helps ensure the movement of the poem reflects the heightened emotion of the speaker’s desperation. The comparisons and connections between humans and nature is a recurrent theme in night myths・・before the body. Trees, flowers, bodies of water, wind, sun, and rocks all feature as recurrent threads throughout the verses, and as Pollokoff writes in “a walk in the woods,” the lines between nature and humanity aren’t clearly defined, “we shiver into the shape / of birch trees rubbing off their / peels as if it were hard to unskin / the self”.
In addition to the use of common motifs to connect the individual parts of the collection, there is a series of short works interspersed throughout the collection which are not included in the table of contents and only titled in Pollokoff’s acknowledgments at the end of the collection as being previously published as “body mythlets.” These small stanzas provide an effective refrain which connects and develops and moves, like a rhythmic pulsing, through the collection, adding interesting layers to the repeated myths of the body’s origins. In one of these, Pollokoff again supports the strong connection between the physical, human body and nature when she writes of a “spine spindled down to conjunction of rings & time.”
A subtle technique Pollokoff uses in night myths・・before the body to balance out the two distinct sides of the collection is to provide a variety of perspectives, interwoven together like camera angles of a visual image, producing a richer whole of the original vehicle which can then be mirrored by its opposite in the second half of the collection. The second poem of the second half of the collection, “to heather is to stake a claim” weaves together the perspectives of strangers, atoms, and denuded birds into an impressionistic painting of recovery after failure or loss:
some wear their bodies. like music. their oncethudded
atoms slick with. others’ bluffs a. compass for. every
spinecracked song a. bare bird with. bones that. twitch
at. the briskness of
something. to remember.
The second poem in the first half of the collection, however, blends together its various perspectives for a very different end result. In “island sided,” Pollokoff implies a much less hopeful ending for the speaker when she writes, instead, of “a. glowing crush of. / phosphorous unsleeping. a deception in. water &. the / discomfort of. moonlight. lilies under oars.”
What are the myths about our bodies which arrived before we were even born into them, and how does the tension of their existence continue to speak into us every day? Abi Polokoff’s debut poetry collection, night myths・・before the body, considers all of the myths created by and around us and their connections to who we become. In the notes at the end of the collection, Pollokoff writes about one particular poem in the collection being “a meditation and an exaltation,” but the phrase is relevant to the collection, as a whole. After all, myths were a way in which societies sought understanding, building connections between their physical selves and the universe which surrounded them, a large-scale quest for understanding which mirrored the understanding of the self, and that’s what this collection seeks, as well, as Pollokoff writes in “aubade,” “a body is only. / a halved hymn. a startling. & doesn’t it all. end here / with. a swelling a. sunrise a. weary aubade.”
Abi Pollokoff is a Pushcart-prize nominated poet and editor in Brooklyn. Pollokoff won the 2012 Anselle M. Larson/Academy of American Poets Prize for Tulane University, and she was a Finalist for the 2022 Coniston Prize and the 2022 Gatewood Prize. She is Managing Editor at Poetry Northwest Editions, and her poems have appeared in The Seventh Wave, Denver Quarterly, Radar, and other places. Learn more about Pollokoff and her work at https://www.abipollokoff.com/
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the Near and Distant World: poems
By Bianca Stone Release date January 13, 2026 Tin House 112 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
Rich with allusions to Tarkovsky and Jordan Peele, Rodin and Rilke, Liriope and Hillary Clinton, Bianca Stone’s most recent poetry collection, the Near and Distant World: poems, is textured lavishly in the images and sounds of introspective existence. Stone’s intelligent, sometimes wry, verse examines philosophy, culture, myth, and truth as cornerstones to our individual and societal foundations. Broken into three numbered sections of between fifteen and nineteen poems each, Bianca Stone’s the Near and Distant World: poems is a sonic and visual contemplation of selfhood, as she writes in “Under-water Candle”:
I come a’knocking
on a fathomless depth
wrapped around
red on the inside of everything
like the inside
of an antique teacup--
The cultural, historical, literary, mythological, and philosophical allusions throughout the Near and Distant World: poems provide intricate connections which ground Stone’s work in all of the planes of existence. This is a collection where the connections matter deeply, and there is an expectation upon the reader if the connection doesn’t already exist to the allusion presented. In “Sound in a Dream,” Stone’s allusions to figures from Greek mythology help provide crucial textual examples when she writes:
In the mirror I looked at someone else. When I touched myself, I
met only rain. Forgive me, I’m not even here. Gone as the worm;
gone as the body of Echo, as the body of Narcissus—only the
res-erection of a yellow, narcotic old-world lily…
In addition to the use of allusion to help ground the Near and Distant World: poems deeply within myriad layers of existence, some of the poems in this collection have a dream-like state which helps invite the subtleties of deep introspection. The poem from which the title of the collection originates, “Thoughts at the Grave,” is an intensely personal poem about familial deaths, playing subtly on the poet’s last name and a grave stone, and weaving through history, geology, and art; however, it invites the reader into immediately to introspection gently with its opening stanza, for most of us understand the feeling when Stone writes, “Even alone I feel I am in another performance. / Even the near world is distant.”
In addition to using allusions and subtle dream-like states inviting introspection in this collection, Stone also uses sound as a critical layer of connection throughout these poems. Using both slant and hard rhymes at the ends of some lines, internal rhymes, and line length, Stone creates intentional musicality in her verse, such as in “Reality 2!” where she writes:
I’m making a documentary called Reality 2!
