Hauntingly vivid, the poems march through a soldier's lingering psychological wounds, tackle the curious questions of school children on the meaning of "hate," and tangle with a lover's witty and vibrant description of longing. Gibson's poems deconstruct the current political climate through stunning imagery and careful crafting. With the same velocity, the poignant and vacillating love poems sweep the air out of the room. It's word-induced hypoxia. Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns whispers with a bold and unforgettable internal voice rich with the kind of questioning that inspires action.

    So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart."This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver's work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet's work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems-a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver's work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet's attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver's most wide-ranging volume to date.

    From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television.Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar:The cowboy grins through the terrible din,***And in the Ninth, a choking woman wailsLook like this country done left us for dead.An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog.

    John O'Donohue, Irish teacher and poet, looks at life's thresholds--getting married, having children, starting a new job--and offers invaluable guidelines for making the transition from a known, familiar world into a new, unmapped territory.Most profoundly, however, O'Donohue explains "blessings" as a way of life, a lens through which the whole world is transformed. He awakens readers to timeless truths and shows the power they have to answer contemporary dilemmas and ease us through periods of change.

    A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.

    This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he’s found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings—and are often funny in spite of themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as he is regrettable. Here are gathered the individual poems from Berry’s various collections to offer the teachings and bitcheries of this amazing American voice. After the great success of the lovely Window Poems, Bob Baris of the Press on Scroll Road returns to design and produce an edition illustrated with etchings by Abigail Rover. James Baker Hall and William Kloefkorn offer poems here that also show how the Mad Farmer has escaped into the work of others. The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of anger and humor to bring even the most terrible consequences into a focus otherwise impossible to obtain.

    African American Studies. LGBT Studies. PLEASE explores the points in our lives at which love and violence intersect. Drunk on its own rhythms and full of imaginative and often frightening imagery, PLEASE is the album playing in the background of the history and culture that surround African American/male identity and sexuality. Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems' chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music. In PLEASE, Jericho Brown sings the influence soul culture has on American life with the accuracy of the blues.

    Poetry can have both a rhyme and a rhythm. Sometimes it is obvious; sometimes it is hidden. But either way, make no mistake, poetry is as vibrant and exciting as it gets. And when you find yourself clapping your hands or tapping your feet, you know you've found poetry with a beat!Like Poetry Speaks to Children, the New York Times Bestselling classic poetry book and CD that started it all, Hip Hop Speaks to Children is meant to be the beginning of a journey of discovery. READ more than 50 remarkable poems and songs!HEAR poetry's rhymes and rhythms from Queen Latifah to Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes to A Tribe Called Quest and more!Book Details: Format: Book+CD Publication Date: 10/1/2008 Pages: 80 Reading Level: Age 8 and Up

    Mojgani's poems are the sound of the river and the stars burning above. He manages to capture the axe in the stump with blood still on the handle. Anis Mojgani has drawn a map of the country in the shape of his wild dreams. These are memories of a life, captured through the blue green filter of the bayou. Mojgani's latest poems are tinged with the sound of crickets spying on us in the darkness. They move forward honestly, brutally and sweetly. The reader will be led into briar patches as well as the moonlight just on the other side.

    Coeur de Lionis an intensely personal, monologic meditation on longing, sex, and love between a speaker and the object of all her passions, which include thinking and writing.

    Today she is recognized as one of America's great poets of the 20th century. This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as "North & South," "A Cold Spring," "Questions of Travel," and "Geography III." In addition it contains an extensive selection of un_published poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes' The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas. "Poems, Prose, and Letters" brings together as well most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop's irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the 53 letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

    Their / infallible sense of what their lives / are meant to be."In The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, Mary Oliver brings together ten new poems, thirty-five of her classic poems, and two essays, all about mammals, insects, and reptiles. The award-winning poet considers beasts of all kinds: bears, snakes, spiders, porcupines, humpback whales, hermit crabs, and, of course, her beloved and disobedient little dog, Percy, who appears and even speaks in thirteen poems, the closing section of this volume.As Renée Loth has observed in the Boston Globe, "Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world . . . She teaches us the profound act of paying attention."

    His oeuvre is steeped in a poetic sensibility, marked by a lyricism rare in the world of Hindi cinema. Born in 1934, Gulzar's journey as a poet began with the Progressive Writers' Movement. Today, he is regarded as one of India's foremost Urdu Poets, unparalleled in his exploration of human relationships and the insights and sensitivity with which he addresses the many facets of daily life. Whether evoking an abiding nostalgia for yesterday (The Heart Seeks), lamenting the lack of time to spend with a beloved (A Day to Spend), or composing an elegy for a tree uprooted by a storms (Amaltas), Gulzar poetry reflects his keen observation of life and the environment around him. Without in any way compromising on artistry or lyricism, his poems incorporate the mundane and the everyday to create vivid images, like in Clothes, where the act of washing and drying clothes becomes a metaphor for a relationship gone wrong, or Monsoon which draws an unforgettable parallel between the rainwater gushing through streets and young children returning home victorious in a match.

    Merwin’s new book of poems. “I have only what I remember,” Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound—the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and “our long evenings and astonishment.” In “Photographer,” Merwin presents the scene where armloads of antique glass negatives are saved from a dumpcart by “someone who understood.” In “Empty Lot,” Merwin evokes a child lying in bed at night, listening to the muffled dynamite blasts of coal mining near his home, and we can’t help but ask: How shall we mine our lives?somewhere the Perseids are fallingtoward us already at a speed that wouldburn us alive if we could believe itbut in the stillness after the rain endsnothing is to be heard but the drops falling

    This collection includes: Aria da Capo, A Few Figs from Thistles, Second April, Renascence and Other Poems

    The title is a reference to both the old sticks and stones saying, and the narrator s feeling of being made of sticks of dynamite waiting to explode. This tale, based on Shane s childhood experiences with bullying, is as beautiful as it is haunting. And it reminds us that although we can assume any role bully, victim, or passive observer ultimately, we must each choose where we stand... With cyber-bullying on the rise, this is truly a timely and important book for all ages and backgrounds: students, parents, teachers, and more. It is sure to ignite lively debate and discussion about bullying in our society and what we can do about it.

