Sidewalk Cruiseship: Poems by Mary Oishi
University of New Mexico Press, 2024
Written by the "pandemic poet laureate" of Albuquerque, Sidewalk Cruiseship draws on Oishi's remarkable ability to illustrate the world around her and the people in it. Separated into eleven short sections by traditional Japanese tankas, the poems in Oishi's newest collection take on the macro and the micro. They respond to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the contentious political climate as they draw readers in to witness intimate moments of people and scenes within Oishi's beloved city of Albuquerque. The poems explore such themes as mental illness, the joys and sorrows of motherhood, what it is to be a woman in the world, and aging and death. Readers will come away with a better sense of Albuquerque and its inhabitants and will get an intimate look at one of its most passionate citizens--a Japanese American longtime justice activist and mentor for queer youth who embraces the best and worst Albuquerque has to offer. Throughout it all, she reminds us that the best response we can offer is love, even in the face of adversity.
Open-Hearted Horizon: An Albuquerque Poetry Anthology by Valerie Martinez and Shelle Van-Etten de Sánchez
University of New Mexico Press, 2024
Open-Hearted Horizon: An Albuquerque Poetry Anthology invites you into a poetic conversation. The anthology includes a wide range of Albuquerque-based poets and poems that are inspired--directly, associatively, obliquely--by Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a place and as a community. Anthologies commonly celebrate a multitude of voices. Because this one is place-based, we hope you will feel drawn into a circle that deepens your sense of place and people, of contexts and cultures, whether you know Albuquerque or not. Because the Albuquerque poetry community is characterized not only by its support for individual writers but also by a strong impulse toward creative collaboration, Open-Hearted Horizon features poems in multiple voices. In addition to poems by individual poets, this collection also features collaborative works, including those by the EKCO collective and one that features a line from every poem in the anthology. Overall, the collection invites you to experience Albuquerque in its richness, diversity, and depth.
Light of Wings: Poems by Sarah Kotchian
University of New Mexico Press, 2024
This haunting collection merges spirit and nature in a voice both elegiac and celebratory. Kotchian explores our deep connection to the natural world, one increasingly at risk even as it continues to surprise and inspire. From meditations on the dangers of global warming to supporting a friend with cancer, from grieving the loss of her own mother to celebrating nature from New Mexico to a wild Scottish island, the poems celebrate both solitude and companionship and enlarge our concept of belonging and community, offering us threads of resilience, persistence, and hope.
ACCLAIM
"In this compassionate and attentive work, there is radiance in the face of loss, music in the ephemeral. Breath is cherished here: the breath of the poetic line, the greater breadth of living things across space and time. Transcendentalist in temperament, modest yet eloquent, Kotchian's lucid and image-laden poems urge us―as stewards of an ever-changing and disappearing world―to 'listen for the new green song.'"--Shara Lessley, author of The Explosive Expert's Wife
"Kotchian's poems evoke the wonders of creatures all around us, if we are patient and quiet enough to encounter them. There is grief here too, woven throughout, as Kotchian attends to dying beloveds (parents, brother, friend) and to ecological loss. In a steady cadence, these poems ask us to bear our intimate and collective losses on this teetering, beautiful, and still wildly alive planet."--Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal
Light As Light: Poems by Simon J. Ortiz
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Legible Walls by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
Stalking Horse Press, 2023
Walking Uphill at Noon by Jon Kelly Yenster
University of New Mexico Press, 2022
Walking Uphill at Noon showcases Yenser’s mastery of prosody and love of play. Including free verse as well as established and newly invented forms, Yenser’s collection is organized into four parts that each explore the author’s life and interests: part 1 focuses on neighborhood observations; part 2 delves into travel at home and abroad; part 3 consists of a “walking log” that muses on current events; and part 4 explores magic, mysteries, and sleights of hand. Ultimately, Yenser urges readers to consider that everyday situations can be made extraordinary if they keep their love of play and wonder close to their hearts.
Fieldnotes by Tommy Archuleta
Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023
Part guide, part vagabond, part healer, part orchardist, part trickster, Archuleta's "researcher" shows what it might mean to lean into each loss as it comes, to search for an opening, gain entry, and from there commence inhabitation. From birth-really, the first trauma we survive-onward, the likes of grief and loss and sorrow none of us can escape, this work vies to say-so why not welcome them, make them sacred, feed them apple slices?
