Best of
Poetry

2015

Pansy


Andrea Gibson - 2015
    Each turn of the page represents both that which as been forgotten and that which is yet to be released. While this book is a rally cry for political action, it is also a celebration of wonder and longing and love.

Black Movie


Danez Smith - 2015
    A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, Black Movie repeats.”– Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer

Felicity


Mary Oliver - 2015
    Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver’s love poems. Here, great happiness abounds.  Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes—with joy—the strangeness and wonder of human connection.  As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems


Joy Harjo - 2015
    Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a "magician and a master" (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.

Waiting on the Word


Malcolm Guite - 2015
    Poetry can help us fathom the depths of Advent's many paradoxes: dark and light, emptiness and fulfilment, ancient and ever new. For every day from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day and beyond, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. In the spirit of the season, he blends the familiar and the new, ranging from from spiritual classics such as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert and Christina Rossetti, to contemporary voices Luci Shaw and Scott Cairns. His own acclaimed sequence of sonnets for the great Advent antiphons are also included.

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude


Ross Gay - 2015
    That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

Questions for Ada


Ijeoma Umebinyuo - 2015
    The artistry of QUESTIONS FOR ADA defies words, embodying the pain, the passion, and the power of love rising from the depths of our souls.  Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s poetry is a flower that will blossom in the spirit of every reader as she shares her heart with raw candor.  From lyrical lushness to smoky sensuality to raw truths, this tome of transforming verse is the book every woman wants to write but can’t until the broken mirrors of their lives have healed.  In this gifted author’s own words—“I am too full of life to be half-loved.”  A bold celebration of womanhood.

Bright Dead Things


Ada Limon - 2015
    Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

Map: Collected and Last Poems


Wisława Szymborska - 2015
    Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,” a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.” But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew. Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred and fifty poems included here, nearly forty are newly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection, Enough, never before published in English.Map is the first English publication of Szymborska’s work since the acclaimed Here, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her “ironic elegance” (The New Yorker).

Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems


Robin Coste Lewis - 2015
    In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present--titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art.Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, Voyage is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin--five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story?Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire--how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race--a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.From the Hardcover edition.

Idiot Verse


Keaton Henson - 2015
    they were written in the late hours of the last 3 years of his life, in hotel rooms, park benches and various apartments. they are stories of lost love, touring, reclusion and new found renown.

Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings


Matthew Burgess - 2015
    cummings. Here E.E.'s life is presented in a way that will make children curious about him and will lead them to play with words and ask plenty of questions as well. Lively and informative, the book also presents some of Cummings's most wonderful poems, integrating them seamlessly into the story to give the reader the music of his voice and a spirited, sensitive introduction to his poetry.In keeping with the epigraph of the book -- "It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are," Matthew Burgess's narrative emphasizes the bravery it takes to follow one's own vision and the encouragement E.E. received to do just that.Matthew Burgess teaches creative writing and composition at Brooklyn College. He is also a writer-in-residence with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, leading poetry workshops in early elementary classrooms since 2001. He was awarded a MacArthur Scholarship while working on his MFA, and he received a grant from The Fund for Poetry. Matthew's poems and essays have appeared in various journals, and his debut collection, Slippers for Elsewhere, was published by UpSet Press. His doctoral dissertation explores childhood spaces in twentieth century autobiography, and he completed his PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center in June 2014.Kris Di Giacomo is an American who has lived in France since childhood. She has illustrated over twenty-five books for French publishers, which have been translated into many languages. This is her sixth book to be published by Enchanted Lion Books. The others are My Dad Is Big And Strong, But . . . , Brief Thief, Me First!, The Day I Lost My Superpowers, and

Give Me a God I Can Relate to


Blythe Baird - 2015
    In 2014, she represented Chicago as the youngest competitor at the National Poetry Slam. Her work has been published or featured by The Huffington Post, Write Bloody, EverydayFeminism, Button Poetry, Chicago Literati, Banango Street, and Wicked Banshee, among others.

Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons


Jan L. Richardson - 2015
    Blessings help us to perceive this circle of grace, to find our place of belonging within it, and to receive the strength the circle holds for us." - from the IntroductionBeginning in Advent and moving through the sacred seasons of the Christian year, Circle of Grace offers Jan's distinctive and poetic blessings that illuminate the treasures each season offers to us.

Dead Man's Float


Jim Harrison - 2015
    Harrison's novels and poems over the last two decades have been increasingly preoccupied with mortality, never so much as in Dead Man's Float, his very good new book of verse. Here he details the shocks of shingles and back surgery, as well as the comprehensive low wheeze of a fraying body... The joys in Mr. Harrison's world have remained consistent. If sex is less frequently an option, his appetites for food and the outdoors are undiminished. In one poem, he goes out into a rainstorm at night and sits naked at a picnic table. In another, he writes: 'I envied the dog lying in the yard/so I did it.'... The title of this volume, Dead Man's Float, refers to a way to stay alive in the water when one has grown tired while far from shore. As a poet, however, Mr. Harrison is not passively drifting. He remains committed to language, and to what pleasures he can catch."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times"Few enough are the books I decide to keep beyond a culling or two. Barring fire or flood, Dead Man's Float will be in my library for the rest of my life. If it's the last poetry collection we get from Harrison--and I hope it isn't--it is as fine an example of his efforts as any."--Missoula Independent"Harrison's poems succeed on the basis of an open heart and a still-ravenous appetite for life."--The Texas Observer"Forthright and unaffected, even brash, Harrison always scoops us straight into the world whether writing fiction or nonfiction [and] goes in deep, acknowledging our frailness even as he seamlessly connects with a world that moves from water to air to the sky beyond."--Library Journal"Harrison pours himself into everything he writes... in poems, you do meet Harrison head-on. As he navigates his seventies, he continues to marvel with succinct awe and earthy lyricism over the wonders of birds, dogs, and stars as he pays haunting homage to his dead and contends with age's assaults. The sagely mischievous poet of the North Woods and the Arizona desert laughs at himself as he tries to relax by imagining that he's doing the dead man's float only to sink into troubling memories...Bracingly candid, gracefully elegiac, tough, and passionate, Harrison travels the deep river of the spirit, from the wailing precincts of a hospital to a "green glade of soft marsh grass near a pool in a creek" to the moon-bright sea."--Donna Seaman, Booklist"Jim Harrison has been a remarkably productive writer across a multitude of genres... His poetry is earthy, witty, keenly observed and tied closely to the natural world [and] mortality looms large in Dead Man's Float, his 14th collection of poems... [F]orceful, lucid, fearlessly honest, Harrison knows that the nearness of death intensifies life."--Arlice Davenport, Wichita Daily EagleWarblerThis year we have two gorgeousyellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush.The other day I stuck my head in the bush.The nestlings weigh one twentieth of an ounce, about the size of a honeybee. We stared ateach other, startled by our existence.In a month or so, when they reach the sizeof bumblebees they'll fly to Costa Rica without a map.Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was one of America's most versatile and celebrated writers.

Her Blue Body


Warsan Shire - 2015
    Collecting work authored during Shire's tenure, 'Her Blue Body' stands as testament and witness, negotiating the complexities of heritage, cultural sensitivity, sensuality, trauma and womanhood, framed and ordered by a sequence of memorial poems, focused through the lens of Shire's intimate and unflinching vision.

Bodymap


Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - 2015
    The first book of the author to examine disability from a queer femme of color lens, Bodymap contains work created and performed with Sins Invalid. Bodymap maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve."These poems are a gift for your love for self, your love itself and everyone you love. It is rare that a poet priestess offers words that allow us to emerge reborn with dirt, glitter and tenderness... Revere it. Revel in it. Read it again and again!" —Alexis Pauline Gumbs"Bodymap uses the alchemy of the voice on the page to transform words into an ache in the pit of me. I want what these poems demand: to be free to love & die, to be resurrected in time, & to be restored by desire. Piepzna-Samarasinha has located where this body houses the smirk learned from the sidewalk, the reason to do the difficult, and the blessings for the best worst thing."—Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level "Sharp, yet remarkably compassionate, Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that the poem is no place for tidy inquiry and easy answers. She offers her own tenacious guts and veins on each and every page. Only someone who understands rage and reconciliation and blood and bone can write like this."—Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir and Sub Rosa

Salt Is For Curing


Sonya Vatomsky - 2015
    It's also too smart for bullshit and too graceful to be mean about the bullshit: a marvelous debut. I love it."Juliet Escoria, author of Black Cloud, says: "Imagine bodies within bodies eating a feast, spilling over with their own secrets and hopes and dreams and fears and brutality and witchery. That is the party you will find in this book — a modern-day, literary equivalent of a Bosch painting.Mike Young, author of Sprezzatura, says: "These poems list the real shit. These poems melt the hard fat of life into tallow candles, then reach up and light themselves.Salt Is For Curing is the lush and haunting full-length debut by Sonya Vatomsky. These poems, structured as an elaborate meal, conjure up a vapor of earthly pains and magical desires; like the most enduring rituals, Vatomsky’s poems both intoxicate and ward. A new blood moon in American poetry, Salt Is For Curing is surprising, disturbing, and spookily illuminating.