    In this lyrical and luminous poetry collection, Coretta Scott King honorees Joyce Carol Thomas and Floyd Cooper celebrate these many shades of black beautifully.Included in Brightly.com's 2017 list of recommended diverse poetry picture books for kids. "Highly recommended for home and school libraries," commented Brightly's Charnaie Gordon. "Each melodic poem eloquently conveys the beauty of different skin tones and complexions. There are also themes of family, traditions, feelings, self-love, and acceptance echoed throughout this book."We are color struck The way an artist strikesHis canvas with his brush of many huesLook closely at these mirrorsthese palettes of skinEach color is richin its own right

    Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations.

    . . brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.”—Charles SimicFans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.From “The Dart and the Drill”:I do not believe that when my brother pierced my skull with a succession of darts thrown from across our paneled rec room on the night of November 18th in my sixth year on earth, he was trying to transcend the notions of time and space as contained and protected by the human skull. But who can fathom the complexities of the human brain? Ten years later—this would have been in 1967—the New York Times reported a twenty-four year old man, who held an honor degree in law, died in the process of using a dentist’s drill on his own skull, positioned an inch above his right ear, in an attempt to prove that time and space could be conquered . . .Mary Ruefle’s poems and prose have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Next American Essay. Her many awards include NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a frequent visiting professor at the University of Iowa, and she lives and teaches in Vermont.

    File Under:Life,Death,Vertigo.Sparrows,Saints,and Morphine.

    And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest's poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest's remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.

    Long associated with the New York School that came to the fore in the 1950s, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language and its unexpected permutations.As the poet David Shapiro has written, “The poems of Ashbery may seem so open that they become, like Hamlet, that rare inexhaustible thing, the irreducible fact of great art.” This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the texts of his first twelve books: Some Trees (1956), selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets; The Tennis Court Oath (1962); Rivers and Mountains (1966); The Double Dream of Spring (1970); Three Poems (1972), saluted by John Hollander as “a meditational masterpiece”; The Vermont Notebook (1975), presented with the original art by Joe Brainard; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976); Houseboat Days (1977); As We Know (1979); Shadow Train (1981); A Wave (1984); and April Galleons (1987). In addition it presents an unprecedented gathering of more than 60 previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades.To read Ashbery’s work in sequence is to marvel at his refusal to rest on what has already been accomplished, his insistence on constantly renewed modes of expression. It is to become aware as well of the way his poetry chronicles life as really lived—“the way things have of enfolding / When your attention is distracted for a moment”—amid the surfaces of the quotidian (waking, dreamt, imagined, remembered) and the equally pervasive, equally elusive and deceptive surfaces of language. Through all his metamorphoses he has continued to work with incomparable freedom and humor: Ashbery (in the words of James Longenbach) “is constitutionally incapable of narrowing the possibilities for poetry.”

    More than a simple anthology, this collection goes deeper, revealing the incendiary intersection of music and activism.

    Rauan Klassnik's HOLY LAND is not a book for the faint of heart. His poems--dreamlike fables that conflate the domestic and quotidian with the dangerous and the perverse--are bathed in tears and blood: a trip to the bank becomes a journey to Auschwitz; bullets and gore find equivalence in rivers, birds and lush grass. In Klassnik's startling vision, 'the world knows what you want, and it knows what you need. It brings you bodies. And it brings you a gun.--Gary Young

    These poems, many of them award-winning, span a wide range of styles-from plainsong free verse to sestinas to nearly epic works. The characters/speakers in Beers' poems range from the rural working class to mythological characters. These poems look at the world with an honest, unflinching eye. She is one of the up-and-coming poets from Generation X we will be hearing a great deal from in the future.

    Junkyard Ghost Revival is an award winning poetry collection of 7 modern touring authors: Derrick Brown, Anis Mojgani, Buddy Wakefield, Robbie Q, Sonya Renee, Andrea Gibson and Cristin O'keefe Aptowicz

    In BREAKING POEMS Suheir Hammad departs from her previous poetry books with a bold and explosive style to do what the best poets have always done: create a new language. Using "break" as a trigger for every poem, Hammad destructs, constructs, and reconstructs the English language for us to hear the sound of a breath, a woman's body, a land, a culture, falling apart, broken, and put back together again. "Suheir Hammad's BREAKING POEMS introduces English to an Arabic vernacular that startles into being an altogether new language, bridging the archipelago of a Palestine under siege to the diaspora and beyond, breaking through convention, breaking open locks on mind and heart, breaking into a music inspired by the Coltranes, Sun Ra and free jazz, Lee Scratch Perry and Ravi Shankar, a music that is at once a joyous celebration of survival and a poignant cri de Coeur that cannot be ignored and that Mahmoud Darwish should have lived to see. This is a poetry written for people who have endured the winds of hurricanes and invasions. What wisdom, energy, joy and poignancy Hammad brings to the page for all of this, and for teaching me a new speaking, I give her my thanks" Carolyn Forche."

    Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert--the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves--Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten. Check for the online reader's companion at http: //zong.site.wesleyan.edu.

    could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." —Time Out New York"The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."—Magill Book ReviewsA girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they’ve been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world.This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and “the joy of self-forgetting,” the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other.Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.

    Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.

    Turner makes his solo spoken-word debut in the form of an original short story, written and recorded for Matt Helders's Late Night Tales compilation.>>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKO_F...

    The poet is in love with the rhythm of the man-made world, and "the rhythm is so strong sometimes / it blows up the room."