Remember by Joy Harjo, illustrated by Michaela Goade
Random House Studio, 2023
One Albuquerque, One Hundred Poets edited by Mary Oishi
Albuquerque Public Library Foundation, 2022
The City of Albuquerque Poet Laureate from 2020-2022, Mary Oishi, brings together one hundred Albuquerque poets in this anthology that commemorates the Poets in the Libraries series. When COVID-19 struck, Oishi was tasked with promoting and programming poetry during the pandemic. As Albuquerque-and the world-shifted to virtual events, so did the Poets in the Libraries series. Community poets read work virtually at home and at the city's many public libraries. The result is a plethora of poetry, now preserved in video productions on One Albuquerque Media at each of the city's public libraries, and a compilation of one hundred poems and poets from the series in this Poets in the Libraries anthology. Poets included are performance and page poets, previously and first-time published authors. The work explores nature, grief, love, and healing, New Mexico and Albuquerque.
Susto by Tommy Archuleta
Center for Literary Publishing, 2023
Surreal yet earthbound, orphaned yet mothered more than most, comforting yet disturbing—Tommy Archuleta’s Susto surveys many settings: the body, the soul, the terrain the soul encounters upon leaving the body. But the setting is also the high desert landscape that is the poet’s northern New Mexico home, a land whose beauty today is as silencing and brutal as was the colonization of the region and her Anasazi descendants by Archuleta’s Spanish antipasados. In Susto, loss is everywhere to be found, though this work is not merely a concerted meditation on lament. Rather, it is part unearthed family album; part unlocked diary; part ode to motherhood and her various forms; part manual on preparing for a happy death; and part primer on the ancient art of curanderismo, whereby plants and roots are prepared for treating all manner of ills a mind and body might face.
Woman Without Shame by Sandra Cisneros
Knofp, 2022
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME and GOODREADS • A brave new collection of poems from Sandra Cisneros, the best-selling author of The House on Mango Street.
It has been twenty-eight years since Sandra Cisneros published a book of poetry. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home—in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light by Joy Harjo
W.W. Norton & Co., 2022
A magnificent selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s fifty years as a poet.
In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light traces every occasion of a lifetime; it offers poems on birth, death, love, and resistance; on motherhood and on losing a parent; on fresh beginnings amidst legacies of displacement. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo’s inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from sunrise and horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth.
Suggest Paradise by Ray Gonzales
University of New Mexico Press, 2023
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea in Suggest Paradise. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.
Reflections Through the Convex Mirror of Time by E.A. Mares
University of New Mexico Press, 2022
Took House by Lauren Camp
Tupelo Press, 2020
Women Without Shame by Sandra Cicneros
Knopf, 2022
It has been twenty-eight years since Sandra Cisneros published a book of poetry. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home—in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.
Pura Puta: A Poetic Memoir by Anna C. Martinez
Casa Urraca Press, 2022
Pura Puta, the debut collection from slam champion Anna C. Martinez, tells the many stories of Woman-sensual, erotic, visceral, tragic, and always, always powerful-through Martinez's own life and the other women in her family in Los Angeles and northern New Mexico. The pieces dance with the unmistakable cadence of performance poetry and spring forth both tears and exuberance. Nearly nothing in this book is easy, because her life has not been easy either. But triumph counters trauma, and the poems return to an eternal freedom, hard-earned through all the stages of her life. These are stories that need heard, from a poet who demands your full heart.
Living Nations, Living Words collection and introduction by Joy Harjo
Norton & Co., 2021
Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands.
Desert Apocrypha by Zach Rively
Casa Urraca Press, 2021
A Temporary Silence by James McGrath
Sunstone Press, 2021
At 92, James McGrath offers poetry in this book as a response to the 2019, 2020, 2021 coronavirus threats and opportunities to change and celebrate our lives. It is as if the months of the virus uncovered, even provoked, fragility and strength to speak in a variety of voices to echo confusion and bewilderment in the comings-and-goings of everyday life. McGrath's voices in the temporary silence are pumice and basalt, cloud and mirror. This is breathing. James says, "These are not last thoughts. You see, I am not completely alone. You are nearby."
No Enemies by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Arte Publico Press, 2021
In this collection of new poems, acclaimed poet Jimmy Santiago Baca expresses his sense of responsibility to use his gift for the greater good. "If not me, then who / speaks to money, power, privilege?" He chastises those who use their connections to benefit themselves at the expense of the impoverished, imprisoned and undocumented. Frequently, he takes aim at those who put their lucrative positions ahead of their constituents: "Governor, if you choose a career / where you have to ignore the truth / and pillage the unfortunate, at least / outlaw automatic weapons." While many are stinging rebukes against the wealthy and powerful, others are beautiful odes to his indigenous roots. There are buffalo with their gentle hearts, sacred places where he prays to his ancestors and the plants growing on steep mountainsides that give "me courage to keep clinging to hope and to learn / life's most important lesson / practice how to lean in life so as not to fall." Baca writes urgently about the most important themes of our generation, including education, justice, the environment and even the coronavirus. "The enemy didn't come at us crossing borders, / swinging machetes and machine guns."