What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford


Frank Stanford - 2015
    . . . Poetry busts guts." —Frank StanfordThe poetry publishing event of the season, this six-hundred-plus page book highlights the arc of Frank Stanford's all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career.Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Frank Stanford's oeuvre has never fully been unified. The mystery and legend surrounding his life—and his suicide before the age of thirty—has made it nearly impossible to fully and accurately celebrate his body of work. Until now.This welcome and necessary volume includes hundreds of previously unpublished poems, a short story, an interview, and is richly illustrated with draft poems, photographs, and odd ephemera.As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost."When It's After DarkI stealall the light bulbsand hide them like eggsin a basketgoing to some outlawI put on the best I can findI cover them with a swatchof somethingthat swells like a bitethat bleeds greencloth that smellsof a feed storebut looksto of been wornI go over to nasty willy's bridgeand throw them into the creekthere in the shade I listenfor themto make nests to escapeagony and burst

The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop


Kevin Coval - 2015
    This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation.It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters.The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad


Christopher Logue - 2015
    “Your life at every instant up for— / Gone. / And, candidly, who gives a toss? / Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips,” writes Christopher Logue in his original version of Homer’s Iliad, the uncanny “translation of translations” that won ecstatic and unparalleled acclaim as “the best translation of Homer since Pope’s” (The New York Review of Books).Logue’s account of Homer’s Iliad is a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of Homer’s tale of warfare, human folly, and the power of the gods in language and verse that is emphatically modern and “possessed of a very terrible beauty” (Slate). Illness prevented him from bringing his version of the Iliad to completion, but enough survives in notebooks and letters to assemble a compilation that includes the previously published volumes War Music, Kings, The Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, and Cold Calls, along with previously unpublished material, in one final illuminating volume arranged by his friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid. The result, War Music, comes as near as possible to representing the poet’s complete vision and confirms what his admirers have long known: that “Logue’s Homer is likely to endure as one of the great long poems of the twentieth century” (The Times Literary Supplement).

Wild Hundreds


Nate Marshall - 2015
    The book celebrates the people, culture, and places often left out of the civic discourse and the travel guides. Wild Hundreds is a book that displays the beauty of black survival and mourns the tragedy of black death.

We Slept Here


Sierra DeMulder - 2015
    In this sequence of memoir-esque poems, Sierra DeMulder pulls at the threads of a past abusive relationship and the long road to forgiveness. The poems themselves become an act of recovery and reclamation, wherein the poet finds again the voice which was taken from her. These are hard poems, made up of clarity and healing, which attempt to share some of their peace with the world.

All the Words Are Yours: Haiku on Love


Tyler Knott Gregson - 2015
    These heartfelt poems have attracted a large and loyal following around the world. This highly anticipated follow-up to Chasers of the Light, presents Tyler’s favorites, some previously unpublished, accompanied by his signature photographs, which capture the rich texture of daily life. This vibrant collection reveals the intimate reflections of one of poetry's most popular new voices -- honest, vulnerable, generous, and truly present in the gift that is each moment.From the Hardcover edition.

Garments Against Women


Anne Boyer - 2015
    It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women’s and children’s lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It’s a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival’s requisite thoughts.“Here Anne Boyer accounts for a form of life—form of life of a woman in this century living in Kansas City apartment complexes or duplexes with names like The Kingman or Colonial Gardens, form of life of a low-rent, cake-baking intellectual parenting a Socratic daughter, form of life of a person whose body refuses to become information or pornography, which are the same. These are the confessions of Anne Boyer, a political thinker who takes notes and invents movements, social and prosodic. Ta gueule, Rousseau.” —Lisa RobertsonAnne Boyer Artist Statement:I read a lot, old works and new ones, but there were so many books that I couldn’t find. These were the books that should have contained an answer to the problem—how do we survive our survival? If a work of literature approached an answer, the answer was bent, asemic, obscured, distorted into sentimental accounts, melodrama, or pornography by literary convention established to make knowing what we needed to impossible..Sometimes the answer was deformed by the failure of survival itself—there were texts severed by their author’s severed lives, by madness, by social isolation, by early death or a long life passed always wanting it. Literature, like garments, had so often been against so many of us, enforcing and sustaining the hostilities of a world with the unequal distribution of resources and the corresponding unequal distribution of suffering..The libraries I needed were full of works written by ghosts of the dead so common their graves lacked stones, the literature of those humans whose names were never their own, whose names were mostly said aloud so that someone might make a command of them, whose names were never used as the mark of their own property—what was it they had known? How did the great human majority—women and girls, those without property, the poor and the workers and enslaved people—resist? In what forms, what languages, what codes were their poems? What possibilities inhabited their thinking, their philosophies, their politics? What names would they be called if they could choose their own? During much of the time Garments Against Women was being written, I wanted to stop writing. I wanted to stop wanting and needing to write. This was so that my daughter and I could better survive; this was also because of my disappointment with literature..But Garments Against Women exists because I failed. I failed to find the literature I needed, so I had to try to write it down. I failed, also, at refusal, failed at failing, failed at self-negating, failed at being ruined despite all that would ruin us, failed at keeping survival bare, failed at obeying history’s prohibitions, failed at being intimidated by the centuries of hostile traditions. What I failed at was not writing despite all the conditions that had been relentlessly calibrated to keep not writing sustained..Some of us write because there are problems to be solved. My life is different than it was when I wrote Garments Against Women, but there’s still a problem: the world as we know it remains the world.

