WINNER OF THE 2025 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD FROM THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS

A stunning new collection exploring lineage and the legacy of survival as seen through the life of the poet’s grandmother Alice—a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South—using the King James Bible as a narrative framework.

“Alice / a god-song, swings still in the high / branch of our throats. I miss her, wonder / what she plants in heaven’s mulch.”

When her grandmother died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn family Bible to remember her by. In The Book of Alice, she retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Using found forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures, Diamond draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of history. The result is both a heartfelt elegy and a new sacred text.

Kaveh Akbar’s exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up to Calling a Wolf a Wolf

With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, “what now shall I repair?” Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance―the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation―teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.

Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives―resonant, revelatory, and holy.

“Lyrical, beautiful, and descriptive.” ―Mandana Chaffa, BOMB

“In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Maya C. Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure.” ―Meghan O’Rourke

Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection. Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?

Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers―John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust―to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.

Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

The award-winning poet Carl Phillips's invaluable essays on poetry, the tenth volume in the celebrated Art of series of books on the craft of writing

In seven insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem explore both the natural world and the inner world? Phillips demonstrates the restless qualities of the imagination by reading and examining poems by Ashbery, Bogan, Frost, Niedecker, Shakespeare, and others, and by considering other art forms, such as photography and the blues. The Art of Daring is a lyrical, persuasive argument for the many ways that writing and living are acts of risk. "I think it's largely the conundrum of being human that makes us keep making," Phillips writes. "I think it has something to do with revision―how, not only is the world in constant revision, but each of us is, as well."

A New York Times Editors’ Choice book from the author of the award-winning Tap Out – “a gritty, insightful debut” (Washington Post) – Edgar Kunz’s second poetry collection propels the reader across the shifting terrain of late-capitalist America. 

 Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry. The virtuosic central sequence explores the untimely death of the poet’s estranged father, a handyman and addict, and the brothers left to sort through the detritus of a life long lost to them. Through lyrical, darkly humorous vignettes, Kunz asks what it costs to build a home and a love that not only lasts but sustains.