John Keene’s Punks: New and Selected Poems won the 2022 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. “Wow. Get Punks. Loads of ritual and performative lyric here, essential stuff,” wrote Eileen Myles. “Keene’s brain ranges through the past impossibly, like an elegant thrift. Then wrenching prose poems that are pretty much explorations of radiant metonymies of someone being black and queer like only John Keene is. This is one rich and thorough (I say pithy) fucking book.”
Sharon Olds, who won the Frost Medal earlier this year, now publishes Balladz, a new book of poetry. “Her poems are pure fire in the hands–risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up,” wrote Michael Ondaatje. “I love the roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.”