Everyone we interview
seems to be confined to their body
while Canadian geese move
with an image of themselves
moving in their minds above us
often I point my lens upward
while my subject speaks
mummering of starlings
It isn’t really a technique, but I wanted to mention, finally, one of the characteristics of Stone’s poetry which shines in this collection is her obvious reverence for Poetry. It’s clear Stone’s passion for the art drives her work, and she does not shy from metapoetics, such as in “What’s Poetry Like?” where Stone writes about:
the treacherous inadequacy with which one
finds oneself explaining in a few loose
deficient words something with lungs
and no face, the immortal freak
of language you haunt and hunt
which is the original state of language
you’re trying to get back to from within--
poetry, whose rare geniuses come
as bitter-sweet suicidal explosions
on the tongue
The elusive mystery of Poetry, reflected by the speaker’s inability even to voice its magnitude in this section of the poem is further layered with the philosophical ideas of our origins and Otto Rook’s philosophy of the human desire to return to the womb. In this poem, and in this collection, we join as Stone becomes seeker, disciple, worshipper at the gates of Poetry as a vehicle by which she explores all of existence.
Bianca Stone’s the Near and Distant World: poems is a luxuriously-textured love letter to existence by someone who breathes in poetry. With sumptuous language, clear images, and rich sound, Stone’s verse examines philosophy, culture, myth, and truth as cornerstones to our individual and societal foundations, as she writes in “The Circuitous Path Towards Inertia”:
how we live merely
a circuitous path towards inertia
on a road distinctly repeating itself
on all sides, as this one, with the vertical green slopes
of bowed ferns, a green waterfall,
hiding the ground that it thick with sunk fronds
and tiny curled rinds of insects: the layers of what was once
the incessant clinging, and letting go.
Bianca Stone is the current Vermont State Poet Laureate and the founder of Ruth Stone House, a poetry-based nonprofit located in the family home of Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Ruth Stone. Bianca Stone is the author of many books and the creator and host of the poetry podcast Ode & Psyche. Her 2022 poetry collection, What is Otherwise Infinite received the Vermont Book Award. Stone’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Poets and Writers, and many other places. More information about Bianca Stone and her work may be found on her website: https://bianca-stone.com/
REVIEWS - MAY 2026
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Maybe the Body: poems By Asa Drake Released February 24, 2026 Tin House 2024 National Poetry Series finalist 88 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
Scientists still don’t quite understand all the unseen ways in which our bodies connect—within their internal systems, among their myriad parts, between one another, within communities, across generations. There are miracles of connection pulsing through and from our bodies every minute, all generating from a form of love. And it is those connections which drive the poems in Asa Drake’s debut full-length collection, Maybe the Body: poems, which was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series.The collection consists of 38 poems, beginning with a proem and then divided into six, epigraphed sections of varying lengths. Each epigraph grounds the work in place, connecting lives from The Philippines to Florida, because as Drake writes in epigraph 6, “It’s so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in.”
The natural duality of foundations in The Philippines and in The United States, two vastly different, but connected, lands runs throughout Maybe the Body: poems, like breathing deeply through both lungs. And Drake’s work confronts both the intentional and unintentional unkindness which sometimes result from that duality, such as in “Tonight, a Woman,” where Drake writes, “I have heard someone I love speak around someone I love, like English is a sieve / for catching one another’s cruelty. // Catch and hold.” The framework of love as a lens through which the speaker experiences cruelty highlights the contrasts within the conflict, making the imagery of the cruelty which follows that much more impactful. It isn’t just intentional cruelty which harms, though, as Drake explores in “More than Half of Americans Can’t Name an Asian American,” where she writes, “Shame is a human emotion I have a lot of / questions about.”
There is an inherent tension between the connections extended intentionally outward from the body and the connections which intrude upon the body in Drake’s work, causing a dynamic interplay in poems such as “I’m Interested in How Animals Teach us Pleasure,” where Drake writes:
A friend reads fortunes in my hair when my lover won’t, love
refracted between us to make everyone in the room more beautiful.
And still, someone enters to ask if I wasn’t born lucky.
I keep a whole rabbit to help me survive. Oh, it eats
and eats at what I was born with.
The contrasts in the poem’s language concerning the lover, the friend, and the intruder are stark. The lover refuses the intimate and requested act of reading “fortunes,” but the friend complies. The result is that the friendship and all who are witness to it are rewarded through beauty. The rewards, however, are fleeting when the scene is interrupted by a thoughtless intruder whose assumptions create disorder from the tranquility a moment ago. The implication is that both beauty and destruction are at least in part reliant on connections outside of the body. The interplay between internal and external connections is a recurring motif in Maybe the Body: poems, creating both positive and negative results, as Drake suggests in “Assemble the Mockingbird,” where she writes, “Every found object is evidence // of disenchantment. / The opposite is also true.”
Connections of all kinds resonate within and between bodies, stretching even through time in Drake’s debut collection. The visceral and the physical connections from lineage matter, as Drake suggests in the poem from which the title originates, “Maybe the Body is a Loved One,” where she writes, “Even the chimera has siblings and children / she resembles.” Building connections across time begins first in familiar features passing from one parent to his or her progeny, and then continues into what is done, what is intentionally created, later, as Drake writes in “The World Begs for Transcription,”where she admits, “I stay so long in one place my hair lines the nests. I don’t know how to hold / down what I love, but I’ve eaten so much fruit trying to lure the animal to me.”
