2022 NAACP Image Award Winner Crystal Wilkinson combines a deep love for her rural roots with a passion for language and storytelling in this compelling collection of poetry and prose about girlhood, racism, and political awakening, imbued with vivid imagery of growing up in Southern Appalachia. In Perfect Black, the acclaimed writer muses on such topics as motherhood, the politics of her Black body, lost fathers, mental illness, sexual abuse, and religion. It is a captivating conversation about life, love, loss, and pain, interwoven with striking illustrations by her long-time partner, Ronald W. Davis.

Poetry. Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was an American modernist of German-Jewish heritage living in New York. She was a painter, designer, and poet. Together with her sisters Ettie and Carrie, Stettheimer hosted a legendary salon on the Upper West Side, where they entertained the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, Henri McBride, and Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1934 Stettheimer designed the set and costumes for Gertrude Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts to much acclaim. In 1949, Ettie collected Florine's poems in CRYSTAL FLOWERS, a privately printed, elegant edition of 250. In addition to these rare poems, this new volume offers formerly unpublished material culled from archives, including three new poems and Stettheimer's libretto for her ballet "Orph e of the Quat-z-arts." Gammel and Zelazo have re-situated this overlooked poet among her modernist sisters, presenting her as an important practitioner of a modernism that integrates multiple art forms. Sixty years after it first appeared for a select few, her poetry shines for a new generation of readers ready to appreciate her irreverent camp aesthetic and her exuberant painterly style.

NYC Youth Poet Laureate

Poetry. California Interest. THE NEXT CRYSTAL TEXT connects the glittering consumption of gems to the brutal exploitation of their production, undermining our cultural myths of beauty, wealth, and the feminine. These multiform poems accrete language from geology and political resistance into a faceted amalgam that's completely original. Dazzling and various, it both mimics and critiques the intricacy of global capitalist systems.

Rewilding: Poems for the Environment is an essential volume of contemporary poetry that encourages us to reevaluate and restore our relationship with the nonhuman world, featuring poems by Camille Dungy, Joy Harjo, Ted Kooser, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Craig Santos Perez, Karen Solie, and a 100 more renowned and emerging poets.