The anthology includes Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, in which the poet describes looking after a friend ill with aids: "I go / around the house with a rag of ammonia / wiping, wiping crazed as a housewife on Let's / Make a Deal, the deal being PLEASE DON'T MAKE / HIM SICK AGAIN." By the author of The Carpenter at the Asylum.

Smith's unflinching poetry addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity. The collection opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved on earth. "Dear White America," which...

"Edgar wants nothing more than to live his life out loud. But telling the truth about his sexuality isn't so easy in his traditional Mexican-American family, and his Amá has made it clear she won't accept who he is. Things get even harder when Edgar's macho father returns home after months away, and the house erupts into fighting and simmering tension. Edgar worries what would happen if he told his father the truth about who he is, and feels he'll...

"In the follow-up to his Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection, This Wound is a World, Billy-Ray Belcourt aims more of an anthropological eye at the contours of NDN and queer social worlds to spot the much that is left unsaid when we look only to the mainstream media. In this genre-bending work, Belcourt employs poetry, poetics, prose, and textual art to illuminate the rogue possibility bubbling up everywhere NDNs are. Part One examines the rhythms...

"Eduardo C. Corral is the 2011 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, joining such distinguished previous winners as Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, and John Ashbery. Corral is the first Latino poet to win the competition. Seamlessly braiding English and Spanish, Corral's poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience. He employs a range of forms and phrasing, bringing the vivid particulars...