Naked Human


Christopher Poindexter - 2015
    Christopher Poindexter's first book is an exploration of humanity at its finest and at its worst. This is a story written between 2011-2015 about the discovery of what makes us human: doing whatever it takes to keep the loneliness away.

No Gravity


Rudy Francisco - 2015
    In 2015, Rudy Francisco decided to take on the challenge. After the task was completed, he published the poems in the form of a chapbook and chose to call it "No Gravity."

Our Numbered Days


Neil Hilborn - 2015
    To date, it has been watched over 10 million times. Our Numbered Days is Neil’s debut full-length poetry collection, containing 45 of Neil’s poems including “OCD”, “Joey”, “Future Tense”, “Liminality”, “Moving Day”, and many, many never-before-seen poems.

Fanny Says


Nickole Brown - 2015
    With hair teased to Jesus, mile-long false eyelashes, and a white Cadillac Eldorado with atomic-red leather seats, Fanny is not your typical granny rocking in a chair. Instead, think of a character that looks a lot like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but darkened with a shadow of Flannery O’Connor. A cross-genre collection that reads like a novel, this book is both a collection of oral history and a lyrical and moving biography that wrestles with the complexities of the South, including poverty, racism, and domestic violence.

For Your Own Good


Leah Horlick - 2015
    “Leah Horlick’s For Your Own Good may be the best book of poetry to come out of Canada this year.” –Michael Dennis“Sometimes it feels as though there are Poems About Important Issues and Good Poems, and the two camps rarely meet. For Your Own Good is a startling combination of the two, skillful poems both defiant and self-aware, and close to my femme heart. We need this book.” –Zoe WhittallIn the canon of contemporary feminist and lesbian poetry, For Your Own Good breaks silence. A fictionalized autobiography, the poems in this collection illustrate the narrator’s survival of domestic and sexual violence in a lesbian relationship. There is magic in this work: the symbolism of the Tarot and the roots of Jewish heritage, but also the magic that is at the heart of transformation and survival.These poems are acutely painful, rooted in singular and firsthand experiences. But Horlick also draws from a legacy of feminist, Jewish and lesbian writers against violence: epigraphs from the works of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt act as touchstones alongside references to contemporary writers, such as Daphne Gottlieb and Michelle Tea.In this reflection on grief, silence and community, we follow the narrator’s own journey as she explores what it is to survive, to change, to desire and to hope. At once unflinching and fragile, For Your Own Good is a collection with transformation at its heart.REVIEWS“‘Magic,’ which is the title of one of the poems in this collection, is a word I’d use to describe Leah Horlick’s work. Each piece takes us through a transmutation–from frightened girl to woman, from lover to abuser, from audience to performer, from alone to beloved. Horlick doesn’t back away from hard realities, deep longing or fierce desire, and drapes language around them like fitted silk–revealing and reflecting.”–Jewelle Gomez, author of Waiting for Giovanni‘These poems are beautiful. Solid and glittering as ice or crystal, they hold secrets and hard truths in their core. The wonder and lushness of Horlick’s voice imparts a loveliness to countless hidden tragedies, never sugaring them but bearing an elegant, whispering witness.”–Michelle Tea, author of How to Grow Up“Leah Horlick’s most recent collection of poetry is a beautiful rendering of grief, love and survival. This poignant poetic offering left me feeling the sensitive grace of her words long after I finished reading. The way she weaves stories into poetry is both haunting and powerful, elegant and unsettling. While reading, I had to keep reminding myself to breathe!”–Lishai Peel, author of Why Birds and Wolves Don’t Trade Stones

Before the Next Bomb Drops


Remi Kanazi - 2015
    He captures the Palestinian people's stubborn refusal to be erased, gives voice to the ongoing struggle for liberation, and explores the meaning of international solidarity.In this latest collection, Kanazi expands his focus outside the sphere of Palestine and presents pieces examining racism in America, police brutality, US militarism at home and wars abroad, conflict voyeurism, Islamophobia, and a range of other issues.

