Patrick Nathan’s novel The Future Was Color, newly republished in paperback, opens in Los Angeles in the autumn of 1956, as George, the book’s Hungarian protagonist, settles into the redundant comforts of eternal sunshine.

There’s a scene, very early into Wim Wenders’s 1985 film, Tokyo-Ga, where the director, filming inside the confines of the jet that will take him to Tokyo, turns his gaze from the small screen playing an in-flight movie to the plane’s window, glimpsing the aircraft coursing through clouds.

James Nolan, in his translator’s introduction to If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) refers to Jaime Gil de Biedma as a “poet of the ‘in between,’” who, in his life and work, represents the contradictions of postwar Spain, the Spain that was sundered by the Spanish Civil War and the fascist regime of Francisco Franco that infiltrated all areas of public and private life.

Splice (Trio House Press, 2025), selected for the Louise Bogan Award in 2024 by Trio House Press, mobilizes a frenetic polyphony, embodying both the giddiness and seduction of the metaphysical poets and the montage—crafted by Borruso’s nimble use of enjambment, parataxis, and caesura—of a twenty-first century scroll, inhabiting the death drive of the former and the simultaneous horizons of the latter.

Nate Lippens knows that any notion of advancing, advancement, can also be achieved through retreating and withdrawal—“a way not to be human but still alive”—and to write a book whose logic of momentum follows the natural trajectory of nothingness can serve as the paradigm for this literature of refusal.

In Spoilers, as though the text doubles as a book of spells, it is description itself that allows an individual to transcend the limits of individual subjectivity. And thus “plot” pivots often on the aura of conditional clauses—the if, were, and would which together permit the possibility of a particular thing when and only when something happens: we stage truth and so make it real.

Julie Choffel and Michelle Naka Pierce, both recipients of this year’s Poets Out Loud award, imbue their work with binaries of meaning, multi-perspective angles, a dissonance of language, and an inherent human longing that is akin to people talking separately at the same time—each of us missing the texture.