    Hauge deserves a larger American readership, and this book may summon it." —Publishers Weekly "(Hauge's) poetry is miniaturist, pictorial, and ruminative; personal in that his experience, cognitive and sensual observations, and intentions are everywhere in it. Yet it isn't at all confessional or self-assertive....He is a man who knows where he is and helps us feel that we can know where we are, too."—Booklist “If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than the apples.”—Robert Bly, from the introduction Olav H. Hauge, one of Norway’s most beloved poets, is a major figure of twentieth-century European poetry. This generous bilingual edition—introduced by Robert Bly—includes the best poems from each of Hauge’s seven books, as well as a gathering of his last poems. Ever sage and plainspoken—and bearing resemblance to Chinese poetry—Hauge’s compact and classically restrained poems are rooted in his training as an orchardist, his deep reading in world literatures, and a lifetime of careful attention to the beauties and rigors of the western fjordland. His spare imagery and unpretentious tone ranges from bleak to unabashedly joyous, an intricate interplay between head and heart and hand. The rose has been sung about. I want to sing of the thorns, and the root—how it gripsthe rock hard, hardas a thin girl’s hand. During a writing career that spanned nearly fifty years, Olav H. Hauge produced seven books of poetry, numerous translations, and several volumes of correspondence. A largely self-educated man, he earned his living as a farmer, orchardist, and gardener on a small plot in the fjord region of western Norway.

    It will convert you and install a skylight in your brain. Alive and kicking in these pages is the voice of a brilliantly comic consciousness. McDaniel is a candid, frisky survivor: hyperalert, conversant with drugs and sobriety, obscene phone call addicts, 'boner etiquette, ' fatherhood, the special hell of family, being an 'emotional warrior' and so much more. He's an urban wordsmith of the first order. You hold in your hands his anguished autobiography, a smorgasbord of famished compassion, tenderness, luminous surprises, and armor-piercing humor. - Amy Gerstler It was an energetic moment when I encountered Jeffrey McDaniel for the first time. Even after a few lines it became obvious that he was someone who produced not only a very vivid but also innovative poetry. A fusion of pain and goodness, comic reliefs, and explosive moments on the crunchy surface of daily horrors/shocks

    Traditional children's poems are presented alongside contemporary pieces, and the collection is capped off with tributes by Eric Carle and Steven Kellogg, two of Bill Martin Jr's best-known collaborators. This essential compilation also features original illustrations by award-winning artists, including Ashley Bryan, Lois Ehlert, Steven Kellogg, Chris Raschka, Dan Yaccarino, Nancy Tafuri, and Derek Anderson. This beautiful anthology is sure to become a classic.

    The “haiku moment,” as it is called, refers to a heightened awareness of the world around us and how, in that small, transient period, the greater essence of our lives is reflected. As our culture speeds up and our personal lives feel overbooked and busy, haiku can offer an easy way to slow down, appreciate the simple things around us, and give us a moment to reflect on our lives. In Haiku Mind, Patricia Donegan presents 108 haiku that offer a larger lesson on how we can approach our lives. With themes such as honesty, transience, and compassion, Donegan offers haiku and commentary as a form of meditation—a moment where we can slowly and naturally discover what is simply here.

    Asian Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. The first full-length English language edition of one of the foremost woman poets in Modern Korean poetry. Kim Hyesoon was the first woman recipient of the prestigious Kim Suyong Contemporary Poetry Award, and is the author of eight collections of poetry. In Kim Hyesoon's saturated political fables, horror is packed inside cuteness, cuteness inside horror. Interior and exterior, political and intimate, human and animal, agent and victim become interchangeable, interbreeding elements. No subjecthood is fixed in this microscape of shifts, swellings, tender subjugations and acts of cruel selflessness

    Radically comic, formally inventive, and ridiculously smart, every 8 to 10 years Kevin Davies releases a new book reminding us just how unexpected poetry can be. THE GOLDEN AGE OF PARAPHERNALIA will without doubt garner the applause his previous book COMP. (Edge Books, 2000) received. That garnering included The San Francisco Book Award in 2000 selected by Kevin Killian, write-ups in the New York Times, Village Voice, and Boston Review, translation into French by Xandaire Selene, and extended critical articles in American Literature, Jacket, and The Poker-- i.e. Davies' work has met with more than a little enthusiasm. One example: Joshua Clover in the Village Voice: "Davies often writes long, tumbling sequences that gather force like a dream landslide, with each part standing out as an idiosyncratic scene charged by an alluring voice, or stance, not quite like anything else in contemporary poetry." Cover photograph by Benjamin Friedlander.

    Born and raised in the ancient city of Kashan, he was educated in Tehran and travelled widely. A gentle introvert by nature, he was accused of escapism when his reaction to the world around him was to go back to nature, mysticism and mythology, poetry and painting. This mystic of the twentieth century seeks a light that radiates from the individual soul and ultimately affects its relationship with others and the world around it. While Rumi, the mystic of the thirteenth century, dances, sings, and chants out loud that he comes from the world of spirit and is a stranger in the world of matter, Sepehri, quietly aware of humanity in a milieu alien to its physical, psychological, and spiritual needs, in poetry and painting, appeared to stroke human consciousness into a tranquility, almost a state of beatitude, which nevertheless is never quite free of the ongoing struggle for "awareness, understanding and illumination."Sepehri had a free and sometimes convoluted approach to the verities of life, insisting that the book of everyday "illusions" must be closed and ....".. one must rise""And walk along the stretch of time, ""Look at the flowers, hear the enigma.""One must run until the end of being ...""One must sit close to the unfolding, ""Some place between rapture and illumination."(Both Line and Space. Bk.8)In this fresh translation, Bahiyeh Afnan Shahid successfully conveys the meaning, feelings, and sensitivity of the Persian original allowing the reader to appreciate the pertinence of Sepehri to the twenty-first century.

     Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering,           just as the poem lasts. In the concert of being present.                                                           —from “Arriving” Linda Gregg’s abiding presence in American poetry for more than thirty years is a testament to the longevity of art and the spirit. All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems for the first time collects the ongoing work of Gregg’s career in one book, including poetry from her six previous volumes and thirty remarkable new poems.