Pop Sonnets: Shakespearean Spins on Your Favorite Songs


Erik Didriksen - 2015
    All of your favorite artists are represented in these pages—from Bon Jovi and Green Day to Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, and beyond. Already a smash sensation on the Internet—the Tumblr page has 20,000+ followers—Pop Sonnets has been featured by the A.V. Club, BuzzFeed, and Vanity Fair, among many others. More than half of these pop sonnets are exclusive to this collection and have never been published in any form.

War of the Foxes


Richard Siken - 2015
    In this restless, swerving book simple questions—such as, Why paint a bird?—are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its—and our own—invention.

Edge of Wonder: Notes from the Wildness of Being


Victoria Erickson - 2015
    Weaving words like a vivid tapestry, Erickson reaches into the soul and invites us to swim in an ocean of hope, choosing love and aliveness over fear and resistance. Equal parts old soul and starry-eyed child, she encourages us to find the depth and meaning within our everyday lives, reminding us to stay true to our own paths while embracing both the pain and the beauty at the heart of reality. Keep this book close as a timeless reminder that wonder is everywhere. Your daily cup of universe.

How to Be Drawn


Terrance Hayes - 2015
    While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates theprinciple of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes’s award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

Forest Primeval


Vievee Francis - 2015
    Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work. Winner, 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Poetry category Finalist, 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize Shortlist finalist, 2015 PEN Open Book Award for an exceptional book by an author of color

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai


Yehuda Amichai - 2015
    One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai created remarkably accessible poems, vivid in their evocation of the Israeli landscape and historical predicament, yet universally resonant. His are some of the most moving love poems written in any language in the past two generations—some exuberant, some powerfully erotic, many suffused with sadness over separation that casts its shadow on love. In a country torn by armed conflict, these poems poignantly assert the preciousness of private experience, cherished under the repeated threats of violence and death.Amichai’s poetry has attracted a variety of gifted English translators on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s to the present. Assembled by the award-winning Hebrew scholar and translator Robert Alter, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai is by far the largest selection of the master poet’s work to appear in English, gathering the best of the existing translations as well as offering English versions of many previously untranslated poems. With this collection, Amichai’s vital poetic voice is now available to English readers as it never has been before.

Stunt Water: Selected Poems of Buddy Wakefield, 1991-2011


Buddy Wakefield - 2015
    It is a vulnerable cross section of his writing that moves from disarmingly human to sudden bursts of beast, able to seamlessly blend back into grounded stories of humor, heartache and identity using crisp, innovative and unforgettable metaphors. If you can only buy one Buddy Wakefield book, this collection is the most comprehensive of his most compelling works to date. His craft mimics the intrigue of propellers when they make themselves invisible. Buddy’s honest story is a one-man relay race to the light; that of a boy at gentleman practice who sometimes wants to blend in so badly he forgets his purpose has already arrived and there is no need to fight a war that’s long been over. The reader must be prepared for the recurring nightmares from which Buddy wakes up only to realize that whatever supposedly awful thing was stalking him was actually just trying to help.

eighteen years


Madisen Kuhn - 2015
    It is meant to be curled up with at night, accompanied by a cup of tea. It's a hug in book-form. It is there to comfort you when fuzzy socks and ice cream just aren't enough. It will inspire you to pick up a pen and write down thoughts of your own. It will help you to say the words that feel stuck in your chest. Take it on the train. Take it to the beach. Keep it on your nightstand. Keep it in your backpack. Read it at the park on benches beneath hundred-year-old trees. Read it while it's raining. Read it when you're happy. Read it when your heart aches. Eighteen Years is meant to be bent and worn, written in, tear-stained, and loved. This book is for you.

Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World


Jane Hirshfield - 2015
    The lucid understandings presented here are gripping and transformative in themselves. Investigating the power of poetry to move and change us becomes in these pages an equal investigation into the inhabitance and navigation of our human lives.Closely reading poems by Dickinson, Bashō, Szymborska, Cavafy, Heaney, Bishop, and Komunyakaa, among many others, Hirshfield reveals how poetry's world-making takes place: word by charged word. By expanding what is imaginable and sayable, Hirshfield proposes, poems expand what is possible. Ten Windows restores us at every turn to a more precise, sensuous, and deepened experience of our shared humanity and of the seemingly limitless means by which that knowledge is both summoned and forged.

Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015


Patti Smith - 2015
    Building on the collection originally published in 1998, this new edition features more than thirty-five new songs, new artwork, and an introduction from Patti Smith herself.As relevant, fresh, and searing as when they were originally written, Smith’s lyrics capture her unique voice, raw in beauty, grace, and authenticity. Sharing a message of dedication, love, and compassion that speaks across the ages, Smith’s words empower fans and reveal the strong yet vulnerable heart of woman defined by her art.

