Joy Harjo’s “An American Sunrise” is the title poem of a collection concerned with years of violence against and displacement of Native Americans at the hands of settler colonists.

Gwendolyn Brooks understood the power of one raised voice to fight oppression and to speak truth to power—and as a Black woman in America, she had a huge stake in the notion that “We are each other’s harvest.”

I love the poem for its assertion that voting always matters and that “a collectivity of votes . . . can really / make some noise.”

To enter the spirit houses, storage units, and myriad spaces Maw Shein Win opens for us in the pages of her new collection is to enter a universe where familiar objects and structures take on new shapes and significance.

The hardest part of jury duty for me was being forbidden to talk about the trial until after our verdict. Writing poems months later helped restore the voice that had been silenced. —Kathleen McClung

The poems in 'Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl' paint their own murals in words glowing with passion and conviction. There is also a good dose of sass, a quality visually captured in book’s cover photo.

The things that matter to the poet—her own body, her children, a country on the brink of the Trump administration, and the injured planet—all appear to be under siege, just like her eardrums. The poem smacks of catastrophe far beyond the speaker’s self-described “mid-life crisis.”