Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by the renowned Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, is a brilliant collection of poems written in and for the new century. Aridjis seeks spiritual transformation through encounters with mythical animals, family ghosts, migrant workers, Mexico's oppressed, female saints, other writers (such as Jorge Luis Borges and Philip Lamantia), and naked angels in the metro. We find tributes to Goya and Heraclitus, denunciations of drug traffickers and political figureheads, and unforgettable imaginary landscapes. As Aridjis himself writes: "a poem is like a door / we've never passed through..." And now past eighty, Aridjis reflects on the past and ponders the future. "Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds," he writes, "I live in a state of poetry, because for me, being and making poetry are the same."

George McWhirter grounds his delightful characters in the real, while his sharp wit and creative scenarios border on the fantastical: a woman adopts a dolphin-man; an Irish madam runs a railroad bordello in the desert; a devoted husband drives his childless, belly-dancing wife to Greek tavernas with the ambition to quicken their lagging fertility; a Kurdish barber has a cure for hair loss, but not the loss of his wife and family in Iraq; a Mexican campesino swears his machete-severed ear is a sea shell tuned to the Pacific Ocean. The Gift of Women is about religion and sexuality, the surreal and the magical, a tale-telling of earthy and incendiary women, capable of setting a man, a valley, and an entire island on fire.

Bellowing in the Common is Karl Petersen's first book. This collection "bellows" on behalf of the unheard things and people. Unheard and unseen, because they are too ordinary and common for human perception. His poetry shows how the mundane -- whether it be a boat rocking at the dock or a garden squash -- often rings with a voice louder and more startling than the extraordinary, if only we have ears to hear. Karl Petersen hears a bellowing in the common and, with a true poet's vocation, awakens us with new ears to the same old tunes.