Uptalk


Kimmy Walters - 2015
    By turns sassy and serious, the poems can seem to sprint in two directions at once, managing to make the reader laugh at the same time they are struck by the emotional strength of the work. "Charming, inviting, beguiling and delightful poems in the language of someone who seems alive speaking refreshing riddles to herself." SHEILA HETI"Uptalk is a book of transcribed whale songs. Some scientists gave a whale a microphone and she took it home and stayed up all night under the covers talking to herself about faces and word-parts. I am delighted that Kimmy took it upon herself to transcribe this unique document of marine biology, and my heart goes out to the brilliant, charming whale author, wherever she may be." SARA WOODS

The Hell Within Me


C.B. Roberts - 2015
    These are stories—stories from the heart and soul.The Hell Within Me is a collection of extremely emotional and heartfelt poetry that many can relate to. The contradictions and play on words bring new life to the stanzas as they leap off the pages and tug at your emotions.

The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All


C.D. Wright - 2015
    Wright argues for poetry as a way of being and seeing, and calls it "the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine." Wright's passion for the genre is pure inspiration, and in her hands the answer to the question of poetry is poetry.From "In a Word":I love the nouns of a time in a place, where a sack once was a poke and native skag was junk glass not junk and junk was just junk not smack and smack entailed eating with your mouth open, and an Egyptian one-eye was an egg, sunny side up, and a nation sack was a flannel amulet, worn only by women, to be touched only by women, especially around Memphis. Red sacks for love and green for money…C.D. Wright's most recent volume, One With Others, was a National Book Award finalist. Among her many honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.

Calling Down the Sky


Rosanna Deerchild - 2015
    Many were forbidden to speak their language and practice their own culture. The author portrays how the ongoing impact of the residential schools problem has been felt throughout generations and has contributed to social problems that continue to exist today.

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison


Maggie Smith - 2015
    Even as her compressed stories are unfolding on a suburban cul de sac, they are deep in the mythical woods, “where children, despite their commonness, / are a delicacy.”

The Selected Poems of Donald Hall


Donald Hall - 2015
    Here, in his eighties, having taken stock of the body of his work—rigorous, gorgeous verse that is the result of seventy years of “ambition and pleasure”—he strips it down. The Selected Poems of Donald Hall reflects the poet’s handpicked, concise selection, showcasing work rich with humor and eros and “a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines” (Billy Collins). From the enduring “My Son My Executioner” to “Names of Horses” to “Without,” Donald Hall’s best poems deliver “a banquet in the mouth” (Charles Simic) and an “aching elegance” (Baltimore Sun). For the first-time reader or an old friend, these are, above all others, the poems to read, reread, and remember.  “However wrenching [Hall’s poems] may be from line to line, they tell a story that is essentially reassuring: art and love are compatible, genius is companionable, and people stand by one another in the end” (New York Times Book Review).

Sand Opera


Philip Metres - 2015
    Polyvocal poems, arias, and redacted text speak for the unheard. Philip Metres exposes our common humanity while investigating the dehumanizing perils of war and its lasting effect on our culture.From "Hung Lyres":@When the bombs fell, she could barely raiseher pendulous head, wept shrapneluntil her mother capped the firewith her breast. She teeteredon the highwire of herself. Shelay down & the armies retreated, nevershowing their backs. When she unlatchedfrom the breast, the planes took off again.Stubborn stars refused to fall . . . Philip Metres has written a number of books and chapbooks, most recently A Concordance of Leaves (Diode, 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine, 2011), To See the Earth (Cleveland State, 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941 (University of Iowa, 2007). His work has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Bastards of the Reagan Era


Reginald Dwayne Betts - 2015
    Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear "the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world." We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.

The No You Never Listened To


Meggie C. Royer - 2015
    With The No You Never Listened To, she takes the personal and makes it universal. As a sexual assault survivor, Meggie is well-acquainted with trauma: the aftermath, the guilt, the anger. She has never shied away from taking Hemingway’s advice – write hard and clear about what hurts – and that strength has never been more of an asset than with this body of work.The No You Never Listened To is the book you will wish you’d had when trauma climbed into your bed. It is the book you will give to friends who are dragged from their “before” into a dark and terrifying “after”. And yes, it is the book you will wish didn’t exist.But it is also the one that will remind you, in your darkest moments, where the blame really belongs. It will remind you that your memory will not always be an enemy. And it will remind you that none of us have ever been alone in this.”– Claire BiggsTo Write Love on Her Arms Editor / Writer

Four-Legged Girl: Poems


Diane Seuss - 2015
    Ghostly, sexy, and plaintive, these poems skip to the tune of a jump rope, fill a wishing well with desire and other trinkets, and they remember past lush lives in New York City, in rural Michigan, and in love. In the final poem, she sings of the four-legged girl, the body made strange to itself and to others. This collection establishes Seuss's poetic voice, as rich and emotional as any in contemporary poetry.

