Wilder Forms

THIS year’s focus on debut poets features ten of the most notable first books of poetry published in 2018. The selected books, which encompass a broad range of styles and subjects, take on complicated and weighty topics—Fatimah Asghar’s traces the impact of the Partition of India, Tacey M. Atsitty’s draws on Navajo ceremony to elegize and pray for the land, Mario Chard’s reckons with a sense of exile, and Tiana Clark’s and Justin Phillip Reed’s contend with, among other issues, the injustices Black people have endured in America. Each poet seems to address the question Jenny George, author of , asks: “How much of our aliveness can we bear?”