The key to every type of connection is love. Love is the miracle of connection which pulses steadily through the interior connections keeping our body systems running, the connections among family members and communities, and the connections through generations. Asa Drake’s debut collection, Maybe the Body: poems, radiates with love, even in less than ideal circumstances, as in “Wading Into the River Beneath the Interstate,” where Drake writes:
After Eden, everyone goes home.
To plant seeds. To say we love the unrelenting
aspects of the world and carry them with us
into its aftermath, which is full of potential.
Asa Drake is the author of Maybe the Body: poems, her debut full-length collection of poetry, which was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series, and the chapbook One Way to Listen, the winner of the 2021 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest and a 2023 Florida Book Awards Recipient. Her work has appeared on The Slowdown podcast, as well as in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Poetry Daily, and other places. More information on Drake and her work may be found at her website, https://www.asaldrake.com/
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Antibody By Elane Kim Release date February 23, 2026 River River Books 84 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
With the careful observation of a scientist and the wordplay of a linguist, Elane Kim’s powerful debut poetry collection, Antibody, reimagines and redefines the body as a home— something separate and sometimes conquerable, something both smaller than the power we ascribe to it and vaster than our realization allows. Organized into three, named and epigraphed sections of twelve to fourteen poems each, Kim’s Antibody tenderly explores binaries of individual and societal, Korean and American, disaster and redemption, all in relationship to the boundary of human form and the comfort we derive from its consistencies. It is this comfort which helps us define home, as Kim reminds in “Aubade in the Aftermath,” when she writes, “We are just soft bones and the places they inhabit.”
Perspective, subjective in its processing and limited by its sightline, is its own binary of physical and mental, and the poems in Kim’s Antibody use the additional layer of perspective to include and set apart within the verses. In “Second Try,” the speaker is an included part of the whole of society, denoted by the use of we when Kim writes,“When there were birds and only birds, / we stopped resenting our wingless bodies.” The same is true of the inclusive our and we within “Corollary,” where Kim writes, “So many small disasters / to call our own, these calamities we call bodies.” But in “Axiom,” the speaker is outside of the world, observing as a solitary I, when Kim writes,“The loneliest parts of the world / are still trying to be found. I want there to be warmth, even if / it cannot be mine.”
The inherent pull between inclusion and exclusion in Kim’s debut collection doesn’t always create negative tension. Sometimes, as in “Axiom,” the speaker’s position outside of the world is beneficial to the observation, and therefore carries no weight of negative connotation. In “Sonnet as First Words,” however, a list of imperatives from a second-person perspective, the separation is bitter. There is a deep divide, reflected through parallels of country and citizen, tense and language, as Kim writes:
Say mother. Say father. Say it over again. Let your tongue
become a washboard, your body past tense, your body minor
chord. Say amendment, contraction, the declaration
like a prayer. Say warzone. Say warzone. Say,
I am waiting for this country to love me back. Future
tense.
Tense matters in Kim’s lyrical verse, both the tenses as they are used within the verse and the tense of the verse. In “Manifesto for the Immigrant Poet,” Kim chooses present continuous as the tense for all verb forms within the poem, building a narrative of ongoing, long-term tension into the language of the verse. With the body again as a consistent framework of home, Kim writes:
25. We are not looking for forgiveness. We are not looking for the good years, the
synonyms for survival that fit in the pinch of two fingers. We are looking for a
pat of flour on kneaded dough, a sewn patch over skinned knees, another bowl
of soup, a body to be sung.
26. We are looking for hunger and it is looking for us.
In addition to building layers with the inherent tension from detailed explorations of binaries and tense, Kim’s debut collection also explores form and formatting. The structure of forms such as the sonnet, pantoum, and diptych become haunting frames for lyrical verses which pull from history as their forms help create reflections of the past in the present. As Kim writes in “Eomma’s Pantoum”:
Kitchen smoke collecting into fingers, into fists
blooming open. I inherit grief, Eomma’s
apron salted with bleach stains,
so many pigeons behind glass. Bodies
blooming open. I inherit grief, Eomma’s
way of returning home, nesting, preserving
so many pigeons behind glass. Bodies
can only remember so much. No
way of returning home.
Interspersed among the form poems and the free verse poems, there are several poems in which Kim also plays with formatting on the physical space of the page, juxtaposing well with the lyrical verse and creating rhythm and movement through the collection. The use of space in “Good Daughter,” a poem based on Korean myth, works to create pace, as the spaced sections throughout the poem mimic the leaping of fish or of waves, moving the longer poem quickly until lines of tension surface through the intentional pacing, causing the reader to slow a moment and consider more deeply, such as when Kim writes, “there is some place that will love her best // when she is gone.”
Astonishing in its keen observation of self and society, tender in its understanding of humanity and the ephemeral and wonderful bodies which house us, Elane Kim’s debut poetry collection, Antibody, is a powerful redefinition of the body as home and an exploration of the collective tensions its impermanence causes—within society, within cultures, within our personal worlds, as Kim writes in “Sonnet at the Supermarket,” “The bravery of searching for sweetness / where there is only dust.”