Ophelia Wears Black


Segovia Amil - 2015
    Divided into four parts, each mirroring the cycling seasons, we follow Ophelia into her own re-imagined Underworld where she learns to make sense of and find the perfection and necessity of her own inner darkness.

City Sticks


A.H. Sewell - 2015
    It was a sample (and not even the correct file - it was an old rough draft that was saved under a new title), and Goodreads will not take it down. The Amazon link directs to the correct, and full, edition. "She is lost, but the world is too. It is a perfect circle.For life is, but a dream /// is not."- "Seeing Ghosts/A Perfect Circle" excerptA. H. SewellCopyright 2015

Seeds Planted in Concrete


Bianca Sparacino - 2015
    By writing truthfully about the intricacies of both love and loss, Sparacino’s first collection of work is one that will speak to the very depths of those who read it, inspiring a will to love, and live. This collection is a manifesto of the journey every human being takes throughout their life; an assembly of words that celebrates the resilience of the human heart through stages of hurting, feeling, healing and loving.

Haiku: Classic Japanese Short Poems


Hart Larrabee - 2015
    Its structure has become popular in other languages and today it is probably the best know form of poetry worldwide.There are few rules to haiku, but they are strict: 17 phonetic sounds, a sense of cutting images or ideas, and a reference to a season. From those restrictions, poets have written about many things, from the year’s first blossom to aging, from mosquitoes humming to insects singing, from catching one’s shadow to crossing a stream in the summer.Haiku features 90 classic poems from four poets: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki which range across more than 200 years of Japanese poetry.In Haiku, each poem is presented in Japanese script, along with romanized Japanese (romaji) and an English translation. Beautifully produced in traditional Chinese binding and with a timeless design, Haiku is an expert introduction and celebration of one of the most beautiful and accessible forms of poetry in the world.

Sometimes a Wild God


Tom Hirons - 2015
    The book is A6 size (4.2″x5.9″) and has 32 inner pages, with 6 beautiful internal black-and-white illustrations.

Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems


Dulce María Loynaz - 2015
    International recognition came to her late: at the age of ninety she was living in seclusion in Havana when the Royal Spanish Academy awarded her the 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest literary accolade in the Spanish language. The first English publication of her work, Absolute Solitude contains a selection of poems from each of Loynaz's books, including the acclaimed prose poems from Poems with No Names, a selection of posthumously published work.

Reconsolidation: Or, it's the ghosts who will answer you


Janice Lee - 2015
    Consolidation is the neurological process that stores memories after an event’s occurrence; reconsolidation refers to a process whereby consolidated memories later become unstable, causing false or loose recall.Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer you is a lyrical montage born out of the eternal loss of a loved one. Powerfully crafted during grief’s inertia, Janice Lee elegantly weaves the present with recollections of a tenuous past, arresting memory’s flexible and vulnerable position in the lifelong process of mourning. A eulogy for a loved one – pure and honest – Reconsolidation is a poetic search for a lost connection.

Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives


Frank Stanford - 2015
    There is a great deal of pain on the poems, but it is a pain that makes sense, a tragic pain whose meaning rises from the way the poems are so firmly molded and formed from within."—James Wright.Hidden Water is an addition to Copper Canyon's definitive collection What About This. Featuring unpublished and uncollected works, never before published correspondences between Stanford and poet Alan Dugan, and extremely rare audio of Stanford reading, Hidden Water is a must for any lover of Stanford, poetry, and the imagination.My wallet was thick as the bible I carried aroundGraphs of Elvis Presley John Lee Hooker Brigitte Bardot and the sodbusterI thought up nom-de-plumes in the outhouse and sent off Burnsfor things cryptic ads I used stamps that made the postmaster ask where I was fromIs it too bold to say that Stanford will soon be recognized as one of the important voices in American literature and pop culture?Born in 1948, Frank Stanford was a prolific poet known for his originality and ingenuity. He has been dubbed "a swamprat Rimbaud" by Lorenzo Thomas and "one of the great voices of death" by Franz Wright. He grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, and then Arkansas, where he lived for most of his life and wrote many of his most powerful poems. Stanford died in 1978. He authored over ten books of poetry, including eight volumes in the last seven years of his life.

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry


Robert Chandler - 2015
    Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Dream Girl


Clementine von Radics - 2015
    The collection is about the ways idealization leads to dehumanization, perception versus reality, sexism, feminism, mania, love, and Oregon. Dream Girl features poems that have gone viral on tumblr and Button Poetry, as well as 30 new poems, and illustrations by the author. This book is the much-anticipated second collection by Clementine von Radics. 80 pages, 6x9, Glossy cover.

