Aviva No Trans By Yael Segalovitz

Cycle of poems composed after Adaf's sister's death.

In the original text alongside the English translation, Adaf blends contemporary colloquial Hebrew, Arabic, and old Aramaic with biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic intertextualities. The collection is a powerful lamentation for Adaf’s sister, Aviva, who died at 43. Written from a witness of Israeli society, the daily violence taking place makes the grief reverberating through the poems both personal and palpable.

Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is a memoir-in-poems that reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six during a time of pandemic and political upheaval. With humor and honesty, the book portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life—even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on. This book is for anyone who's ever asked how to live in the face of suffering, and doesn't expect an easy answer. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive looks unflinchingly at painful realities, posing the question "What isn't hell?" and finds the answer in a powerful eros, letting a loved one pull laughter out of the narrator's reluctant mouth like a "redvioletcerulean handkerchief."

Winner of a 2022 Whiting Award in Poetry Winner of the 2021 Alice James Award At times located in the Philippines, at others in the United States, the speaker of these poems is curious about how home can be an alchemy from one to the other. Feast explores the intricacies of intergenerational nourishment beyond trauma, as well as the bonds and community formed when those in diaspora feed each other, both literally and metaphorically. The language in these poems is full of musicality—another way in which abundance manifests in the book. Feast feeds its readers by employing lush sonics and imagery unafraid of being Filipino and of being Asian American. Feast offers abundance and nourishment through language, and reaches toward a place an immigrant might call home. The poems in this collection—many of which revolve around food and its cultural significance—examine the brown body's relationship with nourishment. Poems delve into what it means to be brown in a white world, and how that encourages (or restricts) growth.

Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn't just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is a comment on writing itself. What have words done? When does writing become a form of disengagement, or worse, violence? The book is an exercise in paring the state down to its true logic of violence and imagining what can happen next. There are many contradictions—Although the protagonist teaches the same science that was used to justify enslavement and a racial caste system, she knows she will die at the hands of science and denies the state the last word by penning her own death certificate. As an educator and knowledge worker, she is an overseer of the same racist, misogynistic, and homophobic systems that terrorize her. Yet, she musters the courage to kill Kurtz, a primordial vision of white terror. She is Black and queer and fat and angry and chill and witty and joyful and depressed and lovely and flawed and an (im)perfect dagger to the heart of white supremacist capitalism.

From the unique perspective of a U.S. Forest Service elite, a Type 1 Interagency “Hotshot” Crew (the “SEAL Team Six of the firefighting world”), poems weave together memory, urgency, and the passage of time. Features segments from actual incident reports, forcing readers to witness what it’s like to stand before an inferno, walking with one foot in the black.

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction—through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history. The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope. By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men—in the structures that they design and maintain.

Titled after a small gallery of the same name found in Rome, the poems are devoted to meditations on religious relics and works of art. They explore the narrative power these objects carry—the way we imbue totemic figures with both meaning and story, and the potential they have to define the world.