A Freeing Space
HE page was my freeing space to say some truth about shit, to wrestle in the wide berth of freedom it created for me,” says poet Threa Almontaser about writing her debut collection, . Almontaser’s book and the nine other titles included in our seventeenth annual debut poets, while Desiree C. Bailey weaves together songlike poems in quest of a self and freedom in Dennis James Sweeney imagines two explorers in Antarctica in his hybrid collection of prose poems, , while Shangyang Fang attends to the tensions within longing, desire, and beauty in the lyrical . There’s the boundary-defying, sprawling chorus of voices in Aurielle Marie’s , and the sustained conversation between art, film, and politics in Cheswayo Mphanza’s . Almontaser preserves Yemeni American history with photos and tender, sly poems in , and W. J. Herbert offers whittled-down lyrics and elegies for extinct species and a dying mother in . In , Ana Portnoy Brimmer marries poems of protest and love for Puerto Rico, while in , Devon Walker-Figueroa conjures a past life in a small Oregon town. Each of these ten debuts is imbued with a sense that the poet made it knowing, as Bailey says, “that this work is yours, that you are creating it according to your rhythm, your aesthetic.”