    In a world of machinists, loggers, mill workers, and hairdressers, the poems collected here bear witness to a landscape, an industry, and a people teetering on the edge of ruin. From tightly constructed narratives to expansive and surreal meditations, the various styles in this book not only reflect the poet's range, but his willingness to delve into his obsessions from countless angles Full of despair yet never self-loathing, full of praise yet never nostalgic, Dismantling the Hills is both ode and elegy. McGriff's vision of blue-collar life is one of complication and contradiction, and the poems he makes are authentic, unwavering, and unapologetically American.

    Now David Young, author of Black Lab, and well known as a translator of Chinese poets, gives us a sparkling new translation of Du Fu’s verse, arranged to give us a tour of the life, each “chapter” of poems preceded by an introductory paragraph that situates us in place, time, and circumstance. What emerges is a portrait of a modest yet great artist, an ordinary man moving and adjusting as he must in troubled times, while creating a startling, timeless body of work.Du Fu wrote poems that engaged his contemporaries and widened the path of the lyric poet. As his society—one of the world’s great civilizations—slipped from a golden age into chaos, he wrote of the uncertain course of empire, the misfortunes and pleasures of his own family, the hard lives of ordinary people, the changing seasons, and the lives of creatures who shared his environment. As the poet chases chickens around the yard, observes tear streaks on his wife’s cheek, or receives a gift of some shallots from a neighbor, Young’s rendering brings Du Fu’s voice naturally and elegantly to life.I sing what comes to mein ways both old and modernmy only audience right now—nearby bushes and treeselegant houses standin an elegant row, too manyif my heart turns to ashesthen that’s all right with me . . .from “Meandering River”

    This is an edition of the poems which identifies the references, verse-forms, contexts and occasions of her work, and which offers readers a new arrangement of the poetry as a whole. The notes also identify dates of composition, so that it is possible to observe the development of her work. As well as drawing on Wendy Cope's three published books, the selection also includes a significant number of poems collected or published for the first time.

    We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both prose and verse, struggle to hang on to a vision of the world that can still allow benevolence, luck, and laughter. In this, the collection embodies a contradiction: it is a tender book of fury, a book of bleak hopefulness.Rybicki’s work is steeped in challenge: the biological and spiritual challenge posed by his beloved’s recurrent cancer or the daily challenges of an adopted child who could be, all too easily, lost. He spins these phenomenal struggles into a lyrical book that offers hope and awakens the reader into a new way of seeing.

    Born in Lisbon, he spent nine years of his childhood in South Africa and then returned to his native city, where he lived an outwardly quiet and modest life. But his inward, creative life was volcanic, giving rise to a vast and largely fragmentary output that includes poetry, fiction, dramatic works, writings on sociology, economics and religion, political commentary, astrological charts, and esoteric speculations. His most stunning prose work is The Book of Disquiet, a semi-fictional diary published for the first time in 1982. Although Pessoa published a number of his finest poems - such as "The Tobacco Shop," "Autopsychography" and "Portuguese Sea" - in magazines and in a book titled Message (1934), many others came to light posthumously, as family members and researchers sifted through the poet's generous legacy to the world: a trunk containing thousands of unpublished manuscripts. Forever Someone Else offers an ample selection of the poetry written by Pessoa under his own name and in the names of the personas he called "heteronyms": Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. Unusual not only for writing under different names but also for adopting dissimilar points of view and radically diverse literary styles, Fernando Pessoa, of all poets from all ages, was like no one else. Richard Zenith, born in Washington DC, is a longtime resident of Lisbon, where he works as a writer, translator, and researcher. He is responsible for many editions of Fernando Pessoa's works in Portugal, including the Livro do Desassossego (Assírio & Alvim, 1998; 10th ed. 2012). His translations of Pessoa's poetry and prose have won prizes in the United States and Great Britain.

    A landmark compilation of popular music, this collection contains Paul Simon's lyrics from his first album in 1964 to the present, now with 2011’s So Beautiful Or So What?

    A recipient of Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation grants, Cruz teaches creative writing and literature at UP Diliman.

    Lushly illustrated by rising star Brandon Dorman and featuring a CD with classic performances by the poet himself, it's the perfect volume for any poetry lover's bookshelf.When you're in the world of Jack Prelutsky, anything can happen. Ogres run wild, dragons sing, and baby uggs hatch. . . . Frogs wear red suspenders in a rainstorm of pigs and noodles. . . . Scranimals gallivant under a pizza the size of the sun. . . .Even the new kid on the block can see that the nation's first Children's Poet Laureate is something big. So, what are you waiting for? Let your parents think you're sleeping, and ride a purple pelican to a land where imagination is king, ridiculous rhymes rule, and laughing out loud is guaranteed! These are Jack Prelutsky's greatest hits!

    The seven poems that make up (SOMA)TIC MIDGE were each written after eating a single color of food for a day, and carrying the color externally. For the RED poem CA Conrad ate only red foods while wearing a red wig, right side straight, left side in curls. The BLUE poem was written while listening to Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" on a loop for a day. Anti war, yet at the same time not taking the magic of renewal for granted, CA Conrad's WHITE poem was written after writing "108" on his forehead with his boyfriend's semen, which of course was white for a little while.

    Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer’s poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and served on depression ware, and where bawdy instructions for a modern “Home on the Range” read:Mix a drink of stock lot:vermouth and the water table.And the bar will smell of IBP.And you will lick my Laura Ingalls.In Boyer’s heartland, “Surfaces should be worn. Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.” And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed.Nothing, too, is a subject:dusk regulating the blankery.Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,fill in the metaphorical smell.A poet and visual artist, Anne Boyer lives in Kansas, where she co-edits the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln and teaches at Kansas City Art Institute.

    These poems make me wish I had the same dreams Shea has; after reading this book it seems possible—anything does."—Nick Flynn

    His characters are often lost or confused, his settings bizarre, his scenarios brilliantly surreal. Opaque, inscrutable people float through a dreamlike world where nothing is as it seems. The Ghost Soldiers offers resounding proof, once again, that Tate stands alone in American poetry.

