Spring is here, and so is Poetry Month. Please Check out Wesleyan’s new poetry titles.

Peter Gizzi’s In Defense of Nothing, Selected Poems 1987–2011 represents close to twenty-five years of work. This generous selection strikes a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth, and otherworldly resonance. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi’s poetry enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music.

The Tatters is Wesleyan’s first book with Brenda Coultas; she’s known for her investigative documentary approach. Here, she turns her attention to landfills and the unusual histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. She enables us to be present with the sorrow and horror of our destructive nature.

Gerald Vizenor’s Favor of Crows: New and Selected Haiku follows two artistic traditions: Japanese haiku and Anishinaabe dream songs. He unifies vision, perception, and natural motion into concise poems—creating a sense of presence while acknowledging naturalistic impermanence. The book has an outstanding introductory essay by Vizenor, addressing his early influences while stationed in Japan as a soldier.

Endarkenment: Selected Poems, by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and edited by Eugene Ostashevsky, presents the imaginative, fragmentary work of this Russian L=A=N=G=U=A=G-E poet in a bilingual edition. The book covers the time from perestroika through Dragomoshchenko’s recent death. Ostashevsky brings together revised translations by Lyn Hejininian and Elena Balashova, from long out of print volumes, and translations of newer work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky.