Recent poetry releases:

THE CLEARING: Poems, by Allison Adair. (Milkweed, $22.) The poems in Adair’s debut draw on folklore and the animal world to assert feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines, as when “A fat speckled spider sharpens / in the shoe of someone you need.”

THE NIGHTFIELDS, by Joanna Klink. (Penguin Poets, paper, $20.) “There are no / empty hopes. But knowing / what to hope for is steady / work,” Klink writes. What she hopes for again and again in this expansive, remarkable volume, her fifth, is the ability to see the universe whole.

GUILLOTINE: Poems, by Eduardo C. Corral. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In his second collection, Corral nimbly bridges the personal and political, evoking themes of migration to ask what it means to be unwanted. In one poem a border patrol agent remembers graffiti on a boulder: “God / is always hungry.”

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ALBERTO CAEIRO, by Fernando Pessoa. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. (New Directions, paper, $18.95.) Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, invented many alter egos; this book collects the work he wrote as a humble shepherd.

ASYLUM, by Jill Bialosky. (Knopf, $27.) Haunted by her sister’s suicide and by political and environmental collapse, Bialosky finds refuge in nature and language, all the ways “the mind seeks / to keep itself from torture.”

What we’re reading:

It is not the most obvious of escapes from the torrent of news we’re now living through: a compilation of newspaper articles. But the news stories, profiles and columns featured in THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY: AND OTHER WRITINGS, a collection published in this country last year, carry the byline of Gabriel García Márquez and show the real-life building blocks on which the onetime journalist later created his magical worlds. For El País, the Spanish newspaper, he wrote a dispatch from Colombia that seemed plucked from one of his novels: “The train from Puerto Salgar climbed as if crawling up rock cornices for a whole day,” he writes in Anne McLean’s translation. “In the steepest sections it would back down as if to gather momentum and try the ascent again puffing like a dragon, and on occasion it was necessary for the passengers to get off and walk up to the next cornice, to lighten the load.”

—Marc Lacey, National editor