    The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can.     This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels”Let me beas streamlined as my knife when I say this.As cold as my three-pronged fork thatcools the meat even as it steadies it.A pettiness in me was honedin this cutlers’ town, later bombed,in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born therealongside my wedding pattern, could hearthe constant sharpening of kniveslike some children hear the corn in their hometownstalking to them through the wind.The horizon is just the score they breathe throughlike a box of chickensbreathing through a slit.

    

    In the preface to his first book, a lyrical epic on the violent convergences of colonialisms on Guam (Japanese and American), history, family, and language (Chamorro and English), Perez writes: "On some maps, Guam doesn't exist; I point to an empty space in the Pacific and say, 'I'm from here.' On some maps, Guam is a small, unnamed island; I say, 'I'm from this unnamed place.' On some maps, Guam is named 'Guam, U.S.A.' I say, 'I'm from a territory of the United States." On some maps, Guam is named, simply, 'Guam'; I say, 'I am from Guam.'" Written in the spirit of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee and Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco, Perez's book promises to add significantly to a growing canon of Pacific poetries.

    In A Metaphorical God, Johnson showcases her gifts for mining language for its hidden gems and its gospel (my tongue is a fovent choir, / a cloven fire), using what she unearths to delve deep into mysteries both epistemological and holy.

    "Using simple, understandable language," notes "USA Today," the two-term U.S. Poet Laureate "captures ordinary life-its pleasure, its discontents, its moments of sadness and of joy." His everyman approach to writing resonates with readers everywhere and generates fans who would otherwise never give a poem a second glance. Now, in this stunning new collection, Collins touches on a greater array of subjects-love, death, solitude, youth, and aging-delving deeper than ever before. "Ballistics" comes at the reader full force with moving and playful takes on life. Drawing inspiration from the world around him and from such poetic forebears as Robert Frost, Paul Valery, and eleventh-century poet Liu Yung, Collins drolly captures the essence of an ordinary afternoon: "All I do these drawn-out daysis sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridgewhere there are no pheasants to be seenand, last time I looked, no ridge." Collins reflects on his solitude: "If I lived across the street from myselfand I was sitting in the darkon the edge of the bedat five o'clock in the morning, I might be wondering what the lightwas doing on in my study at this hour." And he meditates on the effects of love: "It turns everything into a symbollike a storm that breaks loosein the final chapter of a long novel. And it may add sparkle to a morning, or deepen a night when the bed is ringed with fire." As Collins strives to find truth in the smallest detail, readers are given a fascinating, intimate glimpse into the heart and soul of a brilliantly thoughtful man and exemplary poet.

    . . . We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.”—Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge"Dickman crystallizes and celebrates human contact, reminding us...that our best memories, those most worth holding on to, those that might save us, will be memories of love....The background, then, is a downbeat America resolutely of the moment; the style, though, looks back to the singing free verse of Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara....(Dickman's) work sings with all the crazy vereve of the West." —Los Angeles Times"Toughness with a smile....(Dickman) breathes the air of Whitman, Kerouac, O'Hara, and Koch, each of whom pushed against the grain of what poetry and writing was supposed to be in their times." —New Haven ReviewAll American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. As Matthew Dickman said in an interview, he wants the “people from the community that I come from”—a blue-collar neighborhood in Portland, Oregon—to get his poems. “Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems. . . . Pepsi, McDonald’s, the word ‘ass.’”There is no one to save usbecause there is no need to be saved.I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowedthe front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dresscovered in a million beadsslinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,I take her hand in mine. I spin her outand bring her in. This is the almond grovein the dark slow dance.It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapingfor joy . . .Matthew Dickman is the winner of the May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a poetry editor of Tin House, and the coauthor, with brother Michael Dickman, of 50 American Plays. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

    His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.

    Facing the sudden loss of his father, Young pays homage to his significant clan: to aunties and double cousins, and a great-grandfather's grave in a segregated cemetery. At the book's heart is a series of highly original food odes, poems that grow out of hunger and pain and find a way to satisfy both. Whether in Ode to Pork (I know you're the blues / because loving you / may kill me) or in addresses to collard greens, catfish, and kitchen grease, Young counts his losses and our blessings, knowing inside / anything can sing. And Young is still singing the blues, though now with a touch of country and western, burnished by loss and a hard-won maturity, delivering poems that speak to our cultural losses, even as he buries his own, sadder than / a wedding dress / in a thrift store. What we love will leave us or is it we leave what we love, Today, belly full enough to walk the block after all week too cold outside to smile-- from I shall be released

    Dan Albergotti’s references are not mere proselytizing, though. In fact, the first poem in the book, “Vestibule,” tells the story of the author’s teenage experience making love to his girlfriend in a university chapel, saying: “Lord of this other world, let me recall that night. / Let me again hear how our whispered exclamations / near the end seemed like rising hymnal rhythm / and let me feel how those forgotten words came / from somewhere else and meant something.” Dan Albergotti teaches at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.

    D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

    Winner of the 2007 Gatewood Prize, Kathleen Rooney's ONEIROMANCE (AN EPITHALAMION) explores the absurdity and divinity of the marriage ceremony through a dizzying dream sequence with playful verse that skillfully blends call and response with Shakespearean odes, romance and cynicism, story-telling and wordplay. Patty Seyburn proclaims: These poems contain deep doubt and true sentiment, providing that pleasure-giving union of provocation and renewal. Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author of Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas, 2005).

    "Kylie Minogue, more than muse, is K. K.'s aesthetic m.o., his ammo. Around her name and image, he circulates the particles of his own uncanny idiom, which is unlike anything in contemporary American poetry. Killian works every instrument in the band; he sneaks up behind meaning, and makes it sing. Somehow, in the midst of defamiliarization, Killian's voice remains companionable and comforting. ACTION KYLIE is a book I will turn to when I want to remember that literature can regenerate authenticity as well as renege it. Killian plays with multiple rhetorics and codes, all in the pursuit of his own school of Action Poetry, in which I wish quickly to enroll" Wayne Koestenbaum."

    Some poets, such as Bei Dao and Mahmoud Darwish, are acclaimed worldwide, but many more will be new to the reader. The collection includes 400 unique voices—political and apolitical, monastic and erotic—that represent a wider artistic movement that challenges thousand-year-old traditions, broadening our notion of contemporary literature. Each section of the anthology—organized by theme rather than by national affiliation—is preceded by a personal essay from the editors that introduces the poetry and exhorts readers to examine their own identities in light of these powerful poems. In an age of violence and terrorism, often predicated by cultural ignorance, this anthology is a bold declaration of shared humanity and devotion to the transformative power of art.

    Individually, Jake Adam York’s poems are elegies for individuals; collectively, they consider the violence of a racist culture and the determination to resist that racism. York follows Sun Ra, a Birmingham jazz musician whose response to racial violence was to secede from planet Earth, considers the testimony in the trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant for the murder of Emmet Till in 1955, and recreates events of Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Throughout the collection, an invasion of starlings images the racial hatred and bloodshed. While the 1950s spawned violence, the movement in the early 1960s transformed the language of brutality and turned the violence against the violent, says York. So, the starlings, first produced by violence, become instruments of resistance.York’s collection responds to and participates in recent movements to find and punish the perpetrators of the crimes that defined the civil rights movement. A Murmuration of Starlings participates in the search for justice, satisfaction, and closure.

    Moved by the guilt of never having worked with his hands, Neruda opens with the despairing confession, “Why did I not make a broom? / Why was I given hands at all?” The themes of hands and work grow in significance as Neruda celebrates the carpenters, longshoremen, blacksmiths, and bakers—those laborers he admires most—and shares his exuberant adoration for the earth and the people upon it.Yes, I am guiltyof what I did not do,of what I did not sow, did not cut, did not measure,of never having rallied myself to populate lands,of having sustained myself in the desertsand of my voice speaking with the sand.Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was a Chilean poet and diplomat who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Recognized during his life as “a people’s poet,” he is considered one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.William O’Daly is the best-selling translator of six of Pablo Neruda’s books, including The Book of Questions and The Sea and the Bells. His work as a translator has been featured on The Today Show.

    

    as he struggles to understand why his father walked out. His father is back now, though C.J. is not as quick to forgive as the other members of his family. He still feels the weight of responsibility that fell on his shoulders when Daddy was gone, and he's not prepared to give that up. But C.J.'s anger is making him a stranger in his own home, and instead of life seeming better now that Daddy has returned, it feels worse.Through powerful poems, Hope Anita Smith chronicles the nuanced emotions of a family that is slowly learning to heal and put the pieces back together.Keeping the Night Watch is a 2009 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

    But by the time of Stalin's terror, the contradictions of the revolution caught up with him, and he ended in despair.A major influence on American poets of the twentieth century, Mayakovsky's work remains fascinating and urgent. Very few English translations have come close to capturing his lyric intensity, and a comprehensive volume of his writings has not been published in the past thirty years. In Night Wraps the Sky, the acclaimed filmmaker Michael Almereyda (Hamlet, William Eggleston in the Real World) presents Mayakovsky's key poems--translated by a new generation of Russian-American poets--alongside memoirs, artistic appreciations, and eyewitness accounts, written and pictorial, to create a full-length portrait of the man and the mythic era he came to embody.

    Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, Lesley Wheeler LETTERS TO THE WORLD is the first anthology of its kind—a feminist collaboration born from The Discussion of Women’s Poetry Listserv (Wom-po), a vibrant, inclusive electronic community founded in 1997 by Annie Finch. With an introduction by D’Arcy Randall and brief essays by the poets themselves reflecting on the history and spirit of the listserv, the book presents a rich array of viewpoints and poems. LETTERS TO THE WORLD is a remarkable example of how the Internet has radically rearranged associations among poets, editors, and readers.

    Get minky in the momodrome with Lara Glenum's second book, MAXIMUM GAGA. In scenic Catatonia, the Normopath snoozles, the Cherubim applaud, King Minus lies face-down, the Visual Mercenaries burst in, Icky and his school-boy minions race past, and the Queen Naked Mole Rat climbs inside the miraculating machine. Reworking the tabloid maximalism of Jacobean drama, this book investigates the politics of aesthetics and prosthetics, gender and power. With original cover art by Swedish artist Mia Makila. Lara Glenum's first book, THE HOUNDS OF NO, is also available from SPD.

    They are featured here alongside an introduction from Armitage and press reviews of the film, which is due for re-screening at the South Bank, London, in November 2008.

    Consisting of twenty-six smaller books, one for each letter of the alphabet, it employs language in ways that are startling and innovative. Over the course of the three decades during which it has appeared—in journals, magazines, and as stand-alone volumes—its influence has been wide-ranging, both on practicing poets and on critics who have had to contend with the way it has changed the direction of American poetry.   Ron Silliman, a founder of the language poetry movement in the 1960s and one of its most dedicated and acclaimed practitioners, has deployed in The Alphabet the full range of formal and linguistic experiments for which he is known.  The Alphabet is a work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices--historical and private--that capture the dizzying evolution of America’s social, cultural, and literary consciousness.

    "Goofy, weird, beyond funny, wise, wicked, K. Silem Mohammad is the exorcist giving us all a ride home. Beyond the pale, right with it, he's my poet laureate for our frightening state of the union"--Linh Dinh. "They say Auden was the first poet to be truly at home in the modern world. Mohammad is the first to be utterly unimaginable in any other. His poems communicate a total, infectious joy at being alive today, in our F'ed-up pluriverse of words and deeds. F in this case being flarf, a four-letter word for our time" -Benjamin Friedlander. Be sure to check out Mohammad's previous titles A THOUSAND DEVILS and DEAR HEAD NATION, both currently available from SPD.

    Using prose poems to suggest narrative logic, THE ORPHAN AND ITS RELATIONS "bridges," as Robert Creeley said of Robinson's work, "between the physically given world and that other we gloss with words, yet apprehend insistently as the defining presence of our lives themselves."

