Break to Sing: Seven New Poetry Collections to Read in July

“Elegy, sing the bones to break / the cycle. The cycle: Sing to Break. Break to Sing.”

–Philip B. Williams’ Lift Every Voice

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This month, we see poets collaborating and conversing beyond words on a page, from Victoria Chang’s hand-stitched historical photographs to a robot libretto from Brenda Shaughnessy, who joins the substantial ranks of poet-librettists, including contemporary poets Douglas Kearney, Janine Joseph, Avery R. Young, and Robert Pinsky, who’s own 2011 robot opera, Death in the Powers, centers a chorus of robots. The line between poem and song continues to be porous; the journey of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” set as song by his brother, later coined the “Black National Anthem” and then individually turned back to poem as a golden shovel by Philip B. Williams, reminds us of a poem’s endurance, as do the last words of Franz Wright, caught in the poems of his final collection: “Let alone, let / alone the lights / of home my / wanderings done.”

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