Beginning with ALONE and closing with WORK, each chapter is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on the inevitable vicissitudes of life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling besieged and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness the appropriate confusion and helplessness that accompanies the first stage of revelation. CONSOLATIONS invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.

    In these poems, Smith opens the reader to a world of desire, longing, and deep mourning that picks up where his brothers Hopkins and Whitman left off. Startling in their formal range and virtuosity, these poems interrogate the ways the body not only inhabits but actually becomes public and private space: …tonight, I am no one’s pet, maybe an animal, wounded & hungry for revenge or sympathy but what’s the difference? Danez Smith lays down the gauntlet for all of us to speak our deepest truths with more elegance, more ferocity, and almost more beauty than a reader can bear.—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Apocalyptic Swing, Poetry Editor for The LA Review of BooksDanez Smith is the crown prince of innovation and ferocity, a stunningly original voice that chooses not to recognize or respect those vexing artistic boundaries. Here is forte unleashed, an elicit glimpse of poetry's yet-to-be-turned page, a reason to stomp and romp in your church shoes. Hallelujah is an understatement.—Patricia Smith, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah and Blood Dazzler

    In February 2013, Shane Koyczan's passionate anti-bullying poem "To This Day" electrified the world. An animated video of the lyric narrative went viral, racking up over 12 million hits to date and inspiring an international movement against bullying in schools. Shane later performed the piece to sustained applause on the stage of the 2013 annual TED Conference. Now this extraordinary work has been adapted into an equally moving and visually arresting book. Thirty international artists, as diverse as they are talented, have been inspired to create exceptional art to accompany To This Day. Each page is a vibrant collage of images, colors and words that will resonate powerfully with anyone who has experienced bullying themselves, whether as a victim, observer, or participant. Born of Shane's own experiences of being bullied as a child, To This Day expresses the profound and lasting effect of bullying on an individual, while affirming the strength and inner resources that allow people to move beyond the experience. A heartfelt preface and afterword, along with resources for kids affected by bullying, make this book an invaluable centerpiece of the anti-bullying movement. See the video version of the poem on YouTube at www.youtube.comwatchvltun92DfnPY.

    Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

    Containing poems on a variety of different topics and themes.

    Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.

    This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.

    A scholar of poetry and a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Lent.

    No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's knack for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"), among other curious topics. Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join in on her journey of discovering herself and the world around her. It's an honest and powerful collection.

    As the child of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores her own losses, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the atrocities these war heroines endured.Throughout the volume, the narrator endeavors to bridge generational and cultural gaps even as the victims recount the horror of grief and personal loss. As we read, we discover the profound yet fragile seam that unites the fields, rivers, and prisons of the 1971 war with the poet’s modern-day hotel, or the tragic death of a loved one with the holocaust of a nation.Moving from West Texas to Dubai, from Virginia to remote villages in Bangladesh and back again, the narrator calls on the legacies of Willa Cather, César Vallejo, Tomas Tranströmer, and Paul Celan to give voice to the voiceless. Fierce yet loving, devastating and magical at once, Seam is a testament to the lingering potency of memory and the bravery of a nation’s victims. Winner, Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, 2014 Winner, Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, 2015

    How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express ourselves? Danger is everywhere in these poems, but never overwhelms them; the poet is always an anchor on the other side. And his story carries us relentlessly along.

    The miracle in the mundane.One day, while browsing an antique store in Helena, Montana, photographer Tyler Knott Gregson stumbled upon a vintage Remington typewriter for sale. Standing up and using a page from a broken book he was buying for $2, he typed a poem without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything.He fell in love.Three years and almost one thousand poems later, Tyler is now known as the creator of the Typewriter Series: a striking collection of poems typed onto found scraps of paper or created via blackout method. Chasers of the Light features some of his most insightful and beautifully worded pieces of work—poems that illuminate grand gestures and small glimpses, poems that celebrate the beauty of a life spent chasing the light.

    Those who turn to poetry to become confidants for another's stories and secrets will not be disappointed.”—Publishers Weekly“In her fifth book of poetry, Bass addresses everything from Saturn’s rings and Newton’s law of gravitation to wasps and Pablo Neruda. Her words are nostalgic, vivid, and visceral. Bass arrives at the truth of human carnality rooted in the extraordinary need and promise of the individual. Bass shows us that we are as radiant as we are ephemeral, that in transience glistens resilient history and the remarkable fluidity of connection. By the collection’s end—following her musings on suicide and generosity, desire and repetition—it becomes lucidly clear that Bass is not only a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller.”—BooklistEllen Bass brings a deft touch as she continues her ongoing interrogations of crucial moral issues of our times, while simultaneously delighting in endearing human absurdities. From the start of Like a Beggar, Bass asks her readers to relax, even though "bad things are going to happen," because the "bad" gets mined for all manner of goodness.From "Another Story":After dinner, we're drinking scotch at the kitchen table.Janet and I just watched a NOVA specialand we're explaining to her motherthe age and size of the universe—the hundred billion stars in the hundred billion galaxies.Dotty lives at Dominican Oaks, making her way down the long hall.How about the sun? she asks, a little farmshit in the endlessness.I gather up a cantaloupe, a lime, a cherry,and start revolving this salad around the chicken carcass.This is the best scotch I ever tasted, Dotty says,even though we gave her the Maker's Markwhile we're drinking Glendronach...Ellen Bass's poetry includes  Like A Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Human Line  (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), which was named a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award.  She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). Her work has frequently been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Sun  and many other journals. She is co-author of several non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008) which has sold over a million copies and been translated into twelve languages. She is part of the core faculty of the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

    Paired with stunning linoleum print illustrations by Rick Allen, that celebrate nature's beauty and power.

    These poems bear witness to survival in the face of brutality, while also elegizing two brothers haunted by shame, two lovers hounded by death, and an America wounded by war and numbered by religion. Brown summons myth, fable, and fairytale not to merely revise the Bible—more so to write the kind of lyric poetry we find at the source of redemption—for the profane and for the sacred.

    

    Ask me whetherwhat I have done is my life.     —from Ask MeIn celebration of the poet’s centennial, Ask Me collects one hundred of William Stafford’s essential poems. As a conscientious objector during World War II, while assigned to Civilian Public Service camps Stafford began his daily writing practice, a lifelong early-morning ritual of witness. His poetry reveals the consequences of violence, the daily necessity of moral decisions, and the bounty of art. Selected and with a note by Kim Stafford, Ask Me presents the best from a profound and original American voice.

     Bone. Visceral. Close to. Stark. The poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward's collection bone are exactly that: reflections on a particular life honed to their essence--so clear and pared-down, they become universal. From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society's expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward's bone resonate to the core of what it means to be human. "You will come away bruised. You will come away bruisedbut this will give you poetry."

    Warsan Shire’s poems are direct, but they are works of such delicate construction and layered insight that one quickly realizes what seems “direct” is necessarily wholly indirect, questioning, uncertain, and vulnerable. Her poems are about how women deal with the violence of all kinds of exploitation, but they are never didactic or simplistic. Shire fills her poems with the effects of her complex sense of identity in transcultural Africa.—Kwame Dawes

    In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.

    Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry gathers the five final volumes of his life's work in a bilingual edition, translated and with commentary by the award-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris. This collection displays a mature writer at the height of his talents, following what Celan himself called the "turn" (Wende) of his work away from the lush, surreal metaphors of his earlier verse. Given "the sinister events in its memory," Celan believed that the language of poetry had to become "more sober, more factual . . . ‘grayer.'" Abandoning the more sumptuous music of the first books, he pared down his compositions to increase the accuracy of the language that now "does not transfigure or render ‘poetical'; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible." In his need for an inhabitable post-Holocaust world, Celan saw that "reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won." Breathturn into Timestead reveals a poet undergoing a profound artistic reinvention. The work is that of a witness and a visionary.

    Equipped with 144 pages of self-discovery. Alex shares some of her deepest and darkest moments that are intertwined with faith, hope and finding her light. This body of work explores the ins and out of trials and tribulations, partnered with successes and failures. The pages of "Love in my Language" are filled with poetry, narrative essays, and gentle reminders. You will get an authentic look into the life of the author, and she hopes that readers take away peace after reading the pages.

    His lines are so clear and simple."—Michael Dirda,The Washington Post“Readers [of Splitting an Order] will find ‘characters’ both strange and wonderful, animal or human. There is a sense that time is passing quickly and that everything worthy must be captured and savored, from an old couple lovingly sharing a sandwich to another sowing seed potatoes to a tribute to an old dog who waits as age and winter approach… Master of the single-metaphor poem, Kooser offers images that evolve, fluid and unforced.”—Library Journal, starred review"Wisdom, compassion, and dignity continue to mark the poetry of Ted Kooser...Splitting an Order [is] a quiet collection that honors small victories and gives reasons to be hopeful."—Elizabeth Lund, The Christian Science Monitor"Kooser's ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift."—Bloomsbury ReviewPulitzer Prize winner and best selling poet Ted Kooser calls attention to the intimacies of life through commonplace objects and occurrences: an elderly couple sharing a sandwich is a study in transcendent love, while a tattered packet of spinach seeds calls forth innate human potential. This long-awaited collection from the former U.S. Poet Laureate—ten years in the making—is rich with quiet and profound magnificence.From "Splitting an Order":I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half… and then to see him lift halfonto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,and then to wait, offering the plate to his wifewhile she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,her knife and her fork in their proper places,then smoothes the starched white napkin over her kneesand meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.Ted Kooser is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press), which won the Pulitzer Prize. A former US Poet Laureate, Kooser serves as editor for "American Life in Poetry," a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper column.

    Based on the myth of the blind prophet Tiresias, Hold Your Own is a riveting tale of youth and experience, sex and love, wealth and poverty, community and alienation. Walking in the forest one morning, a young man disturbs two copulating snakes - and is punished by the goddess Hera, who turns him into a woman. This is only the beginning of his journey . . . Weaving elements of classical myth, autobiography and social commentary, Tempest uses the story of the gender-switching, clairvoyant Tiresias to create four sequences of poems: 'childhood', 'manhood', 'womanhood' and 'blind profit'. The result is a rhythmically hypnotic tour de force - and a hugely ambitious leap forward for one of the UK's most talented and compelling young writers.

    But the poem above is a folk couplet—a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love—these are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave.     After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their landays. The poems gathered in I Am the Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

    And here we cross over into a landscape where beauty interrogates, and we encounter a voice that refuses to let us off the hook."—Yusef KomunyakaaIn this stunning debut, we follow one woman's profoundly personal account of sexual violence against the backdrop of cultural conflict deftly illustrated through her parents' experiences of the Vietnam War, immigration, and its aftermath. By looking closely at landscape and psyche, Split explores what happens when deep trauma occurs and seeks to understand what it means to finally become whole.From "The German word for dream is traume.":When my mother whispered,Has anyone touched you there?I had to pick.Alan, I said.I was seven.The training wheelswere coming off.Between the couchand wall, the ceiling was whitewith popcorn bits. The boys stoodand watched. I lay there,my eyes open like a doll's.Someone said, Let me try.He rode on topthen abruptly stopped.The boys laughed,and then, they stood me up.Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles, CA. She has received awards from The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Residency, and Poets & Writers. She is a founding editor of Paperbag.

    A slow flicker at times, a wild dance at others, Taplin stokes the emotions with his usual verbal finesse. Unique to this collection is the story of Charlie Jones, told intermittently in post meridiem hours between smaller flares of poetry and prose. Falling in love has never been so easy, but neither has getting hurt. Taplin’s existential awareness burns throughout, reminding us that our pains and joys are not so different. His thought-provoking dialogues and brief poetic synopses will invite you to admire the human condition from fresh perspectives, teach you about letting go and new growth, and somehow manage to leave you feeling full even after you’ve been completely gutted.Playing with Fire will make the sap crackle from your veins, lift the burning leaves from your limbs in one hot breath, then let the ash fall on the top of your head, soft as snow.

    

    Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin America, from small formal elements to large mysteries, he provides thoughtful definitions for the most important poetic vocabulary, imbuing his work with a lifetime of scholarship and the warmth of a man devoted to his art.Knowing how a poem works is essential to unlocking its meaning. Hirsch’s entries will deepen readers’ relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter. Shot through with the enthusiasm, authority, and sheer delight that made How to Read a Poem so beloved, A Poet’s Glossary is a new classic.

    e. cummings poem, beautifully illustrated by Mati Rose McDonough. Showing the strong bond of love between mother and child, within nature and throughout life, Cummings' heartfelt words expressed through McDonough's lovely illustrations combine to create a fresh, yet classic, portrayal of love. First published by Liveright Publishing in 1952 in "Complete Poems: 1904-1962" by e. e. cummings, as " i carry your heart with me (i carry it in]," "I Carry Your Heart With Me" has become a classic and very popular poem over the years. McDonough's illustrations provide a new artistic interpretation on this familiar poem.

    His first collection follows the narrative of his 5-star Edinburgh Fringe shows, 'Harry Baker's Super-Amazing Mega-Awesome Gap Year Adventures: Birth of a Champion' and 'Proper Pop-Up Purple Paper People'. It details the journey from performing Jay-Z maths parodies in school competitions to representing his country in Paris and becoming the youngest ever World Poetry Slam Champion. 'The Sunshine Kid' contains the raw honesty, tongue-in-cheek humour and blistering wordplay that have characterised his live performances and won the hearts and minds of audiences across the globe.

    They formed the spine around which the stories blossomed. September Verses takes you directly into their emotional and intellectual DNA. You will learn how the verses shape the lives of Liz Snow and Pete Hendrix and the other characters in the stories, and unlock aspects of who and how they are. But not all the verses made it to publication. This is your chance to sit in the editor's chair and read some of the ones that ended on the spike and learn why they were thrown away. Your poet - creator of Jack O. Savage - *bows*

    “Fat girls of the world will find their voice through Wiley’s brilliance, and we all owe her for that.”-Jes Baker, TheMilitantBaker.com, Blogger, Baker, Advocate

    Unique to this anthology is its focus on creating positive social change through gorgeous, gusty poetry. Alongside and embedded in featured poems are concrete ways to address social and political issues raised. The goal of We Will be Shelter is to raise awareness, encourage critical self-reflection, and call readers to action.

    Many are popular favorites and several represent the best works written by their authors, among them William Shakespeare's sonnets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming," and Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Although some of these poems share themes and verse forms, each is a unique work unto itself. All suggest a world much greater than can be encompassed in their words, and the way in which they transport the reader to that realm is a large part of the pleasure that they offer. Pocket Book of Poetry is one of Barnes & Noble's Collectible Editions classics. Each volume features authoritative texts by the world's greatest authors in an exquisitely designed bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging.

    Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of America’s most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him.

    As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes such as The Continuous Life (1990), Strand was already well-known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: “And here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns.” In his later work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent Almost Invisible (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.

    “All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun.” With figurative language that makes long, associative leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect themselves across poems, the collection builds and transforms its world through a locomotive echo—a regenerative force—that comes to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that will establish the already decorated young author as an important and vital new voice in American poetry.

    More than a collection of poems, this book serves as a survival guide for anyone who has ever been a daughter. Knotted with gritty tales of addiction, mental illness, and girlhood, Redhead and the Slaughter King is the prequel to every time someone asked the question, “how the hell did I end up here?”

    Poems by Scott Laudati

    You know that Santa can fly a sleigh, squeeze down chimneys, and circle the globe in a night. But did you know that another of his talents is writing haiku? These twenty-five short poems—composed by Santa himself—give you a peek into life at the North Pole as the December days tick down to Christmas. See the hustle and bustle of the elves' workshop, feel the serenity of moonlight on fresh snow, and find out how Santa and Mrs. Claus keep busy as Santa's big night draws near.

    African American Studies. Music. California Interest. THE FEEL TRIO is Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker. Or is it that THE FEEL TRIO are Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker? See, that's the amazing problem and chance, right there! In the wake and air and light of THE FEEL TRIO, what it bears and what propels them, which is everything in particular, THE FEEL TRIO tries to put some things together. Alabama runs through those things like nobody's business. I kept trying to visit the uncounted space James Brown forms around the one. To celebrate the varieties of black devotion. But coalition can't be too easy; it's in our nature not to come naturally lyrically, beautifully violently. The organizing principles, in our extramusical tailor's retrofit of fitting, sharp as a tack from the tone worlds of east by southeast of Sheffield, the Bronx's compassionate project/s and fly, flaired, flared Corona: listen to everything, relax the shape, approach with love, be worthy of a lovely t!

    These exercises, unorthodox steps in the writing process, work to break the reader and writer out of the quotidian and into a more politically and physically aware present. In performing these rituals, CAConrad looks through a sharper lens and confirms the necessity of poetry and politics.

    Eloquence is only a grasping in the space of ineffable air. There are few words or phrases that do justice to the soul singing its own revelations. That place is where Last Psalm at Sea Level lives, where it is as solid as gold burning itself into light. --Afaa Michael Weaver

    Here is his very earliest work—“In My Eighteenth Year,” published when he was eighteen; his first widely celebrated verses—“A Far Cry from Africa,” which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one’s very blood; his mature work—“The Schooner Flight” from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces—the tenderness of “Sixty Years After” from the 2010 collection White Egrets.     Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one’s own memory. This collection, edited by the celebrated English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions and passions that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

    

    With her gift for compassion and insight, Fortesa's poems are at once both gentle and cutting.

    her writing engages with subjects such as coming out as a trans woman, "surviving and thriving w/mental illness, and attempting to reconcile [her] anger/sadness at the state of things w/ [her] love for all the beauty that exists."

    Janeczko pairs with Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet for a collection of short poems to sample and savor. It only takes a few words, if they’re the right words, to create a strong image. Whether listened to in the comfort of a cozy lap or read independently, the thirty-six very short poems in this collection remind readers young and old that a few perfect words and pictures can make the world glow. Selected by acclaimed poet Paul B. Janeczko and gorgeously illustrated by Melissa Sweet, Firefly July: A Year of Very Short Poems invites children to sample poems throughout the four seasons.

    We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognize—even to envy—a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that “constrict like throats,” every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.

    Part narrative poetry, part memoir, and wholly unusual, it is an honest, messy, beautiful, at times brutal account of navigating collective living, sex, love, fear, and self-discovery as a young artist.

    A nonfiction work; a memoir about certain aspects of the author's life, family and community written by the author in the form of literary poetry.

    “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.

    The poems move from the magic of childhood – bostin fittle at Nanny’s, summers before school – into deeper, darker territory: sensual love, enchanted weddings, and the promise of new life.In Berry’s hands, the ordinary is transformed: her characters shift shapes, her eye is unusual, her ear attuned to the sounds of the Black Country, with ‘vowels ferrous as nails, consonants / you could lick the coal from.’ Ablaze with energy and full of the rich dialect of the West Midlands, this is an incandescent debut from a poet of dazzling talent and verve.

    This literary piece speaks volumes on love, pain, mistakes, and personal growth. On every page are words from the depths of a mans core that has broken others and been broken, priceless words no longer left unspoken.

    Mine: Body & Soul is a collection of Cameron Lincoln's poetry exploring desire, lust, sensuality, emotion, identity,friendship and love. Divided into two sections, the pieces stretch the body to its limits and delve into the depths of the heart.

    Her poems are already making waves--several from this collection have received award attention, including: "The Fiddlehead"'s 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, "The Malahat Review"'s 2012 Far Horizon's Award for Poetry and an Editor's Choice Award in "ARC Poetry Magazine'"s 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. They have also been shortlisted for "The New Quarterly"'s 2013 Occasional Verse Contest, longlisted for CBC's 2013 Canada Writes Poetry Contest and have appeared in literary publications across North America.The poems in "For Your Safety Please Hold On" move in thematic focus from family, to girlhood, to adulthood, each permeated by Czaga's lively voice and quick-witted, playful language. They test the line between honest humour and bitter reality in a sophisticated, incisive manner that tugs at the gut and feels true.The linguistic hopscotch of Czaga's poems about girlhood is often beautifully juxtaposed with feelings of menace or a first taste of smothering expectations--"She sits. She sips her bright pink fingers. / She slips into smart short haircuts, yes, / she does so, and does herself up just so." While her pin prick meditations on contemporary adulthood suggest a yearning for personal meaning and purpose on a larger scale--"I still wander, sometimes, / my coat closing the world out of my body, with pockets / full of garbage, with my slender steady want. I still / make the bed and at bedtime unmake it."The irrepressible energy of the poems in "For Your Safety Please Hold On," paired with their complex balancing act between light and dark, humour and melancholy, innocence and danger, make this collection an extraordinary first offering.

    On days when there’s no sprinkler to comb through her curls, no rain pouring in glorious torrents from the gutters, no dew in the grass for her to nuzzle with her nose, not even a mud puddle in the kiddie pool, she wonders how much longer she can bear this life. The front yard thud of the newspaper every morning. Singing songs to the unresponsive push mower in the garage. Wriggling under fence after fence to reach the house four down which has an aquarium in the back window. She wants to get lost in that sad glowing square of blue. Don’t you?            —from “The Backyard Mermaid”Prose poems introduce deeply untraditional mermaids alongside mer-tool silhouettes. A text by Ray Bradbury is erased into a melancholy meeting with a Martian. The Michelin Man is possessed by William Shakespeare. Antonio Meucci’s invention of the telephone is chronicled next to embroidered images of his real and imagined patents. If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? combines Matthea Harvey’s award-winning poetry with her fascinating visual artwork into a true hybrid book, an amazing and beautiful work by one of our most ingenious creative artists.

    "These hags, these great beauties, these mermaids who taunt, who feast, who slash, who steal, these succubae who cannot rest, my mothers, my sisters, my unborn friends, my keepers, my guardians": Powerhouse Jenny Zhang on identity, love, art, and living with rage.

    This bruising collection of poems puts a blade and a microscope to nostalgia, tradition, race, apology, and sexuality, in order to find beauty in a flawed world. His work has been described as an astounding testament to the power and necessity of confession.