Elane Kim is a Korean American poet and student at Harvard College. Kim won the 2024 Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, she was the winner of the 2021 Columbia Journal Winter Poetry Contest, and she is a Davidson Fellow in Literature. She is editor-in-chief at Gaia Lit, and her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative Magazine, and other places.
Perspective, subjective in its processing and limited by its sightline, is its own binary of physical and mental, and the poems in Kim’s Antibody use the additional layer of perspective to include and set apart within the verses. In “Second Try,” the speaker is an included part of the whole of society, denoted by the use of we when Kim writes,“When there were birds and only birds, / we stopped resenting our wingless bodies.” The same is true of the inclusive our and we within “Corollary,” where Kim writes, “So many small disasters / to call our own, these calamities we call bodies.” But in “Axiom,” the speaker is outside of the world, observing as a solitary I, when Kim writes,“The loneliest parts of the world / are still trying to be found. I want there to be warmth, even if / it cannot be mine.”
The inherent pull between inclusion and exclusion in Kim’s debut collection doesn’t always create negative tension. Sometimes, as in “Axiom,” the speaker’s position outside of the world is beneficial to the observation, and therefore carries no weight of negative connotation. In “Sonnet as First Words,” however, a list of imperatives from a second-person perspective, the separation is bitter. There is a deep divide, reflected through parallels of country and citizen, tense and language, as Kim writes:
Say mother. Say father. Say it over again. Let your tongue
become a washboard, your body past tense, your body minor
chord. Say amendment, contraction, the declaration
like a prayer. Say warzone. Say warzone. Say,
I am waiting for this country to love me back. Future
tense.
Tense matters in Kim’s lyrical verse, both the tenses as they are used within the verse and the tense of the verse. In “Manifesto for the Immigrant Poet,” Kim chooses present continuous as the tense for all verb forms within the poem, building a narrative of ongoing, long-term tension into the language of the verse. With the body again as a consistent framework of home, Kim writes:
25. We are not looking for forgiveness. We are not looking for the good years, the
synonyms for survival that fit in the pinch of two fingers. We are looking for a
pat of flour on kneaded dough, a sewn patch over skinned knees, another bowl
of soup, a body to be sung.
26. We are looking for hunger and it is looking for us.
In addition to building layers with the inherent tension from detailed explorations of binaries and tense, Kim’s debut collection also explores form and formatting. The structure of forms such as the sonnet, pantoum, and diptych become haunting frames for lyrical verses which pull from history as their forms help create reflections of the past in the present. As Kim writes in “Eomma’s Pantoum”:
Kitchen smoke collecting into fingers, into fists
blooming open. I inherit grief, Eomma’s
apron salted with bleach stains,
so many pigeons behind glass. Bodies
blooming open. I inherit grief, Eomma’s
way of returning home, nesting, preserving
so many pigeons behind glass. Bodies
can only remember so much. No
way of returning home.
Interspersed among the form poems and the free verse poems, there are several poems in which Kim also plays with formatting on the physical space of the page, juxtaposing well with the lyrical verse and creating rhythm and movement through the collection. The use of space in “Good Daughter,” a poem based on Korean myth, works to create pace, as the spaced sections throughout the poem mimic the leaping of fish or of waves, moving the longer poem quickly until lines of tension surface through the intentional pacing, causing the reader to slow a moment and consider more deeply, such as when Kim writes, “there is some place that will love her best // when she is gone.”
Astonishing in its keen observation of self and society, tender in its understanding of humanity and the ephemeral and wonderful bodies which house us, Elane Kim’s debut poetry collection, Antibody, is a powerful redefinition of the body as home and an exploration of the collective tensions its impermanence causes—within society, within cultures, within our personal worlds, as Kim writes in “Sonnet at the Supermarket,” “The bravery of searching for sweetness / where there is only dust.”
Elane Kim is a Korean American poet and student at Harvard College. Kim won the 2024 Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, she was the winner of the 2021 Columbia Journal Winter Poetry Contest, and she is a Davidson Fellow in Literature. She is editor-in-chief at Gaia Lit, and her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative Magazine, and other places.
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Superbloom: Poems By Catherine Esposito Prescott Release date February 11, 2026 Gunpowder Press 83 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
In so much of literature, grief is described in terms of water because of how it flows and engulfs and sometimes gets caught in eddies which circle back on themselves, but in Catherine Esposito Prescott’s second full-length poetry collection, Superbloom, grief and its aftermath are granted instead the colors and light and even the sharp beauty of a desert superbloom— illuminating, surprising, and vital. Broken into three, epigraphed and numbered sections, the poems in Superbloom sing reverently of what has been lost and what is still to come with vivid color and clear imagery, alchemizing grief into hope. As Prescott writes in “The Ride”:
…Even
as the future swung open its threatening door.
How do we? How can we? The eaves
channel rainwater down the sides
of our house. The rocks below glow
green with mold. Basil seedlings shout
through the soil. My heart is dust,
but nothing is unbeautiful here.
Color and the effects of color are explored throughout Prescott’s Superbloom, in the imagery within the verses as well as in dedicated color meditations such as the haunting “Meditation on Blue” where Prescott writes:
If truth had a color, this would be it. A shade
less than shady. Improbable skin of the gods
who are ether. You now. You now. Moved
from this world to the next. Moved from skin
and bones to pure energy. Cobalt and indigo, and primary.
