Abu Toha, Mosab. Forest of Noise: Poems. Knopf. ISBN 9780593803974.

In this heartbreaking collection, Palestinian poet and librarian Abu Toha makes vividly real the suffering in Gaza. What’s even more pervasive than the constant thrum of death is the sense of loss—of family, memories, continuity, home, and village. “We no longer look for Palestine. / Our time is spent dying. / Soon, Palestine will search for us.”

Addonizio, Kim. Exit Opera: Poems. Norton. ISBN 9781324078937.

In this bravura performance, Addonizio uses frank, gutsy, wittily caustic language to ask what life means and how to ride out its anxieties. She knows exactly how absurd human existence is, and she’s not backing down: “I prefer to stay here…saying many pointless things…to no one // & in that way go on…not killing myself…or anyone else.”

Carson, Anne. Wrong Norma. New Directions. ISBN 9780811230346.

Moving from a woman swimming and a non-encounter between Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy to a raucous contemporary Socrates, Canadian poet and classicist Carson connects the dots by limning the very nature of thinking, showing how people organize their perceptions of the world: “Every water has a right place to be but this place is in motion.” Original, erudite, and absorbing.

Jacobs, Jessica. unalone. Four Way. ISBN 9781954245822.

Gracefully blending the scholarly and the personal, Jacobs explores her movement toward God as she reinvestigates the Judaism in which she was raised: “Just like that—a new door / in a room I thought I knew by heart.” As she ponders self, language, connection, and love, refracted through a queer sensibility, she gifts readers with an understanding of God in the world.

Ondaatje, Michael. A Year of Last Things: Poems. Knopf. ISBN 9780593801567.

In language one might call conversational—if only all talk were so deeply revelatory and luminously rendered—Canadian Sri Lankan novelist Ondaatje plumbs the past, from Pompeii to his own vanished loves, to unearth connections both grand and intimate. What’s been lost and gained isn’t so much narrated as intuited: “not as memory, but like a gift / from forgetfulness.”

Pardlo, Gregory. Spectral Evidence: Poems. Knopf. ISBN 9781524731786.

Pardlo looks acutely at a history of demonizing the other, particularly Black people and women, then leaps to understanding the self, battling cultural norms, absorbing knowledge and values, and acknowledging a human connectedness that people individually and collectively work hard to break. A remarkable poetry of ideas, unexpected, brilliant, challenging, and worth multiple reads: “the future makes the past impossible to escape.”

Phillips, Carl. Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems. Farrar. ISBN 9780374612412.

Continuing his ever-persuasive study of the evolving self, often strikingly framed by images of the natural world, Phillips reveals a tentative acceptance, despite the underlying sense of melancholy. Yes, the world’s a harsh place, but he comes to accept its grace: “I believe in gift as much, I think, as I believe / in mastery.” Mastery, indeed; another sterling collection.

Seuss, Diane. Modern Poetry: Poems. Graywolf. ISBN 9781644452752.

Purveying stunningly propulsive, hard-edged plainspokenness, Seuss revisits her working-class upbringing and sense of unbelonging to arrive at her discovery of poetry. As she tells readers, poems aren’t about making meaning (“in a gale, …the first thing to go”) but depth of feeling and the concreteness of experience, “the particular / nature and tenor of the energy / of our trouble.” Unputdownable.

Smith, Danez. Bluff: Poems. Graywolf. ISBN 9781644452981.

Noted for their shattering poems responding to Black oppression, Smith now questions everything they’ve done. “My career came on / an elegy’s back,” they regret, adding, “there is no poem greater than feeding someone.” Personal pain thus amplifies the communal pain shown here even as the poet demands, “danez, stop acting shook when black folk / are alive.” A courageous, illuminating look at art and responsibility.

Spellman, A.B. Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems. Wesleyan Univ. ed. by Lauri Scheyer. ISBN 9780819501196.

Poet and jazz critic Spellman published collections in 1965 and 2008, working for the National Endowment for the Arts in between; new poems comprise half this eye-opening volume. Assaying Black heritage, the arts, and being in the world, he shifts perceptions in language both distinctive and piercingly precise (“she thinks of thought / as windows, as ice around the dance”). A major (re)discovery.