    Now, acclaimed poet Maya Angelou honors the life and remarkable soul of Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa and Nobel laureate.   In His Day is Done, Angelou delivers an authentically heartfelt and elegant tribute to Mandela, who stood as David to the mighty Goliath of Apartheid and who, after twenty-seven years of unjust imprisonment on the notorious Robben Island, emerged with “His stupendous heart intact / His gargantuan will / Hale and hearty” to lead his people into a new era.   This poignant work of gratitude and remembrance offers condolences to the resilient people of South Africa on the loss of their beloved “Madiba” and celebrates a man like no other, whose life and work changed the world.Praise for His Day Is Done   “Moving and heartfelt.”—The Washington Post   “A powerful, gripping tribute.”—NewsOne   “[His Day Is Done captures] how many were feeling.”—BBC News

    For a group of poets so widely admired, relatively little seems known about their philosophy of poetry and their poetic influences, and although there is tremendous aesthetic diversity in this group, they have more in common than many readers assume. Russian poetry was a small world, made even smaller by the arrests, disappearances, pogroms, famines, assassinations, and political conflagration of the revolutionary era, and literary differences were often overcome by a mutual sense of historic cataclysm.This anthology's structure is like textile, with many common threads intertwining, doubling back, sometimes unraveling--creating a matrix of poetic conversation: Mayakovsky on Khlebnikov, Pasternak on Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva on Pasternak, Brodsky on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova on Mandelstam. Shared themes range from expected (the word) to serendipitous (the ocean). Above all these poets are obsessed with proximity--to God, to nature and place, to poetic predecessors, to language (their own and others), and always, forever, to the inexpressible.Featured writers: Anna Akhmatova, Andrei Bely, Joseph Brodsky, Daniil Kharms, Velimir Khlebnikov, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva

    Her poetry is heartfelt and soulful. She takes you through the depths of melancholy and loneliness with “Yearning,” and sings a “Love Song to the South” that will take you back to a simpler, more beautiful time. She’ll have you cracking up with a poem about her cat, dancing with her “Goddess of the Night,” and ready to take on the world, with “One Voice.” And you'll be soaring with her in the universal soul in the Whitmanesque “Edges.” And everything she writes cries out with the words of the poor little forgotten book on the shelf – Read Me! Go ahead and turn the page.

    This volume encapsulates the finest work from Seeing Things (1991) with its lines of loss and revelation; The Spirit Level (1996) where we experience "the poem as ploughshare that turns time / Up and over."; the landmark translation of Beowulf (1999); Electric Light (2001), a book of origins and oracles; and his final collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), which limn the interconnectedness of being, our lifelines to our inherited past.

    Fables, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. The Pedestrians brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations.That Great DiasporaI'll never leave New York & when I doI too will be unbodied—what? youimagine I might transmogrify? I'm fromnowhere which means here & so wade outinto the briny dream of elsewheres likea released dybbyk but can't standthe soulessness now everyone who evermade sense to me has died & everyone I lovegrows from my body like limbs on a rootless treeRachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife, The Last Clear Narrative, Eating in the Underworld, and Annunciation.

    At the age of five her family migrated to Miami, Florida. She wrote her first poem at the age of six and since then cultivated a passion for poetry. "Letters, To The Men I Have Loved" is her debut as an author. In it she expresses her feelings through distinct letters and poems to various men whom she considers motivated personal growth and her transition from young adult to womanhood. With words she paints a vivid picture of feelings such as passion, forgiveness, lust, and hope. Gracefully playing with the universal theme of the pursuit of love and the desire for change that can resonate with women all around the world.

    It's filled with love & magic & secret notes to help you remember the most important things in your life... It's full color, just like the hardcover version, so you can carry its magic with you on your Kindle, anywhere you go...

    Together with its earlier, sibling volume, it completes the arc of a remarkable career.Shortly before his death in 2013, Seamus Heaney discussed with his publisher the prospect of a companion volume to his landmark New Selected Poems 1966-1987 aimed at presenting the second half of his career, 'from Seeing Things onwards', as he foresaw it. Although he was unable to complete a edition/selection, he left behind selections that have been followed here. New Selected Poems 1988-2013 reprints the author's chosen poems from his later years, beginning with his ground-breaking volume Seeing Things (1991), his two Whitbread Books of the Year, The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999), and his multi-nominated, prize-winning volumes, Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). The edition concludes with two posthumously published works.

     List of Works: Laodamia Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems Lyrical Ballads, With A Few Other Poems Poems Written In Youth Poems, In Two Volumes The Excursion The Prelude: Growth Of A Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem The Complete Prose Works Of William Wordsworth

    Riley’s debut collection is an arsenal of deeply personal poems that embody an intensity that is truly impressive yet their hands are tender. She enlists you. She gives you camouflage & a pair of boots so you can stay the course through the minefield of her heart. You will track the lovely flow of her soft yet fierce voice through a jungle of powerful imagery on womanhood, relationships, family, grief, sexuality & love, amidst other matters. Battles with the heart aren’t easily won but Riley hits every mark. You’ll be relieved that you’re on the same side. Much like war, you’ll come back from this book changed.

    The gold-foiled softcover book contains 30 illustrated poems and scientific notes. Listed as one of the Best Science Books of 2014 by Maria Popova. This is a limited edition print run of 1000.These illustrated poems were created, one per day, during April 2013, for National Poetry Writing Month, an annual international event. I was reading about cosmology at the time, and as I took my habitual walks across the marshes, I pondered on the dimensions of space and time through which I was passing, as well as existing euphorically in the moment with the first stirrings of spring. The poems followed naturally through, allowing me to weave a pattern of deep emotion through a weft of scientific fact. The illustrations came about from my collection of paper ephemera, and a lot of digital manipulation. Where I have used scientific images, I have credited these.This beautiful, gold-foiled softcover anthology contains all 30 illustrated poems and includes scientific notes.

