Miriam Bird Greenberg

‘Why wasn’t I better made / to refute assimilation’s maze’

Will Harris

‘a man caught my eye as I was about to cross the road / and asked to shake my hand. You have a kind face, he said.’

Benoit Jutras

‘Our nation is a spell of nerves and gas. We say yes to monsters, to elegies etched in our palms.’ Translated by Daniel Canty.

Kim Fu

‘I see them as a needlepoint sampler, / flowing script that reads: everyone suffers.’

Benoit Jutras

Kim Kyung Ju

‘Underneath the leaves that stack my upper lip / the reindeer do not share their love.’ Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine.

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’

Renee Gladman

J.V. Foix

‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’

Leontia Flynn

‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’

Leontia Flynn

‘The opposite of simply sitting about / in your head, like an egg in eggshell.’

Tyehimba Jess

‘Let me tell you how / white hands kilned me / in the moonless middle / of night.’

Eliza Griswold

Angélica Freitas

‘amelia, the real woman, / ran away with the bearded lady’

Angélica Freitas

‘woman is basically meant / to be a residential complex / all the same / all plastered over / just in different colors’

Peter Gizzi

‘otherwise it is all otherwise I’m lost, did I say that’

Anjum Hasan

‘motorcyclists like to howl / and dogs drop bulging bags of garbage / from their mouths when they see other dogs / they want to mount’

Minal Hajratwala

‘The unicorns are a technology / we cannot yet approximate.’

Kimiko Hahn

‘The lemon shark / who returns to the same mangrove-lined shallows / every year to give birth.’

Adam Fitzgerald

‘Would you like to come with me for some / old-fashioned inconclusive combat?’

Sakutarō Hagiwara

‘What I do not have is Everything: / how is it that I won’t bear this neediness?’

Kimiko Hahn

‘nothing like an ancient corridor where a / woman is stripped of resistance.’

Kimiko Hahn

‘Certainly the tide or the dog striding along the sluff of seaweed, / this afternoon – brown, light green, black green, white and red.’

Aracelis Girmay

‘Please stay with me as I / replay the last touch.’

Ishion Hutchinson

‘The train station was a cemetery. / Drunk with spirits, another being entered.’

Lavinia Greenlaw

‘Do they dance for those creatures / whose unmade selves / come unbuttoning out of the dark?’

Sadaf Halai

‘Of the 36 views of Fuji, this one is the strangest: / the great wave off Kanagawa, frozen and tempestuous, / both sound and silence.’

Amy Gerstler

‘I must remember god is not my private / secretary.’

Sadaf Halai

‘It made the sound of / a small balloon dropping.’

Selima Hill

‘Black against the sky the giant mothers / are whispering together in the moonlight’

Hiromi Itō

‘Who connects with the next woman / With tens and hundreds and thousands of women.’

Juan Felipe Herrera

Yasmeen Hameed

‘Tell me, what is this cry of pain in the air?’

Hasina Gul

Troy Jollimore

‘Our conversations faltered, the celestial musicians / took a break between sets, and all the little engines / we had so painstakingly gathered and constructed / lapsed into stillness for a few brief moments.’

Seamus Heaney

‘I called his name, although I knew / The answer this time would be silence / That kept me standing listening while it grew.’