Like the remembrances of a vacant town, the poems in Daniel Coudriet’s Parade echo and scratch, fill rooms, floodlike, and rush against the worn paths of past populaces. Their lines trip into each other in the act of sense-making, weary and wistful; their stanzas shutter and develop detours like new symptoms of a melancholy. Each piece gives itself over to its own ghosts — townspeople raising hopeless ruckuses, lost children, passengers of caravans, cold railways, and rivers. Who are these processions? Where is their nation? And is this our best possibility of understanding it — with these fever dreams and distortions? Coudriet holds them his hands, his sustenance, with one promise: “You’d hear hunger.”

In A Blade of Grass Made Bare by its Own Anatomy, Maureen Alsop offers vignettes in the truest definition, by fading the borders of her own illustrations, evocating a greater world beyond each cropped document. Their subjects are idylls ruined by frost, communication that works like cold, first numbing the nerves and then making them unbearably sensitive. A book of touch and location, A Blade of Grass gives readers “the visible world in which only kinesthetic beliefs, in particular, are strengths.”

A home and its broken ghosts are given voice in Rachel Mennies’ seance-like No Silence in the Fields. Its several speakers frighten and comfort, whisper and wail, with Mennies as their unflinching medium. Forging and foraging, even through vicarious anguish, for family stories chained to dilapidation, Mennies pulls memories from voluminous quiet and cold ground. In a place where death elicits no reflection or funerals, No Silence in the Fields gives both.

Histories are storehouses, and the storehouse of Andrew Kozma’s and Michelle Schmidt’s A Natural History is a collaborative one, idiosyncratic and stark. The poems converse and detour as they travel through the rural, the domestic, the psychological and meteorological. They wonder and are wondrous, ready to be pulled from the ground, marveled at and ingested.

War recontextualizes everything—romance, friendship, and solitude become desperate acts and cosmic jokes, ghosts run for office and ride the rails, and permanence holds no sway, making “time capsules … a crop” and “clouds … the future.” Reading like a dead war correspondent’s gonzo journalism, the poems of Christopher Deweese’s Maneuvers relay every uncanny detail of the wasted landscape, and acknowledge that absurdity becomes the only appropriate response to carnage. Each poem, the collected debris of rallies and bomb runs and campsites, give purpose to the poet that claims: “Inside me, there is all this dust I want to have a reason for.”

The film critic falls asleep as the credits roll; the identities and images just concluded are now processed into dream configurations; the components arrange themselves in newly fractured and sinister fashion. Such a vignette could describe the lucent and aggressively beautiful project Letitia Trent has undertaken with the cinematic ekphrasis of Splice, in which the poet takes films varying in genre from American classics to European arthouse to J-horror, disassembles their narratives, and uses their iconic cells and essential tones to express the connections of art to viewer, to artist, and to its history. Each poem is a rippled, frightening montage borne of Trent’s cinephiliac passion and curiosity, and they serve as evocative counterpoints to their sources—the mark of any successful ekphrasis.

Fritz Ward’s Doppelgänged is an electrified daguerreotype of authorial impulse, a swerving tour around the haunted amusement park we call narrative. Ward’s proxies write their own misadventures, setting up their shadowy sideshows near agricultural accidents, morgues, and drive-ins. The poems in this dazzling, maximalist collection swing gracefully through the reader’s reflection, and each risky inversion of verbal acrobatics allows both the speaker and the audience to share in the pleasurable vertigo that comes from working without a net. Doppelgänged’s fun house of mirrored forgeries reveals a portrait, in multiple exposures, of the poet himself and much more.

The voices that make a mantra of I Am a Natural Wonder must be inspired by ecstatic Whitman reverie, hyperbolic hip hop brag, or both. Anne Caecelia Holmes and Lily Ladewig, collaborating from the root of a casual challenge, twist the title into contradictory poses—grandiosity and quietude, oddity and familiarity—and their utterances are warm and unabashed. The poems eventually gather around questions of ego, worry about the gravity it creates, wonder at it, examine its potential to leave us lonely. At least one solution it offers is to grow as big as can be, come out of faucets, collect the blue world like bowerbirds.