The additional weight in the repetition of the ghostly “You now” in the middle of the stanza moves the poem from a simple recounting of myriad blue examples into an incantation of loss and perseverance. The grounding force of the colors pulls the poem, and its speaker, from shade into energy, from improbability into primary. In the title poem, “Superbloom,” Prescott again allows garish, even aggressive, color to carry layers of meaning beyond the physical when she writes:
Around us, fog grows light. We are in it,
but poppies shout orange, the agave screams
its yellow flowers up toward an imaginary
sun. The grass no longer just grass, lemondrop
flowers dance on its breath. Even
the cliff holds tufts of heart-red flora.
Every living thing blooms bright as our hope.
Vivid and repeated use of color is one of the ways in which Superbloom is able to connect the individual poems, creating a larger conversation about grief and what comes afterward. In addition to the overt application of colors within the poems and in the poem titles, there is an intentional use of color and light within the indirect descriptions in the poems, as well, such as in “Touch” where Prescott writes, “Sunlight spreads / as if from a broken bottle. I want to touch everything.” Prescott also uses repetition of poem titles and vocabulary to connect the individual poems in Superbloom. There are several poems in the collection, all different, which are entitled, “Fallen Poem,” mirroring all of the ways in which we, in grieving and in living, fall. And there are several poems in the collection whose titles begin with “Meditation on –” providing additional connections of thought for the collection as a whole. The heart-wrenching “Meditation on Yellow” continues the repetition of color as a metaphor in the collection as it minutely examines the vocabulary of grief. In it, Prescott writes:
…What is my job
here, as a mother missing her son? There are no words
for a mother without her son—not widowed or widower,
not unmothered—beyond bereft, without, lacking, minus,
beyond bereaved, deprived of, dispossessed,
which implies layered suffering, lamentation, and left.
We know very well what I am missing. We have no
language for who I am, for what I may become.
One of the techniques Prescott uses to ground the palpable grief in Superbloom is the use of form poetry to provide structure for the intense emotions in the same way lattice would for blooms. Prescott includes several form poems in the collection, including sonnets, an abecedarian, and the beautiful tercet, “No Words” in which Prescott writes:
I don’t know how to find that place inside
where every chamber and hollow fills with grace.
Today, my tongue is a rainbow tied
to a rock, held, contracted.
In addition to the established forms Prescott uses to ground the emotion in Superbloom, there are also many poems in the collection in which the poem’s form, particularly the way in which space is used on the page, is an additional, intentional layer of the poem. One example of this technique is “The Swimmer” in which Prescott uses the space on the page to create physical space for the subject of the poem, as well, by writing:
So she swam across the sea,
one woman a boat
meters ahead another behind
and drones like judges
following waiting for her throat
to burn, for her to choke
on saltwater.
Catherine Esposito Prescott’s Superbloom is an incredible alchemy of grief, drenched in the beauty of a desert, overwhelmed with color and life. The collection manages to remain realistic in its understanding of how grieving affects our daily lives, as it progresses from its repeated elements and clear imagery into a future filled with hope, created both diligently and intentionally, as Prescott explains in “The Swamp,” “We could / not have seen that remembering your exuberance / would be the only light worth navigating by, the only way / we could dare move through our craving to see you again.”
Catherine Esposito Prescott is a poet, an editor, and a yoga philosophy teacher in Florida. She is co-founder of the nonprofit SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) and editor-in-chief of the daily online literary journal SWWIM Every Day. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Superbloom and Accidental Garden (Gunpowder Press, 2023), and two chapbooks, Maria Sings (dancing girl press, 2017) and The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Prescott’s recent poetry appears in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, Verse Daily, and other places. More information about Prescott and her work may be found on her website: https://www.catherineespositoprescott.com/
REVIEWS - FEBRUARY 2026
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Black Mestiza: poems By Yael Valencia Aldana Released January 21, 2025 University Press of Kentucky 122 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor Black Mestiza - The University Press of Kentucky |
The complex history of the Caribbean provides a tonal blueprint for Yael Valencia Aldana’s debut full-length poetry collection, Black Mestiza: poems, like an underpainting, and shadows of racism and exploitation throughout Aldana’s verse create causal layers for community, hope, and celebration, which shine in this collection. The verses in Black Mestiza begin with a proem, and then the collection is divided into four numbered sections of varying lengths; but Aldana’s art in this book begins before the verse. Her painting graces the cover, and the image there provides a rare concrete visual for all the various parts which make up the complex, multitudinous lives carried within. As Aldana writes of these lives and the verses’ responsibility to them in the proem, “Talisman”:
All of you
curl in my ear,
I will carry you.
Sleep in my Mestiza’s body,
Lay aside the violence that forged this body
my body
Lay inside my shell of soul and flesh
We are all in here together
Together, generations of women from Trinidad and Tobago, from Columbia, from Florida sing in Aldana’s verses, celebrating how each component joins to build the depth of the harmony. As Aldana writes of her ancestors in “Las Mestizas”:
I can feel them moving
below the water
that is my skin, crowning at my mouth
a bubble of light that trembles and is released.
we do not care what you think.
you watch sheenless water.
we are not there.
