THE ingenious collections included in our nineteenth annual feature celebrating debut books of poetry are composed of poems that were written more than a decade ago, if not a few years back. Given the sheer amount of time that goes into dreaming up, creating, writing, and editing a book, it seems fitting to in the collapsing and conflation of the chronological that often takes place within art. In the beginning of the pandemic, Leah Nieboer () was paying attention to the growing instability and treacherousness of our world and “thinking about the future…as something an erotic trace of the past or present can release, something we can perform through our rhythms of relationship.” In writing the present, Nieboer created a poetics for the future that is intimate, phantasmal, and neon-lit. Ina Cariño () and Amanda Gunn () offer a physical poetics. Cariño, with their intergenerational and voracious speech, feeds us the brown skin and pink guava insides of the speaker’s body while decentering the fermented milk of the white gaze, and Gunn demonstrates the fragility, will, pleasure, and grief of the body, from Harriet Tubman to the speaker. Elisa Gonzalez () and Carolina Hotchandani () present the delicate poetics of death, exploring a “before-after binary,” as Hotchandani puts it, holding space for the constant transformations of life.
