In a voiceover from the sky in the final scene of the movie “American Beauty,” Lester Burnham, who should be at least a little peeved that he was just murdered, intones, “It’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes it’s like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much.”
We cannot fully take the world, no? Sometimes it is too much! Not just beauty, but…everything. You can’t possess a moment, an object, a person, an event. You can’t collect a thing completely in your soul, put it in your mind like a chipped mug in a cupboard.
And imagine trying to fully express something…about anything! Who can utterly relate the truth, get it totally right? Try explaining to someone what you feel about the love of your life: your wife, your partner, the Christ. Words fail. You can’t completely capture them, or anything.
The poets whose works we discuss below in our annual poetry roundup each write about things that can be spoken of not fully but only in fragments. They each do it with their own native charm, craft and verve, and we are grateful for their work. We hope this review spurs you to the pages of their new books, or simply to reading more poetry.
Joe Hoover
The textures of grief, violence and love take form in Lift Every Voice by Phillip B. Williams, a professor of creative writing at Rice University. The collection opens with “Aide-Mémoire,” which invites the reader to follow Williams as he reckons with the past: “Elegy, sing the bones to break the cycle./ The cycle: Sing to break. Break to sing.” As Williams explores the legacy of his father’s addiction, the women who raised him and cycles of violence, the past makes its enduring presence known. “Was my father’s body as cold as my mind or still/ as warm as his paraphernalia glistening at my feet,” he writes of his father’s death.
In “Paradise” he is horrified at his role as a consumer to kill “at the swipe of a card.” All the while he remains grounded in small, tangible memories, like the image and sound of his grandparents’ wedding rings clinking and “throwing back the light of/ the television” as they watched commercials, holding hands.
Chloe Hanford
“To write—or to read—a poem about a lost moment in one’s life constitutes a kind of resurrection,” Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, a professor at Fordham University, remarks about her collection of new and selected poems. In The View From Childhood, Alaimo O’Donnell resurrects her child-self, and with her, the places and people from her youth as she saw them then.
Readers accompany her in the Robert Hayden-inspired “Northern Nights” as she watches her father warm their house in the wee hours of winter in their Pennsylvania coal mining town. They marvel alongside her at the delights of Atlantic City, N.J., in “The View From Childhood,” looking down from the top of Lucy the Elephant and feeling how “The world seemed/ as if we could hold it in our hands.” Finally, in “The Road,” she turns to imagine the childhood of Jesus and her own children, musing, “You find out who you are/ when you hold the hands of children,/ when you stroll beside the old.”
Chloe Hanford
One of Devin Johnston’s poems in Bright Thorn deftly manages to refer to both Mongol steppes and the over-the-counter medicine Dramamine in the same breath. A summary of 25 years of the Saint Louis University professor’s works, this collection shows the breadth and relatability of his poetry. From the multipage poem “Iona” to the 10-word “The Difference,” Johnston’s poems appear wildly dissimilar yet fit together like a puzzle. He combines historical references to the Duke of Aquitaine with the modern American experience of using Xerox machines.
In “The Rough Bounds” he carries the reader from Australia to Scotland, guiding them confidently: “Keep straight, until your tracks/ disperse in streams and soggy moss/ like final whispered wisps of smouk.” Johnston seems to find the good and the sacred in everything, and this collection reveals his journey as he learns and grows, and watches his young daughter do the same.
Nora Malone
From her childhood in the Dominican Republic to her young adulthood in New York, to her later years in Vermont, Julia Alvarez has always seen the world through the eyes of a poet. Visitations brings together 40 years of her poems, revealing her hypnotic view of the world. Halfway through the collection, her Dominican heritage duels with her newfound American identity in “Ariadne in Bloomingdales.” She asks herself what her life would have been like had she not moved, “and instead stayed/ of the midnight crew running their minotaur vacuums/ like my immigrant tías cleaning in nearby high-rises….”
Alvarez speaks of the pressure to learn English and accustom herself to the dominating regime; her sister’s infatuation with playing chef, and how her grandfather would eat a mango. She welcomes the reader to this collection, and her life, with the first line of the first poem “Recitation”: “Here I am starting again where I first began.”
Nora Malone
Patricia Lockwood is very good at surprise. Agate Head / Stone Soup, named after the colorful, crystalline quartz that she has been crafting into jewelry in recent years, is Patricia Lockwood’s first book of poems after a decade-long venture into prose. This includes her acclaimed memoir Priestdaddy and Booker-Prize nominated novel No One Is Talking About This.
Her tone tightropes between total control and absurdist abandon, but each verse is reliably, hypnotically spangled with detail: Wet curls fall in “scribbles,” a feijoa fruit is “shy to pronounce its name.” Better yet are the tartly fun bits in which she employs impossible colloquialisms like “lizardmaxxed” to describe someone lying out in the sun, or when she remarks that the couple kissing in the airport terminal “look related but who doesn’t.”
At times her absurdities dissipate into lines of consuming, classical ache. “Oh, we fail. We do fail.” Just as the concentric ripples within every agate are unique, Lockwood offers something unique here; these moments when levity and quirk give way to bracing depth.
Will Martino
In Sing Me a Song, She Said, Paul Mariani revisits, with Proustian obsession, the colors, aromas and sounds of adolescence in 1950s New York. In the book’s middle section, he concocts a verse drama, from which the collection gets its name. Its characters are suspended in mid-century Americana: a hard-knuckled father, a wistful mother, a bummy brother and a golden-boy-gone-blue protagonist. By the book’s third and final section, the author returns to the present, shifting focus between a world in which Gaza can be “morphed to dust” and remain “a single crocus.”
