The past decade has seen a rise in documentaries, memoirs and podcasts that revisit the legacies of women wronged by pop culture. With movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp challenging long-standing narratives around female celebrities, it’s no surprise so many believe the representation of women in the media has improved. In her scathingly witty collection of essays, Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women, Lisa Whittington-Hill argues otherwise. Pop culture’s treatment of women, writes Whittington-Hill, is still marked by misogyny and misunderstanding. From the gender bias in celebrity memoir coverage to problematic portrayals of middle-aged women and the sexist pressure on female pop stars to constantly reinvent themselves, Girls, Interrupted critically examines how mainstream media keeps failing women and explores what we can do to fix it. A work of searing relevance, this candid and often cathartic debut marks Whittington-Hill as a cultural critic of the first rank.

Selected from Ricardo Sternberg’s four collections, along with astonishing new poems, One River is a major event. A poet who, according to one reviewer, “has divined the secret connections between the words,” Sternberg's voice is unlike any other: witty, earthy, exuberant, inventive. His poems also forgo conventional subjects. Alchemists, mermaids, angels, and “jongleur” grasshoppers share space with all manner of eccentrics: a trapeze artist, a pilot who navigates by smell, a millionaire who sneaks into heaven disguised as a camel. At the heart of Sternberg’s practice is prestidigitation: the sleight of hand that inheres in effortless turns of phrase, brisk syntax, and bold forms. “Leave it to me,” he says to his muse, “to come up with something / that while not highfalutin, /carries a whiff of the sublime.” Charismatic and original, Sternberg’s enduring work is captured in all of its extraordinary range in this new book.

Talking to Strangers is a book of bracing encounters. Throughout her four decades as poet, Rhea Tregebov has displayed an uncommon eye for the mysteries of ordinary life—moments where, as she writes, “[t]he simplest things / elude me.” This gift is brought to brilliant effect in her eighth book of poetry and most charged to date. In gorgeous arias of recollection and evocation, of elegy and heartbreak, Tregebov mourns, praises, prays, regrets, summons, celebrates, and bears witness with formidable artistry and tenderness (“You wouldn’t think the inanimate would get tired /but it does.”) Direct, never forced, keenly observant, and marked by scrupulous craft, these new poems unfold in beguiling, often breathtaking ways. They confirm Tregebov’s place among the most significant poets of her generation.

States of Emergency is a book-length poem about the apocalyptic present, written in a language whose meaning is liquid and full of slippage, always spilling out from its container. In Yoyo Comay’s hands, words roil, churn, and surge. By taking on different mood and modes, from the prophetic to the colloquial, he has created a form that is a constant unravelling—a leap of faith into intuitive meaning, a letting go into ongoingness. “I am catapulted into where I am,” he writes, “and the air concusses around me.”

Comay sees poetry as a visceral experience: a state of immanence, embodiment, emergence, emergency. This is poetry as diary and seismograph, an infinite scroll for the end of days. It is a debut like no other.