A Small Story About the Sky by Alberto Rios
Copper Canyon Press, 2015
Poet laureate of Arizona and author of nearly a dozen books of poetry, three collections of stories, and Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (1999), Rios delivers another stunning book of poems, rich in impeccable metaphors, that revel in the ordinariness of morning coffee and the crackle of thunderous desert storms. In one sonnet, Rios addresses injustice in the borderlands, capturing with mathematical precision the everyday struggles that many migrants face The border is an equation in search of an equals sign. A series of sonnets about desert flora abounds with fantastic, magical imagery Bougainvilleas do not bloomthey bleed and Apricots are eggs laid in trees by invisible golden hens. Likewise, Rios' bestiary sonnets overflow with inimitable similes, worthy of a book unto themselves Minnows are where a river's leg has fallen asleep and Gnats are sneezes still flying around. This robust volume is the perfect place to start for readers new to Rios and a prize for seasoned fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind by N. Scott Momday
Harper Perennial, 2022
A singular voice in American letters, Momaday’s love of language and storytelling are on full display in this brilliant new collection comprising one hundred sketches or “dream drawings”—furnishings of the mind—as he calls them. Influenced by his Native American heritage and its oral storytelling traditions, here are prose poems about nature, animals, warriors, and hunters, as well as meditations that explore themes of love, loss, time, and memory. Each piece, full of wisdom and wonder, showcases Momaday’s extraordinary lyrical talent, the breadth of his imagination, and the transformative power of his writing. Dream Drawings is also illustrated with a selection of black-and-white paintings by Momaday that capture the spirit of his prose.
Poignant, inspired, and timeless, this is a collection that will nourish the soul.
Psalms at the Present Time by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
Flowstone Press, 2021
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is the 2021-23 Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
"On and beyond the horizon, Wellington's excursions into our body politic, psyche, purpose, and existence are multilayered and multifaceted. Content and craft are given equal time and focus. There is a nuanced reacquaintance with poetry's significance in Psalms at the Present Time. This poet chooses sturdy ethos and empowering authenticity. It is a worthwhile expedition."
-Uche Nduka, Author of Living in Public and Facing You
El Feliz Ingenio Neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y Prosa edited and translated by Anna M. Nogar and A. Gabriel Meléndez
University of New Mexico Press, 2021
El feliz ingenio neomexicano is a bilingual recovery edition of Obras de Felipe Maximiliano Chacón, el Cantor Neomexicano: Poesía y prosa, the first collection of poetry published by a Mexican American author. Journalist and author Felipe M. Chacón, part of a distinguished and active family of nuevomexicano authors, published the book in 1924. El feliz ingenio neomexicano (that “inspired New Mexican wit”) reestablishes Chacón’s work and his reputation by making the text widely available to readers for the first time in nearly a century. With Nogar and Meléndez’s excellent translation of the text, this bilingual volume offers access to both English and Spanish editions for scholars and students from a variety of disciplines. Additionally, the in-depth introduction and appendix materials gathered by the editors place Chacón’s book in the context of the time in which it was printed, offering a unique insight into the work. A welcome volume for scholars and literature lovers alike, El feliz ingenio neomexicano is a groundbreaking work of literary recuperation.
A Five-Balloon Morning by Charles Trumbull
Red Mountain Press, 2013
"Charles Trumbull is a poet of quiet, deep emotion. His haiku are ripples on the pond; the source invisible, yet of paramount importance. A FIVE-BALLOON MORNING has a subtitle, New Mexico Haiku, and, though that sets the scene, it is in no sense strictly regional or limiting. In fact, as regular readers of haiku might attest, the more particular the focus, the greater the potential for a more universal theme—in the hands of the right poet, that is... There is a sense not just of the past in these lines, but of the future, the reclaiming back of things as they were. Certainly thoughts such as these are never far away in a desert clime... Trumbull has composed a set of poems that in some ways are like whispers, just barely heard, until we learn how to focus in on the sound. It isn't so much the volume of the sound as it is the locale. It comes from within."—Lilliput Review Poetry Blog