Saturnalia Books: 28 books

Allison Titus’s newest poetry collection, The True Book of Animal Homes, is obsessed with animal and human alike, and how each one of us makes our home in the stations we hold—from the wilds of southern brambles to a desk in an office cubicle. This book ponders the question: how much wildness...

Each poem of I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean riffs on a Frank Ocean song, paying homage to the man but also investigating oceans, The Ocean, and the similarity between heartbreak and break beats by blending Frank Ocean’s musical catalog with personal narrative and social critique. I Think...

From intimate meditations on birthing, motherhood, and parenting in a time of war to its explorations of the frank and grave matters surrounding a life lived while a lover is off fighting a war, these lush poems of the human interior always put themselves in harm’s way, for there the poet finds...

Peter Jay Shippy’s A Spell of Songs evokes an enchanted world, one we eventually come to recognize as our own, where the cursed and the charmed unreel before the reader like characters in an unspooling film of the American fairy tale. About his poetry, Bin Ramke writes, “Shippy’s strange little...

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s radiant new collection of poetry, The New Nudity, shocks everyday objects to life. In these chiseled, electrically-charged poems, a ladder, wineglass, and spine ignite into being. With a nod to Francis Ponge, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Neruda, Bar-Nadav’s poems have a heartbeat all their own, small miracles that haunt and heave.

Heat Wake the phrase could designate the heat of the just-deceased animal, the warmed seat, the legacy of the anthropocene, the Fata Morgana that swirls and ripples sightlines. Heat Wake the book swirls with tactility, biology, evolution, and desire: hands reach, grab, feel, and are held as the poems...

The landscape of Ritual and Bit is littered with the speaker’s past: empty 40s, old posters, family lies, and fragmented missives. Internal struggles play out in the detritus of long-ago. Yet even as the speaker attempts to cautiously map his movements, effect a survival, and navigate beyond his...

Nowhere Fast offers a view of a world where fools rush in only to be baffled by ordinary dramas—of sexuality and gender, of family, of death and dying. By turns rueful, sardonic and tender, these narratives are overseen by a joyous mockery which reveals to us what Allen Ginsberg once called our...

Recasting the “trial of the century,” Ed Pavli ’s vertiginous new collection puts a century of segregation on trial for its soulSet in the vernacular origins of modernity, Live at the Bitter End puts the racialized logic of 20th century aesthetics on trial. Mixing anonymous voices with the testimonies...

Martha Silano’s new collection begins with The Big Bang and ends with the unleashing of twelve million bees from a jack-knifed semi. In between Reckless Lovely ricochets from Renaissance masterworks to amusement parks, from fissures to fission, praising the peregrine, the paramecium. Reveling in...

What if all women try to Steal It Back? America, art, life. They’re in Sephora, on Twitter, at McDonald’s. They’re single mothers and teachers, Catholic schoolgirls and martyrs. And they’re all stealing it back. Sylvia Plath gets a Malibu beach house. Lady Gaga hatches from an egg of triumph....

In a voice at once direct, musical, and surreal, these poems document the journey of a woman as she examines her role in both the political landscape of modern American culture and within the scope of her familial history. Addressing modern environmental concerns and global destruction, the poems maintain...

Don’t Go Back To Sleep answers the Sufi call to wake up to this life in the here and now where ecstasy serves its summons, inviting us to break out of the mundane quotidian. Timothy Liu winds the clock back to the Nanking Massacre in 1937, then traces its consequences on his family of origin, his...

For Hunger, the follow-up to Margaret Ronda’s award-winning first book, Personification, offers a fierce look at the interiors of motherhood, examining what it means to become a mother and lose a mother. Centering on hunger, these vivid and crushing poems explore the mourning process and its relationship...