by Doris W. Cheng

These verbal capsules contain universes—seemingly ordinary worlds that transform, as a matter of course, in unexpected and mysterious ways. A woman gets a stomachache and lays an egg. A man gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a seahorse and floats out to sea. I’m finding them to be perfect reading for a pandemic.

by Michael Juliani

It is difficult to track the speaker of Shimoda’s poems, as his work permeates the delineation between self and other. With this untethering, Shimoda creates a body of text and formal space that unites human and nonhuman aspects of the desert, embodying it as something internal.

by Joelle Boland

Here are some of the books that have kept me occupied in isolation, and have helped me forget about this mess we’re in, by immersing my imagination in even bigger, scarier messes.