    Its lung is rusted, its heart and belly are rusted. Its mother, father, and sister are all rusted. In this city, though, rust is no death rattle but the life rustle. In this city, the prose poem scrapes the sky until rusted clouds burst, sending rusted beauty clattering down. Hurt brings the prose poem back to life."—Sabrina Orah MarkRochelle Hurt was forged from iron ore in the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio. Currently, she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

    How do we know our feelings and feel our knowledge? It’s about stupid contemporary immune systems and being left to our own devices. If you’re on a bus or plane, you’ll be happy to hear there are a lot of those. Rollerblading, Lord Byron’s clubbed foot, pyramids, falafels, bridges, trains, buses, nightshade, mustard, tattoo, antlers, innovation, nerves, guilt, blood, strawberry cops, conclusive gameshows, moody strangers, and “the yes that keeps watch / over and under my breath.”

    The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the '80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family.Some nights I hear my father's long romancewith drugs echoed in the skeletal choirof crickets.Geffrey Davis holds an MFA and a PhD from Penn State University. A Cave Canem fellow, Davis is the recipient of the 2013 Dogwood First Prize in Poetry, the 2012 Wabash Prize for Poetry, the 2012 Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He currently teaches at the University of Arkansas.

    

    A. Powell's first three groundbreaking booksPublished together for the first time, D. A. Powell's landmark trilogy of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails make up a three-course Divine Comedy for our day. With a new introduction by novelist David Leavitt, Repast presents a major achievement in contemporary poetry.

    . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category. --Mark Doty, from the ForewordBest Poetry Book of 2014— Entropy Magazine30 Must-Read Poetry Debuts from 2015 — LithubSpectacular Books of 2015 — Split This Rock“Bendorf’s poems give us all we have ever wanted, to wake up and feel that the body we are in is ours, that the hands on the ends of our wrists—our body’s gates of tenderness—are large enough to hold in them all the things we have desired.” —Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother Was An Aztec“Astonishing.” —The Literary Review“Oliver Bendorf’s poems draw unflinching attention to the process of making… Bendorf strips a poem to its scaffold with an honesty that is at once funny and unbearably sad.” —Blackbird“Bendorf’s collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wilderness is an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because ‘what we used to be matters’ in the way that language matters— however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be.” —Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography“What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. ‘Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,’ he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wilderness is a wonderful book.” —Ross Gay, author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down“The Spectral Wilderness is full of beautiful little bodies, written into being (into becoming) by a maker from whom we’ll continue to be amazed and enchanted.” —Lambda Literary

    Wily, witty and weird, often haunting, sometimes heartbreaking, [Frey's] poems…dive deep, for all their individual brevity.

    Freely admitting his own youthful bafflement with poetry, Bennett reassures us that the poets and poems in this volume are not only accessible but also highly enjoyable. He then proceeds to prove irresistibly that this is so.   Bennett selects more than seventy poems by Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Philip Larkin. He peppers his discussion of these writers and their verse with anecdotes, shrewd appraisal, and telling biographical detail: Hardy lyrically recalls his first wife, Emma, in his poetry, although he treated her shabbily in real life. The fabled Auden was a formidable and off-putting figure at the lectern. Larkin, hoping to subvert snooping biographers, ordered personal papers shredded upon his death.   Simultaneously profound and entertaining, Bennett’s book is a paean to poetry and its creators, made all the more enjoyable for being told in his own particular voice. its creators, made all the more enjoyable for being told in his own particular voice.

    I Drive a Valence, however, which spans two decades of Smog/ Bill Callahan songs, is a fairly unforgettable look-see; in fact, it’s a definitive-yet-concise trip through the mirror, collecting the lyrics to 70 songs and pairing them with 116 dreamy inkwash images by the man himself. The nuances and ambiguities within plain-spoke expression are at the exquisite center of Callahan’s gift, and the plain fact of words on paper nails them down in a concrete fashion that signals eternity somehow more concretely than sounds in the air can conjure. I Drive a Valence does this for the listener — makes him/her a reader, while putting Bill Callahan’s songson another shelf where they sit just as entirely as they do on LP shelves around the world.

    Over the past several years a dialogue has evolved in which the poet has come to advise the illustrator on the natural history of the animals and plants seen so intimately in the poems. Then came the august book designer Dave Bullen, who has been designing the books of Wendell Berry for more than thirty years.The resulting volume of 21 poems includes dozens of the sketches, drawings and watercolors in what amounts to a visual meditation on the poem they work to illustrate and is simply staggering in both its beauty and its meaning to those of us who remain lovers of the book as physical object.In the full-color Terrapin we have not only a volume of staggering beauty but a consummate example of the collaborative effort that is fine bookmaking, the perfect gift for children, grandchildren or anyone who remains a lover of the book as physical object.