The movement within the poem from the I and them to the we who “do not care” is paralleled by the movement of the words on the page—progressions which feel natural, like waves. The sounds in this section are also set into parallels with Aldana’s use of assonance—clustering the vowel sounds into their own waves, progressing from the ow of crowning and mouth to the series of long e sounds from released through the ending we—mirrored by the alliteration of the w sound in the final three, quoted lines. The attention to sound is one of the many ways in which Black Mestiza: poems connects timelines and locations to create a celebration of life.
When we celebrate a life, we frequently use indicators of progress along life’s paths—loves, deaths, people and places which matter—and all of those ideas are within Aldana’s debut, full-length collection. It is the progress within and among the poems, themselves, though, which help create a sense of generational stability within the collection. One of the techniques Aldana uses to create this sense of progress is a shared vocabulary of words and images across poems, such as when she writes in “Faith Comes at Night” about the “red black, blue black / mars black, austere belly of the night” and then again writes of a separate, contrasting, complete darkness in a poem just a few poems later entitled “Mars Black Night.”
Images, too, are shared across poems. Marine animals frequent many of the works in Black Mestiza: poems, from an eagle ray to a hammerhead to all manner of fish, such as in #3 of the Rodrigo Suite, “Aquarius Sun, Leo Rising, Virgo Moon” where Aldana writes:
his affection holds like
still water, silver rivulets
flashing by metaled fish
in cool dark depths.
he is still there even when absent.
Fish frequent the work, and their presence connects the work back to the Caribbean Sea of its ancestral origin, as well as connecting the individual poems to one another, from section one’s “Small Dark and Moving,” in which Aldana writes, “I am fish / moving under power / malachite scales flashing” to section four’s “Nineteen” in which the poem’s speaker and her mother both become fish and “move together through this verdant / wonderland full of leaves turning brown and dangerous, small / furred animals.”
A second technique Aldana uses to create the sense of progress within and between poems is the use of suites of poems within the sections and the use of anchor poems at the beginning of three out of the four sections. The “Small Dark and Moving” series of poems share a base of vocabulary and images which then move through a variety of forms and ideas from one section to the next, paralleling how the generations and cultures interwoven in the collection move and transform through time and space. As Aldana writes of the transformation in “Small Dark and Moving: Black Bird”:
Open
Open
I am not
perverse
I am small dark and
moving
I am moving in
waves
I am
I am moving rippling
Black Mestiza: poems is a collection which manages to connect light across time and space without ignoring shadows. The shadows are there in poems such as “Re: Ni**er”, but then the very next poem in the collection is “Angela Davis Was in My Car,” carefully placed to remind readers, “She was supposed to die in prison / But she didn’t. She lived. She lived and rose / lived and took us with her in her rising.” The poems in this collection build connections of hope and celebration from their shared shadows, and it’s one of the strengths of Black Mestiza: poems. As Aldana writes of these connections in the Pushcart Prize-winning “Black Person Head Bob”:
I saw you he says. I counted you he says.
I got you. You got me
For our ancestors below the sea
from our ancestors across the sea
I see you, you see me.
Yael Valencia Aldana is a poet and artist in Southern California where she teaches creative writing. She is also the Editor in Chief at Purple Ink Press, and she is a member of the board for Aunt Lute Press. She is a Pushcart Prize winner and the winner of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series Prize 2023 in poetry, as well as a finalist in the AWP Kurt Brown Scholarship in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Torch Literary Arts and Cutbank Literary Journal, among other places. Before Black Mestiza, Aldana published the chapbook, Alien(s), with Bottlecap Press.
More information on Aldana and her work may be found at her website, https://yaelaldana.com/
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In the Good Years By Laura Cresté Released September 15, 2025 Four Way Books 106 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor In the Good Years – Four Way Books |
Paralleling the painting of a whale’s spine which curves across the cover of Laura Cresté’s debut full-length poetry collection, In the Good Years, there is a curving spine of memory within the collection itself, which connects and supports generations of times and experiences throughout the individual poems. Divided into four, unnamed sections of varying lengths, Cresté’s In the Good Years uses a narrative strand textured by family lineage and history and a precise dexterity of language to stitch together bones of memory from past, present, and future. As Cresté writes in “Radius,” “It’s a privilege to know where your dead are buried // when it might have been otherwise.”
Section three of In the Good Years contains an epigraph which begins with “It should be remembered..” and one of the ways in which Cresté’s poems honor the value of memory is by refusing to shy from historical and cultural memories of guilt and pain. According to Cresté’s notes at the end of the collection, the sectioned poem which follows the epigraph, Categories of Guilt, adapts historical types of guilt used in analysis after the Holocaust into a framework for considering the military dictatorship of Argentina from 1976-1983. In the final poem of the series, “Generational Guilt,” Cresté writes, “For those of us who dwell in the after / is guilt the engine in the choice to look or not look / too closely at the forces that let us be born”. The idea of choice and its interaction with action or inaction is a connective thread for the Categories of Guilt series of poems, just as the idea of memory is carried, a connection, throughout the individual poems in the collection.
Cresté doesn’t just examine memory from the perspective of her cultural history, though. The memory of her individual family’s history is explored, analyzed, and honored in poems like “Calle Sin Cielo,” which connects the speaker’s present vividly with her aunt’s and father’s pasts, and “We Love Bad Dogs,” in which Cresté declares of the women in her family, “We love like a sentence / that once given / cannot be rescinded.” And in poems such as, “Poem for My Children Born During the Sixth Extinction,” the threads of family history reach forward, into the future, where Cresté predicts:
We’ll still have the old-fashioned disasters: broken elbow, split lip.
