In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment.Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Major Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronic...

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2026Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at ...

In this collection of essays, talks, and reviews, Major Jackson revels in the work of poetry not only to limn and assess the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of poets, but to amplify the controversies and inner conflicts that define our age: political unrest, climate crises, the fallout from bewildering traumas, and the social function of the art of poetry itself. Accessible and critically minded, Jackson returns to the poem as an unparalleled source of linguistic pleasure that struct...

An anthology of contemporary poems and soup recipes to nourish us, comfort us, and bind us together--gathered by award-winning poet Major Jackson.Poetry and soup both offer sustenance and comfort. And yet, the secret ingredient to every great meal is not what we see on the plate, but who we see around the table. This anthology features poems by today's best poets that embody the idea of nourishment, comfort, and connection across cultures and generations. Among the...

A whimsical and “devastatingly effective” (Washington Post) collection that captures the spirit of travel and pays homage to heritage.In his fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Jackson appropriates the vernacular notion of “rolling deep” to capture the spirit of aesthetic travel that defines these forceful new poems and brazenly announces his steady accretion of literary and artistic influences, both formal and experimental—his “crew.” The conf...

Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist, awarded the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection that tells the story of a political movement—its strides and setbacks, its unity and fractures—with a particular emphasis on print culture. Drawing upon more than a decade’s worth of archival research into nineteenth-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and more, Range highlights the expansiveness of the movement by focusing not on one, but a chorus of abolition...

**“The whole world is in these poems.” —David Kirby, The New York Times Book ReviewAn exuberant collection of two decades of Major Jackson’s passionately intelligent poetry.**A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. Razzle Dazzle traces the evolution of Jackson’s transformative imagination and fierce music through five acclaimed volumes: his...

A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, “is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases.”The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyric...

"A devastatingly beautiful collection of strange and wonderful poems." —Poetry DailyIn these poems of broken unions and acute longing, Major Jackson explores art, literature, and music as seductive forces in our lives.

The Spring 2018 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's four issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles; the Fall and Winter issues are staff-edited.As guest-editor Lan Samantha Chang writes in her introduction, “It is essential to share aspiration and fear, desire, struggle, consciousness. It is important to read the work of those whom we might ...

Guest editor Nick Flynn selects and introduces a diverse collection of poems, essays, and stories. The issues features everything from Eric Fair's essay Consequence, on being an interrogator at Abu Ghraib, to Major Jackson's list poem, "Why I Write Poetry." A stylistically varied issue featuring several emerging poets like Samuel Amadon and Sophie Klahr, as well as established writers such as Mark Slouka, D. A. Powell, Claudia Rankine, and others.

This groundbreaking anthology offers a broad and representative introduction to some of the most exciting, fresh voices on the contemporary poetry landscape by gathering together generous selections from the work of 85 younger American poets.The poets selected were born after 1960, published their first book within the last 10 years, and have no more than three books published. Some are the recipients of numerous awards, while others, who are making their first appearance, are quic...