In these moving poems French Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi urges us to look for the truth and beauty hidden in our daily lives and exhorts us to join him in the collective fight to save our planet from destruction.

The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry is an anthology of poems originally selected by Ted Kooser in 1980 and published by his Windflower Press, a small, independent publisher that specialized in poetry from the Great Plains. The collection contains almost two hundred poems from dozens of poets and was designed to resemble a commonplace farmer’s almanac.

Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. In this five-part testimony Lory Bedikian reconstructs the father figure, mother figure, and the self.

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self.

Turning an unflinching spotlight on the American Dream, Indigo Moor plunges headfirst into national—and personal—laments and desires. From Emmett Till to the fall of the Twin Towers and through the wildfires of Paradise, California, Moor weaves a thread through the hopes, sacrifices, and Sisyphean yearnings that make this country the beautiful trap that it is.

The poems in Leaked Footages carry urgent subject matters, ranging from death to disappearance to grief to memory. Not only do the poems fulfill the tradition of witnessing, but they extend that tradition by the medium through which they witness: the technical and the technological.

Named after the poet’s mother, ‘mamaseko is a collection of introspective lyrics and other poems dealing with the intersections of blood relationships and related identities. Thabile Makue questions what it means to be beings of blood—to relate by blood, to live by blood.

Although ghosts of all kinds haunt this collection, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of metamorphosis.

The poems in Cotton Candy were written during Ted Kooser’s daily writing routine of getting up long before dawn and snatching out of the air whatever comes to him in words, rhythms, and cadences, in the way a cotton candy vendor dips a puff out of a cloud of spun sugar.

Old Rags and Iron is a collection of narrative poems about the life experiences of working-class people with whom the author, R. F. McEwen, is not only acquainted but whose lives he has shared. McEwen supplemented his income as a teacher while working as a professional logger and tree trimmer, and he writes with great love and respect for blue-collar families.