This collection is teeming with curiosity, and Mariani is its restless supplier.
Will Martino
In Christian Wiman’s new poetry collection, The Dance, each poem feels creatively distinct, introducing readers to characters like a “pumpkin monk with his cello legs,” and an “old man I loved who died drinking tea,” all of whom manage to feel at once whimsical and all too real.
References to God and religious identity are not sparse in The Dance. In “The Homily Asked What Heaven Was,” Wiman juxtaposes a religious congregation asking questions about heaven and love with two young people who simply feel the divine present with them in an irreplaceable moment of time. And in a personal standout, “And God’s Presence, Will You Ever Speak of That?” Wiman writes of being “bonded and islanded” with another by “what we hadn’t named but knew/ was here somewhere.”
Brigid McCabe
The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey is a piece of the internal monologue of Alex Mouw, a Midwestern-born professor of English at Samford University in Homewood, Ala. The poetry is autobiographical, at times speaking skeptically about Mouw’s own faith. In many of the poems he speaks not so much to the reader as to God. Mouw does not hesitate to question what God does. In “My Lord I’m Not Too Far Gone, Right? Sure” he asks, “Lord, whom did you make and break today?”
Mouw is willing to share with the world things that many Christians are less inclined to speak about publicly: a crisis of faith, the death of a loved one and even his personal critiques of God. His poetry is at times melancholic, but always deeply introspective and unapologetic. In “Apology for Belief” he writes: “I should love myself. Who’d pierce me? I thought./ Who would lure me through depths and not be caught.” He is always forthcoming about his faith and his relationship with God. He never sugarcoats it.
Alexandra Pfau
D. S. Martin’s poetic range shines in The Role of the Moon as he writes about faith as well as the writers who have inspired him. A poet in residence at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, his book is a combination of sonnets, metaphysicals and free verse. Abstract and philosophical, Martin writes a little bit of everything. Some of the poems are small vignettes of everyday life, like “As She Flew Past.” The poem surfaces his own loneliness after observing other people’s lives: “My razored heart felt like an empty sack as she flew past/ not looking back.”
Other poems meander as he calls out to God. “Litany for the Third Millenium” is a particularly prayerful text: “When we block your light/ so our shimmer might show/ Lord have mercy.” Some of Martin’s poems reckon with nature, as he writes about pine trees and birdwatching, while others, like “Beginning & Beginning” feel almost mystical: “Can we account for our becoming/ our souls breathed into tiny bodies/ by divine breath?”
Alexandra Pfau
Philip C. Kolin’s poems on St. Thérèse of Lisieux, A Centenary Garland, celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her canonization by Pope Pius XI. He emphasizes the pain and suffering that this young woman, who died of tuberculosis at 24, went through during her short life. In “Divine Dew,” a teenage Thérèse visits Rome and “pushed her fingers into the case” containing one of the nails used in the crucifixion. In “A Normandy Winter,” set during her early years in the convent, Thérèse recontextualizes the brutal cold of a French January as the presence of God.
Thérèse emphasizes “The Little Way,” seeing the divine in the mundane. Her life was short, reflected in the brevity of Kolin’s prose, but there is beauty in the smallness. The book is interspersed with photos taken by Thérèse’s sister Céline, which show daily life at the convent, and helps the reader see Thérèse not just as a saint, but as a young girl who died awfully young.
Kevin Christopher Robles
Clever humor, tender care and insatiable curiosity animate Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s new poetry collection, Night Owl. Early on in the collection, the University of Mississippi professor’s poem “Green Love Poem” captures all three of these qualities with child-like innocence: “If you don’t eat a nectarine outdoors while you squint in the sun, and a few drops of juice land on your shirt, can you really say it’s summer?”
In the middle of the book, “Southern Nocturne” details Nezhukumatathil’s experience navigating the twisted knots of entrenched racism as a Filipina and South Indian American woman. “Space Jellyfish” grapples with the ensnaring lure of American capitalism: “But getting more and more on this planet is so good, right?”
The final section brings the reader intimately close to Nezhukumatathil as a mother. “When Milk Is a Memory” pierced my own heart as she recounted the power, pain, tranquility, chaos and joy of nursing her sons. The poems following it navigate the nostalgia of watching those boys mature into young adults. The penultimate piece, “What They Didn’t Tell Me About Motherhood,” rounds out the collection with a loving call to stay present, born of maternal wisdom: “One day you’ll surface…but the only waves you know now mean goodbye.”
Molly Wysocki
With grief at its core, Robert Cording’s What’s Possible—the latest poetry collection from the College of the Holy Cross professor emeritus—reveals the fullness of being human: what it means to breathe, to love, to grow up, to wonder, and to understand that you are not actually as in control of your life as you think you are. This fullness, or as Cording puts it, “corporeal rotundity,” is reflected in his poem, “For Rex Brasher, Painter of Birds.” With echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poem guides the reader into God’s embrace simply through observation: “Everything—the tamaracks and maples, the spruces and their smoke-winged/ sparrows, the painterly sky darkening toward infinity—offers itself as a source of awe.”
This same awe shapes the poet’s reckoning with the mystery of God, as later described in “Lenten Stanzas”: “Nothing could be more real than that which makes no sense.” Challenged and consoled by this mystery, Cording concludes with an invitation to hope: “Take joy whenever you can get it, a wise old poet wrote and how can I refuse….”
Molly Wysocki
This article appears in November 2026.
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