Caitlin Cowan’s Happy Everything is a postnuptial ghost story that Diane Seuss has described as “necessary, witty, painful, and brilliantly made.” This domestic elegy is not a book about bad men or a bad marriage: it’s a book about the ways in which women are asked to facilitate pleasure, be beautiful, and participate in capitalism as joy.

Sebastian Merrill’s GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a transmasculine speaker and a figure that he conceptualizes as his ghost, the girl-ghost of the self that he left behind to become the person he is today.

Sahar Muradi’s OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.”