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Alexis Pauline Gumbs has a beautiful way of allowing words to wash together, rhythmically like the ocean, or rapidly like a river. The popping, start-stopping poetry of Dub is a tour through a history of colonialism, semi-autobiographical storytelling and suggested futures. The structure is poetry and narrative, swift and untethered to typical rules of writing. There is a message in that lack denial of (western) structure, I think, just as with Sylvia Winter's writing, who Gumbs references. The poems move through a slave's history to a philosophical positioning on unlearning and interconnectedness as postcolonial practice. This isn't a book for one sitting, but one to dip in and out of, to appreciate, mull over, and enjoy, and it is immaculately written and presented.

Commons by Myung mi Kim is a book of poetry held together by white spaces. The tempo is abrupt, and it changes suddenly from page to page, and just as often mid-page. Sections of quotations from medical or official texts sit between stark moments that blend 20th Century Korean (war) history with views on modernist agriculture, society and nature. I am not well read in poetry so I may have missed a lot of the depth of this book, but as an immediate experience it was stark, jarring, and really engaging.