What makes words arranged on a page serve as a poem? Over the centuries, poets and critics have spoken of poetry as prospective (as opposed to retrospective), as generating openness, suggestiveness, connotative implication, ambiguity, and—as poet Scott Cairns has said—recognizing the poem as a scene of meaning-making, rather than merely a document of meaning made.

In this, his tenth and perhaps final book of poems, Paul Mariani—acclaimed poet, biographer, critic and teacher—reflects on his life, returning in memory to the 1940s and ending some eighty-five years later with the present. No wonder, then, that so many of the poems strike an elegiac note, some with humor, some with sadness, some with wonder, some with regret—and all asking questions for which there are at best only further questions.

W.H. Auden said about poetry: “there is only one thing / that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being / and for happening.” For forty years, Robert Cording’s poems have sought to praise a world that need not be, but is. His poems embrace what cannot be changed: that living brings us face-to-face with suffering and injustice, beauty and grace.

Tom Howard’s award-winning debut short story collection, Fierce Pretty Things, won accolades for blending “raw emotion with surreal forays into the supernatural and metaphysical.”

The capstone of a distinguished literary career, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems is Baron Wormser’s eleventh book of poetry. It speaks to matters that have haunted and obsessed the author for a lifetime—especially the ways that a finite poem can intersect with the infinitude of being.

“Do not hurry your journey,” the poet says midway through this stunning collection. “Better if it lasts for years, so you arrive / laden with all you’ve lost along the way.” Bonnie Naradzay’s journey—as mother, professional, teacher, and longtime volunteer, leading poetry sessions in prisons, a retirement community, and among the homeless—has gathered much of both the lost and found, culminating in the publication of Invited to the Feast, a collection of poems and literary debut coming in her eightieth year.

In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series.

In his eighteenth collection of poetry, Eric Pankey continues his forty-year investigation into how and what one can know in this world and beyond it. The poet, Jane Hirshfield, says about his poetry, “Eric Pankey is a poet of precise observation and startling particularities.”

When he was a young seminarian, the teacher in Luigi Giussani’s singing class played a recording of an aria from a Donizetti opera, “Spirto gentil” (“Gentle spirit, you once shone in my dreams, but after, I lost you forever. . .”). At that moment, Giussani “understood for the first time that God existed, and thus that nothing could exist without a meaning; that the heart could not exist unless the heart’s goal existed: happiness.”

What do we mean when we say “I”? Behind that word there exists today a deep and abiding confusion. And yet what could be more urgent for each and every one of us than an understanding of what it means to be a subject—a true protagonist in the world? Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimensions of one’s own “I.”

In Your Names Are Written in Heaven, veteran Italian journalist Davide Perillo tells the inspiring story of Rose Busingye and “her women” with clarity, compassion, and insight.

According to T.R. Hummer, “Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate, humanistic ethos.” His poems reflect “concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity’s best hope.” The poems in Haven’s new collection, The Flight from Meaning, have been shaped by—and serve as responses to—an American predilection for violence, spectacle, and distraction—the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world.

In a small North Carolina riverside town where past and present are mysteriously entangled, young Daniel Waterson is growing up in the towering presence of his father Ray, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose mystical powers extend far beyond those of a trained soldier.

Citing a line from Elizabeth Bishop—“The bight is littered with old correspondences”—Scott Cairns avers: “So, also, is my mind.”

On the first day of spring in the Inland Empire of Southern California, our narrator Joe inadvertently rams his car into Ronnie, a homeless man riding a bicycle. The bike is crushed, aluminum cans are scattered, but a new relationship is formed.

Gather the Olives is a dangerous book. That’s because it is about peace in a time when peace in the Holy Land is a faraway, even radical notion. It is about hope and food and community and the way there can be solidarity in sharing a meal

Matters for You Alone is a spiritual exploration of friendship: its shapes and duties, stresses and blames—and its absolute necessity. The book takes its title from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence, as it strives to interpret everyday encounters and events—the domestic, the mundane—in light of the eternal.

An old man—poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar—sifts through the broken fragments of his memory as he recounts what it was like to grow up in Warsaw during the German occupation of World War II.

Searching for Home, Robert Pack’s splendid twenty-second collection of poems, written largely during his last year of life, centers on the search for meaning.

“Olga Sedakova is a writer of global significance. . .the publishing of this collection is a welcome stage in the reception of her exceptional genius in the West.” So writes Rowan Williams in his foreword to this translation of Old Songs.