I’ll try not to scare them, but when I see them eating unwashed grapes
I’ll tell them about pesticides. One will forget but the other won’t eat
fruit for years. When they ask if I believe in heaven I will lie.
One of the structural ways in which Cresté builds the idea of memory into the collection itself is through the interspersal of several long poems and sectioned poems within the work. These poems are some of my personal favorites in the collection, and I love the way Cresté uses them to extend the examination of one or multiple memories across long expanses of time and thought. The fourth section begins with the poem, “Ida,” titled after the category four hurricane which hit Louisiana in 2021. Moving smoothly between clear imagery of the destruction inside and outside of the speaker’s house during the hurricane through generations of time to the speaker’s grandfather’s cross-oceanic voyage and The Great Hurricane of ‘38, Cresté becomes myth-maker and dispeller, as “Ida” begins and ends with the mythological power of water. As Cresté writes:
The water entered twice: rose
from the cellar and fell
through the roof. In the guts
of the house, past the drop
ceiling, hundred-year-old
horsehair insulation
wet and furring the walls,
as if coming alive in the squall.
A horse reborn
out of water– a myth
never written down.
And yet, Cresté is the one who writes it down, who brings the myth to life and gives it memory, if only to provide means by which to refute the water’s mythical abilities later within the poem. The long poems in this collection work effectively, providing opportunities to carry the memories to their caesuras, and to tie the memories to history and each other.
In the Good Years is a collection which branches from a central spine of memory into generations of time, places, and experiences. The individual memories of the first person speaker are extended and connected from original (and historically-miraculous) beginnings into a future beyond sight today. Unflinching and tender, Cresté’s debut collection reminds her readers that there is still more connection to come. As she writes in “You Should Feel Bad”:
The future humans won’t see this night sky,
certain constellations drifted into the cosmic soup.
When they read our maps will they believe us,
and will they be here, puzzling the charts, reading anything at all?
For now, everything is still possible.
Laura Cresté is the author of In the Good Years, her debut full-length collection of poetry, and the chapbook You Should Feel Bad, the winner of a 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Northwest, and other places. More information on Cresté and her work may be found at her website, https://www.lauracreste.com/
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purl By Michele Evans Released February 14, 2025 Finishing Line Press 67 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor purl by Michele Evans – Finishing Line Press |
When I read the required parts of Homer’s The Odyssey in high school many years ago, I felt sorry for Penelope, waiting, weaving, and unweaving, but I really didn’t consider the many, many other women who are impacted, used, manipulated, and discarded throughout the story until I reread it as an adult. It is these women and their unheard voices who inspired the poetry in Michele Evans’s debut collection, purl. By personifying places and things as feminine, as well, though, Evans does more than simply retell ancient stories. She builds layers of connection based on an intentional empathy. Divided into two sections whose titles refer back to the dual meaning of the collection’s title, purl bends and pulls on time to cradle the experiences of women in Homer’s The Odyssey as if they were the experiences of today’s Black women, knitting intricate connections of love, loss, survival, and betrayal across millenia into, as she says in “xenia,” “pages brimming with songs / muffled voices rarely heard.”
One of the ways in which Evans builds such strong connections across time in purl is through the use of form to create an additional layer beyond the words, adding visual context to each character’s voice. The arrangement of the visual text in poems such as “labyrinthia” and “sirenia | in two parts” is as important as the words themselves. In “sirenia | in two parts,” a visual contrapuntal, Evans writes, “which half note should i sing about? / which half will liberate and make me whole?” just before the poem itself breaks into the halves of which it speaks. The vocabulary of halves resonates throughout the poem, and the individual halves of the contrapuntal reflect the two, distinct halves of the mythical creature from which it takes its name. In the stretched sonnet, “penelopia,” Evans uses a modified Petrarchan format which begins with a sestet, followed by five quatrains and ending with a couplet. The five quatrains in the middle of the poem help to create a sense of waiting, a sense of building, reflecting Penelope’s waiting in the epic, her years of worry about her missing husband and her troubled son, “chasing after the king who never could // searching for a father who didn’t drown.”
Throughout purl, Evans cultivates the voice of not only people, but also places and things. Personified and feminized, Evans gives a village a voice in “laestrygonia” when she writes:
i coughed up
every contact trace
memory of him
but when the rubble
refused to leave,
my grey heart dimmed--
And a feminine olive tree is given a voice in “olivia” where Evans writes, “she was crushed bitter, briny / until she found wisdom lurking / in the place where the pit resides.”
The violence of ownership (both of people and of things) is a repeated element through the poems in purl. Many of the characters voiced in the poems are those overlooked or misused by Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey, and that vocabulary of violence is carried by Evans through time as a connection, a persistent reminder of the ways in which some things have not changed. In “domestica,” the reader is told at the beginning of the poem the voice is “those who live a life of toil”:
mopping up hollow grounds
where our fallen souls once
lie bloody, beaten, and broken
hanging from gnarly oaks
In the Best of the Net nominated poem, “anticlea,” Evans creates connections from mother to mother, through time:
this is not the moment i have been waiting for—hades
is a mother’s hospital waiting room, a dreadful place
where restless soles pace, where twenty minutes feels
like twenty years waiting for my sons’ return
Very subtly, though, Evans uses the maternal connection to remind the reader that some sons never come home.
