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.”

Paisley Rekdal’s “有 識: Have Knowledge” moves the reader through questions posed by immigration officials to Chinese immigrants entering the United States during the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Rather than decode every reference in the poem, however, I’m eager to experience the musicality of it, to listen to the opening, and see how it squares with the poem’s first line: “The tension is in drag. the rug of hot winter rain. the droll swish tires.”

In this poem, the speaker moves via stream of consciousness, shifting back and forth between various characters, memories, and histories to create an expansive sense of various kinds of “climaxes” and “joints.”