Newly Published, From a Vermont Sanctuary to Chicago’s Spoken Word

ALL THE FLOWERS KNEELING, by Paul Tran. (Penguin Books, paper, $18.) “My goal is precision,” Tran writes on this highly effective debut, which marshals narrative lyrics and stark magnificence (bioluminescence, “ochre-stained shells”) to handle private and political violence. “Even after I’m unclear I’m deliberate. / Once I’m deliberate I’m liberated.”

SANCTUARY, VERMONT, by Laura Budofsky Wisniewski. (Orison, paper, $16.) Evoking a century-plus of the doings in a single rural Vermont city, the place “each day has a minimum of one marvelous factor,” Wisniewski’s debut builds to a novelistic sense of place and plenitude with shades of Thornton Wilder or Edgar Lee Masters.

THE KISSING OF KISSING, by Hannah Emerson. (Milkweed, paper, $16.) This expansive and ecstatic debut, by a nonspeaking autistic poet who calls on “prayer to let all of / language reply me,” inaugurates the writer’s “Multiverse” collection of books by neurodivergent authors.

RESPECT THE MIC: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry From a Chicagoland Excessive College, edited by Peter Kahn, Hanif Abdurraqib, Dan “Sully” Sullivan and Franny Choi. (Penguin Workshop, $16.99.) Alternatives from the thriving spoken-word scene at Oak Park and River Forest Excessive College within the Chicago suburbs.

ALL THE WHITE FRIENDS I COULDN’T KEEP: Hope — and Laborious Tablets to Swallow — About Combating for Black Lives, by Andre Henry. (Convergent, $26.) Henry, a singer-songwriter and former theology pupil, discusses the impression of the Black Lives Matter motion on his personal non secular and political orientation in addition to his relationships with white pals and parishioners.

AT HOME IN THE WORLD: A Memoir, by Ibrahim El-Salahi. (SKIRA Editore and the Africa Institute, $45.) The Sudanese artist narrates the experiences that led him to broad acclaim as a painter difficult paradigms of African, Islamic and “Western” modernism, together with encounters with Elijah Muhammad and the African American painter Hale Woodruff.

DILETTANTE: True Tales of Extra, Triumph, and Catastrophe, by Dana Brown. (Ballantine, $28.) The previous deputy editor of Self-importance Honest recounts his decades-long journey from barback to editor, rife with celeb appearances and reflections on the once-central function of print media.

THE TOWN OF BABYLON, by Alejandro Varela. (Astra Home, $27.) On this intimate debut novel, a homosexual Latino public well being professor returns to his suburban hometown to take care of his ailing father, the place he’s pressured to mirror on group and confront his previous as he attends his 20-year highschool reunion.