There are connections among all of us, and it is those connections which help us to continue, together, as a society. Hopefully, paying attention to those connections also allows us to grow and change and progress. In Michele Evans’s debut poetry collection, purl, she uses poetic form, personification, and individual character voices from people, places, and things inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey to illuminate the connective threads of love, loss, survival, and betrayal across millenia. As she writes in “melancholia”:
i rewear their sandals and shackles donned
by female forces from the past and present
to navigate my future, never forgetting
always remembering what they look like.
Michele Evans is a poet and teacher in Northern Virginia where she advises Unbound, an award-winning high school literary magazine. purl is her debut poetry collection. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and she has published individual poems in Artemis Journal, Mid-Atlantic Review, The ASP Bulletin, and other places. More information about her publications, awards, and events may be found on her website, https://www.awordsmithie.com/
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Shade is a Place By MaKshya Tolbert Released November 4, 2025 Penguin Poets (Random House) National Poetry Series Winner, 2024, Chosen by Maggie Millner 86 pages Review by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor Shade is a place by MaKshya Tolbert: 9780143138457 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books |
Rooted deeply within their environment, MaKshya Tolbert’s debut poetry collection, Shade is a Place, selected as a National Poetry Series Winner, layers natural images and political and social observations with meticulous language to create verses which weave humanity and nature together as completely as mycorrhizal networks among trees. Divided into four sections which alternate between numbered Shade Studies and titled Shade Walks, and concluding with a fifth section of two individual poems, Tolbert’s poems are eco-poetry in the same way their often-mentioned willow oaks are plants—it’s one of the simplest ways one could categorize something much more complex. In the extended haibun, Shade Walk: “a life in rehearsal,” Tolbert explains the connection, “I live as a blurred register, happy to be wayward. / Robins puff out their chests, reminders to breathe. Shade is a place / that circulates, if we let it. The more we walk, the less my chest hurts.”
The interconnectedness of humanity and nature is one of the strongest motifs in Shade is a Place, and Tolbert makes the connection clear immediately in their opening poem, “Eastbound” when they write, “Believe me when I say plants and people find // their way.” The way, according to the poems in this collection, is at least partially dependent on realizing and understanding just how important this natural connection is to each of us. As Tolbert writes in Shade Walk: a Haibun:
You are your own tree talking to trees. See your trunk, your case of a
body. Spring is for feeling what has always been there. See how you
make your way through, how you start again--
Leaves curl inside out;
you just go with what you know,
being tree yourself—
The lines between the human and tree aren’t simply blurred in Tolbert’s verse, they interweave and branch from each other naturally, as parts of the same universal whole. As Tolbert makes clear in “Shade is a place: relief is my form,” “What is my entry point into the deemed / errant biome of my body? Relief / is my form—(re)leaf by leaf by leaf”.
The connection to trees in this book isn’t just a physical connection manifested through imagery of seasonal cycles of renewal and rest, though. Trees exist in communities, and Tolbert uses the social level of trees to highlight social and political commentary in Shade is a Place, as well. In “Tree walk with worry,” Tolbert writes:
I worry even the violence is mycelial
branching from the tree of each of us
I worry evenly about the willow oaks about what
spreads from all our petioles I worry evenly
Deepening connections between trees and humanity through complex metaphor layers in which both the trees and the society suffer from a sentient virus of violence, passing through our deepest connections to one another, Tolbert weaves clear natural imagery and social commentary throughout Shade is a Place. The connections are overt, intentional, and skillful. In “Shade is a place: an urgent need,” Tolbert highlights additional social and political constructs when they write:
You could say shade is my refuge,
compass of what matters.
Tell me how to pace myself toward comfort.
The Tree Commission appoints me
out of an urgent need for [diversity] shade.
Here, the double meaning of shade to include the shade of the speaker’s skin and its inherent value politically to the Commission in the poem contrasts sharply with the speaker’s “compass of what matters”—the environmental shade provided for the community by the city’s mature trees. In the concrete poem, “Tree walk with cops,” Tolbert uses physical spacing with branches of individual lines to suggest a separateness between the poem’s speaker and the political agency of Law Enforcement. Tolbert writes:
Sometimes we take part
Do what we are told
You tell a tree to grow
It grows too much
Stop you tell the tree
Or else I’ll call the city
Look at you all those use
-less limbs
New technologies are advancing scientists’ understanding of the relationship between our human lives and trees, such as the new evidence pulled directly from tree rings which suggests a volcanic eruption began the series of events causing the Black Plague and wiping out nearly half of Medieval Europe’s human population. Each new discovery supports what MaKshya Tolbert already shows through her debut poetry collection, Shade is a Place. Everything in our world is connected to the trees on which we all rely, from the wide-range disasters to the quiet connections whispering through our own mycelium, as Tolbert writes in “Failed eulogy”:
I wanted to say too much
I mistook trees’ lives
for what I had to give
So much wanted language
I was so much I did not expect knots
I thought trees would bring
me steady entanglements
MaKshya Tolbert is a poet and artist in Charlottesville, Virginia where they are the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. They have received support for their art from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, New City Arts, and Cave Canem. Their poetry has been published recently in Poem-a-Day, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Poets for Science, and other places. Shade is a Place is their first full-length poetry collection.