New & Noteworthy (Published 2018)

New this week:

HEY, MARFA By Jeffrey Yang. (Graywolf, paper, $20.) Yang’s third collection offers a fractal portrait of Marfa, the improbable art mecca in the Texas badlands with its vibrant culture and stark scrubby landscape where “the blood of the defeated runs / fast through the earth’s veins.” Rackstraw Downes’s paintings and drawings of the area’s electrical grid add a visual element throughout. SPELL By Ann Lauterbach. (Penguin Poets, paper, $22.) The quicksilver elusiveness of language dances through Lauterbach’s 10th collection, which darts from pithy observation to clinical definition to a chatty ongoing conversation between the poet and evening. Fittingly, the book’s title refers variously to language and magic and the passage of time, as in “we’re having a spell of dark weather.” YOU DARLING THING By Monica Ferrell. (Four Way, paper, $15.95.) This lively, subversive book is fascinated by questions of feminism and femininity — womanhood as it is lived, and as it is socially constructed. In one poem a bride who takes scissors to her husband’s shirts explains: “That kind of violence is the other side of love.” FRUIT GEODE By Alicia Jo Rabins. (Augury, paper, $16.) The rewards and demands of pregnancy and young motherhood, emotionally and especially physically, anchor Rabins’s second collection. “I cannot think of my old ambition,” she writes in a blunt statement of maternal sacrifice, “before my nipples darkened.” THE POPOL VUH Translated by Michael Bazzett. (Milkweed, paper, $16.) Bazzett’s verse translation of the Mayan creation myth grants contemporary readers access to one of the few epics indigenous to the Americas.

& Noteworthy

In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they’re reading now.

“At home with a book, I tend toward the opposite of the internet — lyrical, linguistically inventive work that can knock loose the paving stones of functional prose. To that end I am reading OCTAGON COMMONWEAL, a book-length poem by the Connecticut-based poet Michael Sweeney. The work is set in the title’s metaphorical eight-sided ring made infamous by the brutal, wildly popular world of mixed martial arts fighting. It consists of some 700 sentence-length stanzas that begin with Socrates and unfold without respect to linear time to draw in figures from MMA, “legit” martial arts, politics, history and pop culture. Gorgeous George, Levon Helm, Joe Frazier and Butterbean appear or are invoked. Think world history as cage match. Also, this book sings. Sweeney studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College in the late 1980s (where I first met him), and employs something like his teacher’s mesmerizing intonation and grand ambition, but with a discipline that would make a sensei proud. It also prophetically invokes a no-holds-barred world that feels a lot like the real-time one we live in now.”

— Peter Catapano, Opinion Editor