New & Noteworthy Poetry, From Sign Language to Robot Saints
April 20, 2021
Recent poetry books of note:
INDEX OF WOMEN, by Amy Gerstler. (Penguin Poets, paper, $20.) Gerstler’s witty collection channels various characters — the tooth fairy, a lost doll — to celebrate “shrewd, / ingenious, difficult women, prodigal daughters / and wisecracking wives.”
THE PERSEVERANCE, by Raymond Antrobus. (Tin House, paper, $16.95.) Intimate and searching, the poems in this lively debut probe the author’s identity as a deaf Jamaican British man; sign language illustrations appear sporadically, and one poem is a scornful riposte to Ted Hughes’s “Deaf School.”
CLEAVE: Poems, by Tiana Nobile. (Hub City, paper, $16.) Harry Harlow’s famous study, raising baby monkeys with wire or terrycloth “mothers,” runs as a motif through this collection about the poet’s experience as a Korean-American adoptee. “Call me Rhesus,” she writes, “monkey without a cloth.”