Remembrance is not an unfamiliar landscape, yet, in Fata Morgana, Jeremy Pataky manages to erect monuments there that feel ephemeral and necessary. His circling, like that of a lost traveler who knows he is returning against his desire to, is skillfully replicated with an attention to language, image, and the intangible. Pataky works folds of memory—those difficult, those defiant, those not even owned—into “the world’s most careful paper crane,” object-making as coping with terminality and with lack. That this act is done with such honest grace and pathos makes Fata Morgana a true accomplishment.

If maps are documents of distance, then Nick Courtright’s Elegy for the Builder’s Wife is an atlas. Each poem in the collection can complete a chronicle the surveyor’s work cannot — the territories of fog, how trees can become landmarks, the continents chipped from paint. Courtright, navigating the same terrain as Lorca, finds icons of longing, passion, and sacrifice in the liminal spaces, and in the process, he charts what, for the mapmaker, is impossible — the incomplete, the rended, and the influence of time on everything, still or in motion.

Like magnetic tape manipulation, the temporal and visual of Andrew Zawacki’s Lumièrethèque is warped and looped, reversed and slow-motioned until the grain of the moment is visible. Zoomed to evocative abstraction, Zawacki’s “clips” twist with Murnau-esque mise en scène; like details of Veronese, their cropping implies a multitude outside the frame. Zawacki provides shaky cam footage of cathedrals, jump-cuts, converts analog to digital and back. At Lumièrethèque’s hand-cranked heart are questions raised by video tracking, galleries of anachronism, line and syllable: how does the simple act of perception fracture—and how could it not?

Howie Good’s My Heart Draws a Rough Map proceeds like a softly-spoken B-movie. Not content to just beat, the heart grieves, gives in to melancholy, takes long walks, plays baseball, makes demands like Edward G. Robinson. Drawn outside of the self, the heart doesn’t just get saddled with emotion, but is an observer, a conversationalist, enigmatic. As equally wrought with primary colors and ominous dark as child’s crayon portrait of her parents come to life, My Heart Draws a Rough Map maintains a simple surreality, tongue in cheek, and heart on sleeve (and atop roof, and on board train, and in a hundred other places).

The spring of Brooklyn Copeland’s Reunions is of birds and bees, but far from the picture book couplets that conjures; these birds, blind from direct sunlight, loop in disorientation, and the bees, stingers firmly attached, travel in packs. Copeland, in swaying, tangling lineation, pinpoints spring’s inherent seediness, that its green is as much flora as fake jewelry, that its relationships, like plant-life, grow weed-like—ugly, stubbornly, everywhere. Everything that can twist—roots, tongues, limbs—does, making the pleasure of the poem the untangling.

Alexis Orgera’s Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! proves that whimsy is nothing if not coupled with melancholy. Orgera, riding shotgun on a road trip through salt flats and suburbs, undercuts her jeremiads with jokes, never snaps a picture of a landmark without someone sad and strange in the frame, twiddles the radio knobs until she finds something disturbing but danceable. Providing “Driving Directions to the Apocalypse” along the way, Orgera gives the reader a map that perhaps looks less like a U.S. atlas than a trashy TV Guide; Orgera slyly makes the argument that both are indistinguishable. With good tea brewing and mild insomnia, any reader of Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! will find the journey, in turns, terrifying and a hoot.

In BHP’s fourth release, Airport, Emily Kendal Frey turns on the tropes of terminals and ticket desks, baggage claims and chain restaurants, letting them “shift and breathe.” Frey, with both a sense of loss and humor, crafts a lucid lyric cycle from the raw material of commuters, vacationers, and separated lovers. Airport is a work of brushing bodies that inhabit a distilled emotional weightlessness, and the airport plays host as a backdrop of physical time.