Coming Soon

A long poem in Kerouac’s freewheeling and spontaneous improvisational style, Mexico City Blues is a unique epic of sound, rhythm, and religion. Called superb sensory meditations, the poetry takes in life, death, and spirituality but roams widely across continents and cultures. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues.

A long poem in Kerouac’s freewheeling and spontaneous improvisational style, Mexico City Blues is a unique epic of sound, rhythm, and religion. Called superb sensory meditations, the poetry takes in life, death, and spirituality but roams widely across continents and cultures. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues.

Whether we're tumbling with Katz in a field of yellow flowers with a group of long-haired young people what seems only a moment (but is really four decades) ago or doing yoga right now, looking out a sliver of window at moving clouds, this collection evokes the exact scenes and buzz of perception that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.

In The New Carthaginians, time – and with it the world – is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that will lead to Idi Amin’s Uganda becoming a pariah state and, within a few years, to the young Nick Makoha’s flight from the country. A mysterious writer daubs poetic slogans on the walls of late-’70s New York City, signing them SAMO©. Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality.

MINX reveals the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family: a world of grandfathers brewing moonshine in marrows, basement reggae parties, and a mother struggling to support her two daughters on the proceeds of her shadowy profession. Their powerful bond helps the sisters survive when they’re taken into care, in a children’s home that forcibly separates them.

In Ecstasy, Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it. He explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity – even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous.

As snappy as a dinner jacket’s red silk lining, as appealing as a piano interlude in jazz, Brad Leithauser’s robust felicity is a balm in grim times. It’s also the perfect vehicle for nostalgia, regret, and surprise, forces that animate his first collection in more than a decade. By turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thoughtful, this collection balances wisdom and practicality, as with deft care Leithauser easily, often unexpectedly, juggles off-rhymes and old forms and new. The book unfolds like a five-act play, moving from chattier poems to dramatic denouements.