    From "Accuracy" to "Wound," "Adam" to "Void," "Babel" to "Silence," these cross-referential, highly associative entries comprise an utterly singular work of art. A Whaler’s Dictionary is the mesmerizing product of a total immersion into one of the greatest novels in the English language.

    Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those periods that are not apparently miraculous?

    Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award. In the aftermath of her father's death, the speaker of Rusty Morrison's exquisitely formed poems takes a step-by-step accounting of her transformation as she reconciles herself to loss. This book-length sequence is the silvery underside of elegy, a lyric of living acceptance paced with the linen texture of right silences. Rusty Morrison's THE TRUE KEEPS CALM BIDING ITS STORY brilliantly restores the energy of telegraphic communication, launching line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning. Her careful handling of form allows knowing to remain both openly discrete and discretely open. This is a joyous read and a remarkable book--Peter Gizzi.

    Fiction. A true account of a fictional work. Renee Gladman is the author of four previous books, most recently NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM, prose installations published by Kelsey St. Press in 2007. Gladman is editor and publisher of Leon Works, an independent press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, and teaches fiction in the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University. She lives in Jamaica Plain.

    His celebrated works range from the unemployment epidemic in pre-war Britain to the horrors of the blitz and the concentration camp at Bergen–Belsen, with each serving to anchor the fantasy world of his celebrated Gormenghast books. Black and white illustrations, drafted by the author, accompany the verse, along with previously unpublished illustrations and photographs.

    Beginning with a series of literal love poems (to the word “lonesome”, to blank space, to doo-wop, to fear, etc.), Pierce whisks the reader on a cross-country road trip (both literally and figuratively) that takes a tangential spree into a series of genre films and ends with gallows humor in the re-imagining of the events surrounding the famous last words of icons like Billy the Kid, Marie Antoinette, Isadora Duncan, and Pancho Villa. From start to finish, Pierce’s book is a delight to the senses, a playful, nostalgic dance that ends with the reader wanting more.

    The result is a zone of violent ambience, a 'fuckscape': where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book."– Johannes Goransson, author of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place"Pregnancy dream of poetry has this Sean Kilpatrick book by the fist. You learn to signal to others from the woken state, here, line-by-line. Do you have any extra money? Buy this book! If you have to skip lunch, buy THIS BOOK! 'I held my breath so hard I ended up in the country.' Some poetry you read is forgotten, and never remembered. Some poetry, this poetry, Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry, is a manual for exciting the engine to throw you out of the vanquished pleasures. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood."– CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank

    Set on the margins of Seattle, beneath bridges and on the banks of waterways, in strip clubs and flooded farmland, the prose poems in TINDERBOX LAWN illuminate the intersection of domesticity and bohemia, orthodoxy and passion. Each untitled block of prose constitutes a novel-in-miniature, with shadow characters and shards of plot. The intensity of Carol Guess's poems builds through lyrical language and recurring images, capturing the moment when the small mad heart at the center of things stalls mid-tick. "This is such deep, rich writing. TINDERBOX LAWN feels like dreams you forgot as you walk through your day but it's your life. I mean we never think as deeply as we live and Carol Guess tries to braid those strands and succeeds. I love being in this work"--Eileen Myles.

    HARD REDS is the first collection of poems by Chicago-based poet and small-press publisher Brandi Homan. "Like the stream of cut-paper hearts in her Valentine Factory, Brandi Homan's poems are connected 'at the blade's edge, ' are all 'hard reds' -- an intelligent and imaginative woman coming to terms with desire. This collection is an exciting 'kick-start' for her electric voice"--David Trinidad

    It's about this one simple truth that we all must face: finding joy even as we slowly fade." - Hosho McCreesh

    Tsvetaeva's poetry was often of a very passionate and almost obsessive nature. She writes of unrequited love and heartbreak, of her admiration for other writers, of the devastation of war, and of her generally troubled life. Nonetheless, she is always able to contain this raw emotion in an extremely rigorous and disciplined form, unique only to her. Especially in her later poetry, frequent enjambments, inner rhymes, short lines, word play, and numerous allusions dominate her work. In this dual-language selection, Andrey Kneller offers his attempts to capture this distinctive style of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry by preserving both the message and the music of the originals.

    THEORIES OF FALLING is the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Judge Marie Howe said of THEORIES OF FALLING, "I kept coming back to these poems--the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn't want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground." "Sandra Beasley slices her way down the page with precision and punch. Her haunting 'Allergy Girl' series will set off such an itch, I doubt you'll ever fully recover...This poet leaves us to smolder and ache in small kingdoms where 'even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.'"--Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

    Ely Shipley's first book of poems, BOY WITH FLOWERS, won the 2007 Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, the 2009 Thom Gunn Award, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He also won the Utah Writer's Award in Poetry from the Western Humanities Review judged by Edward Hirsch and the Virginia Faulkner Award from Prairie Schooner.

    Love is the meaning of our existence, the raw material of transformation, the glorious way of access to Divine intimacy. This teaching infuses the lyric verse of Rumi (1207–1273), the greatest of the Sufi poets. The poems in this collection, taken from among the master's many volumes of work, focus on one of his greatest themes: how love grows and matures for those on the spiritual path. Kabir Helminski and Ahmad Rezwani have crafted a translation that remains faithful to the original Persian while giving eloquent expression to the joy of Rumi's astonishing encounter with the Divine. As our love moves on to ever more refined and exalted objects, Rumi declares, the distinction between lover and Beloved becomes irrelevant—and wonderfully so: There is no Love greater than Love with no object, For then you, yourself, have become Love itself.

    The Last American Valentine is a unique anthology of non-sappy love poetry and flash fiction. Poet Laureates, rock musicians, actors, famed prose writers and a few talented American barfly's have been handpicked, hunted down and crammed together with an artist the world has never met.

