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Honor Book, 2023 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Awards, Poetry CategoryIn Claim Tickets for Stolen People, Quintin Collins embraces a range of poetic forms and registers to show the resilience of Blackness in a colonized world. The tension between mortality and vitality is ever-present, whether Collins is charting his daughter's emergence into being, cataloging the toll of white violence, or detailing the exuberance of community, family, and Chicago and Boston life. In Collins's hands, the world is exquisitely physical and no element is without its own perspective, whether it is a truck sheared by a highway bridge or bees working through the knowledge that humans will kill them, burn their homes, and steal their honey. All goes toward honoring Black grief, Black anger, Black resistance, Black hope-and the persistence of Black love.

"This bewitching debut delivers everything the title promises and more." -Electric LiteratureIn SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, Mag Gabbert redefines the bestiary in fiery, insistent, and resistant terms. These poems recast the traumas of her adolescence while charting new paths toward linguistic and bodily autonomy as an adult. Using dreamlike, shimmering imagery, she pieces together a fractured portrait of femininity-one that electrifies the confessional mode with its formal play and rich curiosity. Gabbert examines the origin of shame, the role of inheritance, and what counts as a myth, asking, "What's the opposite of a man? / A woman? A wound? The devil's image?"

From its opening insistence on "not love but procedure," Hanae Jonas's Softly Undercover explores the possibilities and limitations of ritual and repetition, asking what it means to believe and see clearly. Formally rangy poems map out territories of devotion and divination, contrasting the realm of mystery, dreams, and symbols with the alienation of the mundane. Against a backdrop of intimate relationships, small towns, rural landscapes, and claustrophobic interiors, Jonas casts her gaze on isolation, nostalgia, repression, visibility, and loss while examining the desire "to go anywhere more docile / than facts." Animated by uncertainty, this elliptical and lyrical debut dwells in the pleasures and hazards of illusion.