    A truly gifted poet and truth-spiller, Ashe’s metaphors create images within images, leading us to question the subjective truths, both shared and hidden, in personal relationship – to the other, and to oneself. Unflinching in her approach, her poetry gives voice to that which most struggle to admit – even if only to themselves. And as such, Belly of the Beast is a work of startling courage and rich depth – a darkly delicious pleasure.” —Amy Palko“It isn’t often you find a book of poetry that is as unapologetic, as violent, as moving as this one. Ashe’s writing is intense and visceral. You feel the punch in your gut while you’re reading, but you don’t question it. You know why it’s there and you almost welcome it.” —Caitlyn Siehl“The poems you are about to encounter are the fierce time capsules of girlhood, girded with sharp elbows, surprise kisses, the meanders of wanderlust. We need voices this strong, this true for the singing reminds us that we are not alone, that someone, somewhere is listening for the faint pulse that is our wish to be seen. Grab hold, this voice will be with us forever.” —RA Washington

    Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordinary debut."—Terrance Hayes"[Mad Honey Symposium] has all the delicacy of [Mao's] earlier writing—but now there's also a gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger."—Dave EggersMad Honey Symposium buzzes with lush sound and sharp imagery, creating a vivid natural world that's constantly in flux. From Venus flytraps to mad honey eaters, badgers to empowered outsiders, Sally Wen Mao's poems inhabit the precarious space between the vulnerable and the ferocious—how thin that line is, how breakable—with wonder and verve.From "Valentine for a Flytrap":. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .There's voltagein your flowers—mulch skeins, armoryfor cunning loves. Your mouth pins every stickybody, swallowing iridescence, digestinglight. Venus, let me swim in your solarium.Venus, take me in your summer gown.Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Boston and the Bay Area. She is a Kundiman fellow and 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, and West Branch, among others. She holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University, where she's currently a lecturer.

    Todd Kaneko cover themes of loss, love, regret, redemption, and remorse. Kaneko's poems and illustrations blend Charles Bukowski's raw-boned verse and Randy "Macho Man" Savage's devastating elbow drop to mine the history of professional wrestling and examine complex relationships between fathers and sons.

    Browning follows up her sold out debut, EITHER WAY I'M CELEBRATING, with an even rawer and starker, and again darkly humorous navigation of friendship, marriage, and motherhood. The result is a more overtly political assessment of the absurd deficit between what we're confronted with and what we're equipped with to deal with those confrontations: "It's a girl, / and the wires she needs // open her hands / before they're fists." Browning combats this deficit with relentless anaphora and repetition, reducing seemingly impossible relationships to their most basic element--a love that begets an unconditional loyalty: "I'm here! I didn't run!"

    This poet’s ardent, winning ebullience echoes that of God, a recurring character here, who finds us Her children, splotchy, bawling and imperfect though we are, “flawless in her omniscient eyes.”--Robert Pinsky “In so many ways the poems in this book read like paintings, touching and absorbing the light of the known world while fingering the soul until it lifts, trembling. Gates splayed, bodies read as books, and hearts born of mouths, Studdard's study, which is a creation unto itself, would have no doubt pleased Neruda's taste for the alchemic impurity of poetry, which is, as we know, poetry that is not only most pure of heart, but beautifully generous in vision and feeling.” --Cate Marvin Some Poems: I ATE THE COSMOS FOR BREAKFAST--after Thich Nhat HanhIt looked like a pancake,but it was creation flattened out--the fist of God on a head of wheat,milk, the unborn child of an unsuspectingchicken—all beaten to batterand drizzled into a pan.I brewed some tea and closed my eyeswhile I ate the sun, the air, the rain,photosynthesis on a plate.I ate the time it took that chickento bear and lay her eggand the energy a cow takesto lactate a cup of milk.I thought of the farmers, the truck drivers,the grocers, the peoplewho made the bag that stored the wheat,and my labor over the stove seemed short,and the pancake tasted good,and I was thankful.WE ARE THE UNIVERSE--inspired by the Eric Anfinson painting,The Bravest WomanWatching your mouth as you eat I thinkperhaps an apple is the universe and your bodyis an orchard full of trees. I’ve seen the way your leavescling to the ground in fall, and I noticed thenthat your voice sounded soft, like feathered, drifting thingscoming finally to rest. Note:I was the core in your pink flesh. Youwere hungry birdsand foxes walking though the miles of me.You climbed, dug your nails in my bark, yankedsomething loose. Don’t tell me what it is.Just keep it close.Because I planted these rowsand rows of myself for you--so I could lick the juice from your lips,so I could rememberhow round and hotthe promise of seed. If I could findthat orchard right now, I’d run all through the rowsof you. I’d stand in the center and twirl until, dizzy, I fell. I’d climb high and shakeuntil the only thing left in you was longing,and you’d write a poem for me. You’d say:Your mouth is the universe. Your desireis an orchard full of trees.

    It is an epic journey not only affirming that “there is a difference between sadness and suffering;” but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. The Book of Joshua calls out in hunger and loneliness, “I didn’t feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore.”

    Wetlaufer documents the search for comfort and deliverance in language rich with materiality and great pleasure. The lyrical vivacity of these poems reveals a world where bodies are capable of miracles and deterioration, tremendous loss, and grace.Mark Wunderlich, author of The Earth Avails says of the book: "The mysterious acts in Valerie Wetlaufer’s striking debut are many, and those acts are magnified by her keen attention to the ruptures and illusions of human longing. Love and Eros are threaded through her taut lines, her finely crafted stanzas. Perhaps most startling are the poems in which Wetlaufer takes her readers back into a reconstructed and imagined past in which a 19th century Midwestern woman’s psyche and passion, her madness and her revenges and loves are made manifest, imagined, shaped and voiced. History here is harrowed, made new, made strange by being brought into language, into the light. Mysterious Acts by My People marks the arrival of a poet who possess great gifts of imagination, spirit, music and heart.""Oh, to be Valerie Wetlaufer and write poems perfectly. Mysterious Acts by My People will make you think: this is love—no, this is violence; this is violence—no, this is love; this is comfort—no, this is harm; this is harm—no, this is comfort. The stories she shares and the secrets she imparts are harrowing and vivid, frighteningly beautiful in their metaphorical renderings. There is no other way to say what these poems say: Valerie got it hauntingly right. Her images strike so hard and so true and will stay with you forever."—Jenny Boully, author of The Body, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, and more

    Poems that will comb your hair after they stab you. Very human, and risky." - Ofelia Hunt"Stacey Teague is a bad ass." - Scott McClanahan

    Linked Contents:POEMS 1817POEMS 1820

    . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully."—The New York TimesWhat if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating color? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun "you"? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture, and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema?These and other questions are answered in the new collection from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley+Maxwell.A quorum of crows will be your witness.And if you discover you were bought?You note the smell of rain, bread, and exhaust mixed with tiredness.And if you yourself are incompatible with your view of the world?And what is the subject but a stitching?Once again you are the one who promotes artifice.At 2 am on Friday, you burn with a maudlin premonition.And rankings and rankings and badges and repetitions.Lisa Robertson's book Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010 and was longlisted for the 2011 Warwick Prize. Her other books include Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. She is the 2014 Bain Swiggett Professor at Princeton University.

