His stunning collection "Devotions" has been nominated for both this year's National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; this month, we're honored to debut four new poems from Bruce Smith's latest series, "Thinly Sealed," supplemented with readings by the poet.

Bruce Smith Write like a lover. Write like you’re leaving yourself for another. Write like you’re de Beauvoir, object and subject. Write like you must rescue yourself from yourself, become scrupulous to the body and the rain that floods you with rage and the crude sublimities: there was a lip print on the plastic glass wrapped in the misty domestic interior of the room. Write like there’s evidence, there’s tenderness, like...

Jules Gibbs How was it the I located another I, then stood sinking in the wet sand like a trembling bisection to help me say: am leaving you, which the mouth of the ocean, that many-tongued colossus translated: I believe in you. The ocean’s tongues never say love; they say pull or rush or plunge — spit out snarls of dark ganglia. What was it we thought we sealed in the philtrum — deep, erogenous, Greek for kiss — or pressed spleen...

Jules Gibbs My mothers were famous unknowns who lived in cellars where walls wept ceaselessly in the language of water. Blue ironing board, dangling cord, clench of clothes pins with nothing to hold. A reservoir, my maternal line pools in a porous foundation — wells up, amniotic. The only way through is a sacral path of cracked slabs, what I will make from the exertion of hands on a wrung rag, hung like a spent thought in the...