Such Color

May 1, 2021

Recently appointed poetry editor at the Nation, Iranian American poet/scholar Akbar follows up his corrosively beautiful debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, with Pilgrim Bell, a courageous spiritual journey that captures the addict's ongoing struggle and the challenges of being Muslim in an Islamophobic nation. Bidart, whose multiple awards include a Pulitzer, tops off five decades of writing with a book arguing Against Silence in its embrace of the world. In Winter Recipes from the Collective, her first collection since winning the Nobel Prize, Gl�ck joins voices together in a sort of chamber work to investigate loss, memory, and the quiet stride toward mortality (50,000-copy first printing). Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Smith offers her first retrospective with Such Color, selecting works from four previous volumes while continuing to push boundaries with her new poems. Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, previously director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and poetry editor at The New Yorker, Young revisits places and people leaving holes in his life in Stones.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2021
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Smith has earned praise from a litany of critics and poets alike for her deceptively breezy embrace of form and her deep engagements with subjects of race, faith, and language. This collection bundles several dozen poems from Smith's outstanding oeuvre with 18 new poems collected under the header ""Riot,"" and bookended by two eponymous poems. The collected poems reflect the bright arc of Smith's career, from the instantly evocative ""Self-Portrait as the Letter Y"" (""I waved a gun last night / In a city like some ancient Los Angeles. / It was dusk"") from her debut book, The Body's Question (2003), to the sf-inspired ""My God, It's Full of Stars"" in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars (2011). The first of Smith's stunning new poems concludes with scandalously perplexing stanzas cascading down the page: ""This is not the riot. / This is reality. It rolls, // roils, briefly recoils. / It hammers down. We fall, // rebound. You chase, / we race. You hate, // we wait."" Smith's admirers will enjoy revisiting favorite poems and reading new works, while this volume will stand as a welcoming and dazzling introduction to Smith's poetry for first-timers.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.