    / But what will keep us from the river? Leigh asks in her debut collection, which pieces together a kind of mythology in which the surreal and celestial coexist with the realities of childhood abuse as an adult speaker grapples with its lasting emotional trauma. Rooted in a place of deep faith and bottomless compassion, Leigh's speaker struggles to remember, and to remind us all, that to worship is to survive is to be / wholly human. ""This book went through me like a blue lightning strike. Part lyric, part narrative, and always alive, unflinchingly alive. A wonderful book and an even more astonishing debut!"—Thomas Lux

    Whether in a strip club or a prison these poems weave together an array of personae, celebrating the profane while taking apart tropes and cultural signifiers to expose the human pulse underneath. Part battle cry and part striptease, Thieves in the Afterlife targets the culture of commoditization and violence, articulating the pain, joy, and bravery needed to resist categorization in what Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize judge, Yusef Komunyakaa, calls "a hardcore reckoning."

    Concerned with how the visibility of blackness can become an individual burden, FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS traces the lingering fallout of an identity informed by traumatic artifacts and events—how the story of a story can be revised. FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS complicates the idea of family as nurturer and destroyer. A physical and haunting work of cathartic healing."Shane McCrae's FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS is song that writes wrongs until they ring with generosity. When the poet turns to trauma and difficulty for subject matter, he returns to us with an unflinching devotion to hope, to possibility—bearing wisdom, sustenance. McCrae has again transmuted a legacy of violence into one of love because 'the promise / is / New life.'"—Heidi Lynn Staples

    - Ellen Bass

    Many poems in Basin Ghosts address places and themes that resonated in Graves’s first collection, which won both the Weatherford Award and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry. The poems in Basin Ghosts examine life in the rural South, changes that have occurred over generations in communities there, and the ways in which the past lives on through memory and attachment to the land.Grace NotesLeora never walked the quarter-mile of red dustto her bench at Big Sinks schoolhousewithout carrying the hand-sewn satchelshe used for an accordion case.The notes came to her out of some darkness,a cavity just inside her earwhere the curve of a sound pushed throughher fingers and into the buttons of that strange machine.Where did the accordion come from?The imprint read Vienna Austria 1904and how it arrived to her in Capps Creek,Tennessee, the middle of the middle of nowherewill pass like the mystery of cloudburst,some graceful symmetry beyond this worldand beyond the next.

    Woloch weds us to the natural world through language that is both straightforward and particular. A "river's lifting dress" comes to represent history; branches swaying "like the arms of a woman waving goodbye" come to represent mortality. These remarkable poems are hymns and requiems; they are made of "blood mixed with earth." -Terrance HayesThese poems reflect a mature writer, a woman unflinching in both love and craft. The love is unabashed; the language boldly lyrical and image-rich. As a devoted reader of Cecilia Woloch's writing, I relish anything she offers, so I welcome Earth, this book of passionate, vigorous poetry, in which grandeur of spirit always redeems sorrow. As Woloch writes in the gorgeous prose poem "Afterlife" "I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I'm dead." May we all be meadows with you, Dear Poet. -Holly PradoThese poems gel together beautifully with a musical sense of foreboding and epiphany inhabiting the lines. These pages give us a terrain where a "honey of birdcall in our mouth" seems equally at place with a landscape populated with a willow that leaves the speaker "half afraid that the tree would fly." I want to return to Earth again and again. -Aimee Nezhukumatathil

    The numbered “Imagined Sons” poems are little scenes where the author/narrator imagines, over a period of years, just what might have become of the son she gave up for adoption at birth in 1986. She imagines all sorts of destinies for him from the mundane (supermarket clerk) to the lively (singer-songwriter). Sometimes the scenes are realistic and sometimes they are steeped in the surreal: “visions” that evoke nightmares or practical jokes. The other “Birthmother’s Catechisms” poems present the author/narrator’s emotions more nakedly, in chorus-like laments for what might be or might have been.

    Based in New York City, DarkMatter regularly performs to sold-out houses at venues like La MaMa Experimental Theater, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and the Asian-American Writer's Workshop. DarkMatter was recently part of the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival as well as the Queer International Arts Festival. Known for their quirky aesthetic and political panache, DarkMatter has been invited to perform at stages and universities across the world.

    Most poets take a lifetime to learn as much." —Linda GregersonI say I love and I love and I love. However, the windowwill not close. However, the hawk searchesfor its nest after a storm. However, the discardednail longs to hide its nakedness inside the tire. —from "Fork with Two Tines Pushed Together"How to Dance as the Roof Caves In examines America as it faces a recession of collective mood and collective wealth. In a central sequence, the "housing bubble" reaches its bursting point when, with hilarious and biting outcomes, real estate developers hire a married couple and other down-and-out "extras" to stage a fake community to lure prospective investors. In these marvelous poems, Nick Lantz describes the changing American landscape with great imagination and sharp wit.