SKELETONS, by Deborah Landau. (Copper Canyon, paperback, $18.) Landau’s earthy, angsty poems — about sex and mortality and cosmic despair — are insistently quotable, and more fun than they have any right to be. One opens with a line Emily Dickinson might have written, had she been on Twitter: “Sorry not sorry, said death.”
THE BURNING WORLD, by Sherod Santos. (Arrowsmith, paperback, $18.) As a poet and a translator of classical Greek lyrics, Santos has explored history throughout his career. In his 10th book, he pushes that interest to extremes with short poems that amount to a collage of unending human warfare.
FLICKERING, by Pattiann Rogers. (Penguin, paperback, $20.) Rogers’s closely observed and densely packed nature poems bring an openness of spirit and an almost scientific curiosity to the world at her feet, cataloging unexpected connections everywhere she looks.
WHAT YOU WANT, by Maureen N. McLane. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Early in her new book, in a poem that veers between the A.I. revolution and the desire for simple intimacy, McLane sneezes into her phone, “which transcribes/the explosion as ‘you’”: a fittingly wry line from a poet whose swerving intelligence is all natural.
BARBARA ISN’T DYING, by Alina Bronsky. (Europa, paperback, $12.99.) In this biting, comedic novel, the retiree Walter still doesn’t know how to cook or vacuum when his wife, Barbara, becomes bedridden, leaving him with no choice but to finally outgrow his narrow, comfortable life.
SKY ABOVE KHARKIV: Dispatches From the Ukrainian Front, by Serhiy Zhadan. Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. (Yale, $26.) “We’ll restore everything. We’ll rebuild everything,” Zhadan writes in this personal record of the first four months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, recounting the shelling and killing but also resistance in Kharkiv.
A NEW HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. (University of North Carolina, $45.) This collaborative narrative offers a multifaceted narrative of the Southern United States, from histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous Americans to cultural, economic and environmental trends.
BACK TO THE DIRT, by Frank Bill. (FSG Originals, paperback, $18.) In Bill’s grisly latest, a Vietnam veteran living in early 2000s Indiana confronts his war trauma as he embarks on a search for his girlfriend, who is held hostage by her opioid-addicted brother.
