RETURN FLIGHT: Poems, by Jennifer Huang. (Milkweed, paper, $16.) “I am aligning myself with pleasure,” Huang writes in her avid, observant debut; “I want to feel all of me / realize what is, what is.” These poems chart the path from past to present wherever it leads, coolly and curiously. “What pain is / the desire for pain?” one asks.
DUENDE: Poems, 1966-Now, by Quincy Troupe. (Seven Stories, cloth, $50; paper, $24.95.) A friend of Miles Davis’s (and co-author of his autobiography), Troupe blurs the line between poetry and music; his work is filled with blues and griot songs, rap and especially the “immortal burning flame of Black jazz.”
WHAT IS OTHERWISE INFINITE: Poems, by Bianca Stone. (Tin House, paper, $16.95.) As its title hints, this book roams in the realm of religion and philosophy. “We do not actually live at the top of the food chain,” one poem suggests. “And are devoured daily by thought. And time. Holy and obscene; unmentionable.”
NO PLACE LIKE HOME: Poems, edited by Jane Holloway. (Everyman’s Library, $15.95.) An anthology of verse celebrating the pleasures of domesticity, from apartments to farmhouses to lost homelands, from John Donne’s bed to Joy Harjo’s kitchen table to Billy Collins’s favorite armchair.
CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN, by Coco Mellors. (Bloomsbury, $28.) A 24-year-old British painter’s life changes when she marries a successful man 20 years her senior in America.
FREE SPEECH: A History From Socrates to Social Media, by Jacob Mchangama. (Basic, $32.) A legal, political and cultural history of free speech, via figures like Ida B. Wells, the Athenian orator Demosthenes and the Persian philosopher Al-Razi.
TAKEDOWN: Art and Power in the Digital Age, by Farah Nayeri. (Astra House, $28.) Nayeri explores the history of art censorship and looks at the ongoing reckoning in the art world over ownership, authenticity and appropriation.
WINTER LOVE, by Han Suyin. (McNally Editions, $18.) In this classic queer novel, a college student in London falls in love with her married classmate as World War II rages on in 1944.