    Stroud enters the minds of painters such as Goya, Brueghel, and Giotto Bondone, and he pays homage to the poets Blake, Milton, Smart, Lorca, Machado, and Jeffers....Many of the poems own a clarity that opens to unexpected emotional depths. One would be tempted to call them Zen poems because all have a quiet at the core, but they also love the surfaces."—ForeWord"Reading Joseph Stroud's Of This World: New and Selected Poems, two words come to mind, namely 'breadth' and 'breath.' 'Breadth' because of his unerring command of odes, prose poems, sestets, etc....And 'breath' because of each poem's sure-footed movement....Make no mistake, however, these are not sleepy meditations that go up in incense smoke, but fleshy encounters, sensuous reveries, poems that are as much throbbing taproots as they are like that imaginary wingless bird that never lands, or, in other words, poems that flock as much as they flow." —BookslutJoseph Stroud knows the value of taking one’s proper time to write poems, and taking great care when presenting a book to the world. Stroud has published four books in forty years, and his work has earned a devoted audience, including Jane Hirschfield, Ted Kooser, and Jim Harrison. Of This World includes the best from Stroud’s previous volumes, as well as a series of new poems and translations.The Georgia Review observed that “Joseph Stroud moves easily from the concise to the voluptuous.” He does this through various forms—compressed lyrics, longer narratives, odes, expansive prose poems. Informed by the qualities of clarity and compassion, and inspired by artists and writers as diverse as Li Po, Neruda, and Giotto, Stroud articulates a reverential attention to the world, and a commitment to revelations found beyond the self.Across the ravine from the mill house there’s a grassy patchwhere gypsies keep a donkey tied to a tree. SometimesI’ll cross the stream and bring him an apple, holding it outlike a rare jewel. He’ll contemplate it, then take my wholehand into his lips as soft as suede, and I can’t tell how hedoes it, but when his head lifts back, the apple has disappeared.Joseph Stroud is the recipient of the prestigious Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. His poems have been featured on National Public Radio, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. He splits his time between Santa Cruz, California, and a hand-built cabin in the Sierras.

    Is Zorba lover? Sister? Captor? Uncanny double? And does the story end in a bloody accident or intentional poisoning? Danielle Pafunda is the author of PRETTY YOUNG THING (Soft Skull, 2005), and the chapbook A PRIMER FOR CYBORGS: THE CORPSE (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, forthcoming). Her poems have been chosen three times for Best American Poetry (2004, 2006, and 2007) and appeared widely in journals. She is coeditor of the online journal La Petite Zine, a doctoral candidate in the University of Georgia's creative writing program, and Spring 2008 Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago. See daniellepafunda.blogspot.com for more information.

    Set in an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world that is disturbing because it is uncannily familiar, National Anthem chronicles the aftermath of the failure of imperial vision. Allowing Rome and America to bleed into one another, Prufer masterfully weaves the threads of history into an anthem that is as intimate as it is far-reaching.

    

    Chang sweeps together myth and fairy tale, skirting the edges of events to focus on the psychological tenor of experience: the underpinnings of identity and the role of nature in both constructing and erasing a self. From the edge of the ocean, where things constantly shift and dissolve, through "the forest's thick, / where the trees meet the dark," to an imaginary cliffside town of fog, this book makes a journey both natural and psychological, using experiments in language and form to capture the search for personhood and place.

    This is visual poetry that works otherwise than mere typographic fuckery, sonic work that listens to sight. The poems here are constantly regenerative and surprising in the truest sense—that is, they depend less on mere parataxis and more on in-sight to accomplish the work of astonishment."

    A hopeful romantic, Johnson’s poems that are both whimsical and profound in their exploration of love, loss, and hope, and all that it is to be human. count me the stars is a beautiful, embellished hardcover gift book with exquisite illustrations featured throughout.

    Dolittle fathered a prodigious daughter, she might well be behind the bizarre and entertaining personae found on the pages of Lindsay's first-book bestiary...Lindsay's dark-edged, sometimes creepy poems are also imbued with a buoying sense of respect for the different, the unexpected and the challenging.... In work reminiscent of Amy Clampitt and of Albert Goldbarth, Lindsay weaves informed and moving lyric claims around scientific facts, lamenting extinct species or following local rivers." —Publishers Weekly "Twigs & Knucklebones is a rare thing in poetry—a very good read....(Sarah Kindsay's) voice...is omniscient yet intimate, super-literate and flawlessly graceful, like a really good lecturer who knows how to entertain an audience while speaking on complex subject matters." —Poetry Foundation"With wonder and bemusement, Lindsay writes supple, sparkling poems about life's perpetual coalescence and breaking down....The heart of this mordant yet profoundly compassionate book is a vivid and involving series about the fictional ancient kingdom of Nab. Here Lindsay sifts through the detritus of a civilization, imagines the inner worlds of people long gone, and the layering of tomb upon tomb, city upon city as bone, clay vessels, and the inscribed tablets are all crushed into splinters and shards." —Booklist“Sarah Lindsay is blessed with the sort of X-ray vision a philosopher would kill for.”—The New York Times Book ReviewQuirky, macabre, vivid, and fascinating, Sarah Lindsay’s poetry in Twigs and Knucklebones melds science and art with astonishing facts that might just be true: spadefoot toads singing till their throats bleed, an explorer tumbling into an Antarctic crevasse and swinging from his tether like a pendulum.Many of Lindsay’s poems occur in extremis, and the situations are often severe and surreal: the futuristic “Valhalla Burn Unit on the Moon Callisto” or a bog person discovered in Eske’s Field. These characters often span—in the space of a poem—various times, cultures, and contexts. Lindsay also creates her own fictional kingdom and peoples it with outlandish characters, including jerboas, megalomaniac archaeologists, an adjunct professor, goatherds, farmers, and the god Nummis, who is depicted with a “hawk on his head, fish in one hand, horned ibex at either side.”We prod and whisk and deduce what we canfrom marks in clay, from the trace of a wall.But the way the king tossed and caught his adoring daughters,the foolish songs he improvised for his wife, and his furry voice—these have been safely forgotten.Sarah Lindsay is the author of two previous books of poems. Her debut volume was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in North Carolina.