cafe By Holly Paster (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Beginning with a sequence of prose poems in which the speaker embarks on an anti-epic quest to open her own café, Paster’s second collection focuses on the nature of desire and despair. Comic timing remains a strength, as does her linguistic flexibility, using language as a weapon in the face of the crisis of exploitative working conditions, endless monthly direct debits (“Even my Egg subscription is a disaster”) and the rising cost of living. Between the demands of caring for aging parents, the simmering frustration of a love affair, the “unstable ordeal” of work, and the prospect of becoming a parent, Paster’s speaker finds solace in the third space of the café, which is both a meeting point and a melting pot. “Here the inspiration begins, here the drama begins,” she suggests. “I order another coffee out of respect for circumstantial life.” Ambitious and engaging, this confident collection confirms Fitzcarraldo’s entry into the field of contemporary poetry.
acrobat By Wisława Szymborska, translated by Stanisław Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh (Faber, £12.99)
A slim selection of Szymborska’s work, showcasing intimate and immediate poems that explore themes of endurance and wonder. Reflecting the turbulent history of Poland in the 20th century, Szymborska describes life during and after the conflict, documenting the violence of war alongside moments of resilience and poignant domesticity. “After every war/someone’s got to clean up,” she reminds us. “Somebody has to clear the debris from the roadside so that the vehicles loaded with dead bodies can pass.” With candid wisdom and deadpan humor, these poems celebrate the ordinary in extraordinary times. Rooted in the pains and joys of everyday human experience, Szymborska’s poetry proves “ordinary miracles: / That there are so many ordinary miracles.” The book ends with his 1996 Nobel acceptance speech, in which he praised the world’s inexhaustible wonder: “It seems as if poets have always had their work done for them.”
volvalley By Rachel Boast (Picador, £12.99)
Named for the rotating paper charts designed to calculate the cycles of the Sun and Moon, Boast’s fifth collection offers a delightfully diverse series of poems on the themes of selfhood and the body’s orientation in time and space. The collection is bookended by a pair of poems reflecting on the slippage and mutation of the body – “The body as climate – the otherness of bodies – / The image of the body – the double of the body – the body of water” – which speak of an era of fragmentation and acceleration. Many of the poems are punctuated by images of “senseless war”, lamenting over “buildings that look like bones” and hourly news cycle footage of “crowds / Fleeing uncontrolled explosions”. Boast finds solace in community, particularly other artists, poets, and filmmakers whose work is woven through the fabric of her writing. For Boast, the poet’s role is one of repair: “Things slowly break / and have to be mended”. Throughout this collection, restoration is achieved through sustained acts of care and attentiveness, just as “a deer in the groove / can stand up for all the world to hear”.
tree of wisdom By Victoria Chang (Corsair, £16.99)
Chang’s latest collection continues her engagement with the visual arts. While not directly ekphrastic, these poems respond to the works of Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, and Hilma af Klint, among others, creating space for Chang to meditate on language, grief, and our relationship with history. The poems contain the image of a eucalyptus tree cut down on the poet’s road, leaving a poignant absence. “I have learned that when grief leaves its body, / What remains is not what was before”, writes Chang, whose new poems are composed of evocative couplets that “balance the living / and the dead”. The collection features archival photographs depicting scenes of Chinese American life during the 19th and 20th centuries, each stitched with colorful thread; Like the poems that accompany them, they reflect “the desire // to create a new thing by combining dead things.” One such success is the long central poem, which deals with the expulsion of 263 Chinese Americans from Eureka, California in 1885, an allegorical piece that seems to answer one of Chang’s most important questions: “What am I to do with all these seams of history that keep growing back.”
talk to blue streak By Leela Matsumoto (Monitor, £15)
Through a series of episodic prose poems, Matsumoto’s second collection tells a coming-of-age story set in the United States during the 1990s. The speaker is a new arrival, who suddenly finds himself “living on the set of a movie called America”, surrounded by “synthetic luxuries I didn’t like”. Matsumoto enjoys the essence of unoriginal language, chewing on the strangeness of unfamiliar words and phrases: “riding shotgun, leading a buck, shooting a bullet into the air.” While her musicality and playfulness are the obvious rewards, she also offers a delicate meditation on themes of identity and manipulation, asking questions of how the self is constructed in both response to and resistance to the surrounding culture. She writes, “Around this time I was experiencing life as a series of point-and-click computer games that I had played as a child,” a constant sense of dislocation that permeates these poems. Ultimately, the speaker takes a naturalization test to become an American citizen, which is evidence that the clearest vision of culture comes from an outsider who observes: “Now that I had abandoned prostitution, communism, and genocide, I was at last an American.”
