Turns out, it took a while for God to die. He lingered, barely coherent, through the first years of the last century, until He understood that modern poetry would happen. Then He seemed at peace and let go, knowing the universe would soon fill with imaginative new forms as poets reinvented the divine. Generations of twentieth-century poets did just that. And among contemporaries, no one has made so much of heaven’s silence as Jay Wright, whose verse constitutes a humane, enduring, and fiercely thought-out redivination of the world. His work evokes the fervor that underlies the creation of myths, as

In the last lines of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s poem “The Cherry Tree’s Journey,” the mother asks, “Where will we tie up the cherry tree’s shadow / now that we have neither donkey nor cherry tree?” The question sets the tone for the poems that follow, for Nettles, the Lebanese poet’s latest collection, is engaged in convoluted negotiations between lost things tethered rather tenuously together, primarily in the realms of the spoken and the unspoken.

A Golden Age is meant as testimony. Using her family’s experiences as inspiration for her debut novel, Tahmima Anam tells the story of the Indian subcontinent’s other partition—the nine-month war that ended in 1971, separating West and East Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Anam, an expatriate Bangladeshi and an anthropologist by training, is a keen, sympathetic witness for her heroine, Rehana Haque, a widow living in a middle-class enclave of Dhaka.

A down-on-his-luck visionary has conversations with the love of his life, a pigeon. An autodidact builds a time machine and makes a date to fly it with his best friend, a night watchman at the New York Public Library. An army mechan­ic comes home from the war against Hitler—or perhaps from the future—to court a chambermaid, who steals the visionary’s notes for a death ray. Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Mark Twain, and the old Pennsylvania Station put in appearances. Not quite science fiction, not quite historical fiction, not quite fantasy, Samantha Hunt’s new novel falls within an increasingly popular genre

The unusually various characters in Nam Le’s excellent debut collection, The Boat, live between worlds. In “Cartagena,” for example, a teenage contract killer in Colombia moves from squalid shantytowns to his master’s opulent mansion; in “Hiroshima,”a young girl shifts unambiguously toward death in the days and hours before the atomic bomb is dropped; and in the title story, a Vietnamese refugee overtaken by a storm on the South China Sea feels as if she is “soaring through the air, the sky around [her] dark and inky and shifting.” As these brief descriptions indicate, the book’s seven stories are also diverse

For each of her books, Cole Swensen has typically chosen one subject—often from the world of art—around which the poems revolve, tracing the epistemology of the subject’s historical period all the while. In Such Rich Hour (2001), for instance, she contemplated at length the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches du Duc de Berry, a fifteenth-century book of hours, which was in her broken syntax placed against the tenuous philosophical backdrop of the first Western systemizations of time. For The Glass Age (2007), the poet turned to Bonnard’s painterly depictions of windows, interweaving faintly expository prose regarding his canvases with subtle intimations

The setup is almost a cliché. Thirty years after the love of his life left him for a wealthy, more promising man, Erneste finally receives the letter he has waited for in quiet desperation. Although he can think of nothing else, he resists opening it for two days. When he eventually reads it, it devastates him. His former lover wants money. Before Erneste can get his bearings, another letter arrives, stripping “off a few more layers of scar tissue. Outwardly he was calm, but an explosion had taken place inside him.” It is in that gap that this sleek, understated

We, Brave New World, 1984, A Clockwork Orange: These classics of dystopian fiction provide relief from their grim predictions only because they are predictions. The worlds the books portray are far in the future and thus, it is implied, preventable. Not so with Etgar Keret’s latest collection of disturbing yet hilarious short stories, The Girl on the Fridge. The dystopia that this Israeli writer presents is no imminent nightmare; it’s a reflection of the everyday irrationality and suffering in Keret’s homeland and elsewhere. And though this reflection is as fragmented as the world it depicts—forty-six absurd scenes that range in