Stardust and Sheets


Saiber - 2015
    Each poem is crafted with inspiration from heartfelt emotions immersing the readers into a beautiful, haunting love affair with her writing. The book encompasses little romantic enigmas under the stars and in between the sheets all unique in its simplicity and honesty. The words touch the readers’ heart and resonate with them, epitomizing that they are not alone in the way they feel. Beautifully illustrated and tenderly inked, Stardust and Sheets will take you on a homeward journey to your heart and return you in between the stars.

On Elizabeth Bishop


Colm Tóibín - 2015
    Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Toibin creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Toibin.For Toibin, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop's famous attention to detail, Toibin describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop's attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents--and how this connection finds echoes in Toibin's life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere.Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Toibin's travels to Bishop's Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today's most acclaimed novelists.

The Pocketknife Bible: The Poems and Art of Anis Mojgani


Anis Mojgani - 2015
    For the first time, Mojgani has given us a collection which combines his poems with his illustrations, at times using them to infuse and inform one another. The poems and pictures of The Pocketknife Bible climb through the child-like heart of its author to bring stories from the well that are enhanced by the imagery. This book is a celebration of childhood and family, or rather the mythology of what that entails, exploring the intersection of how we may have once seen the world and how we remember how we saw it. This is an almost-children s book for those who might no longer be young, but could use a map to find their way back to that world."

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night


Morgan Parker - 2015
    Parker’s collection is hyper-contemporary, drawing on what it means to be alive today when our phones autocorrect our texts and we’ve given into a kind of living that prioritizes work, money, and power over justice, equality, and happiness.

Second Empire


Richie Hofmann - 2015
    Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna WarrenThis debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.Antique BookThe sky was crazed with swallows.We walked in the frozen grassof your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.Trees shook down their gaudy nests.The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.I was jealous of the river,how the light broke it, of the skeinof windows where we saw ourselves.Where we walked, the ice crackedlike an antique book, openingand closing. The leavesbeneath it were the marbled pages.Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

Memories


Lang Leav - 2015
    In addition, 35 new poems that have not been published in any Lang Leav collection offer something new to discover. The author's original art is presented in lovely four-color illustrations. Lang Leav's evocative poetry in a gorgeous package with ribbon marker and cloth spine is an irresistible gift for any poetry lover!

The Essential Ginsberg


Allen Ginsberg - 2015
    He was also the dynamic leader of war protesters, artists, Flower Power hippies, musicians, punks, and political radicals.The Essential Ginsberg collects a mosaic of materials that displays the full range of Ginsberg’s mental landscape. His most important poems, songs, essays, letters, journals, and interviews are displayed in chronological order. His poetic masterpieces, “Howl” and “Kaddish,” are presented here along with lesser-known and difficult to find songs and prose. Personal correspondence with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is included as well as photographs—shot and captioned by Ginsberg himself—of his friends and fellow rogues William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and more.Through his essays, journals, interviews, and letters, this definitive volume will inspire readers to delve deeper into a body of work that remains one of the most impressive literary canons in American history.

Honest


Mohamed Ghazi - 2015
    It is just a very small square in the enormous circle that connects us all.I am the story.I am the poems.And you are my muse.

Wishing for Birds


Elisabeth Hewer - 2015
    Reaching inwards to explore the self; reaching back to explore what made us who we are.In this collection of fifty poems, Elisabeth Hewer ponders love and the world, whilst tackling the inexplicable desires and dangers that thread through our daily lives.At times hopeful, at times despairing, her poems ruminate on all the things we comes up against, even if, on occasion, it’s only ourselves.

The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa


Chika Sagawa - 2015
    Asian & Asian American Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. The first comprehensive collection of one of Japan's foremost modernists to appear in English translation, THE COLLECTED POEMS OF CHIKA SAGAWA is an essential book. The project received a grant from the Japan Foundation, and poems from it have appeared in Poetry, Asymptote, Fascicle, and elsewhere.

Dear Woman


Michael Reid - 2015
    If you were waiting on someone to give it to you, Dear Woman is here to inform you that you can give it to yourself. Every woman is a queen, especially you. Put your crown on and get ready to rule.Take a journey: No one has just one page in their life story. That's why Dear Woman has everything--quotes, letters, short stories, and poems to educate, motivate, encourage, and provide a little tough love. This open letter is just as multi-faceted and inspirational as you are.Want the best for yourself: Michael E. Read wrote this book because he wants nothing more than for you to be the best woman possible, regardless of circumstance. In Dear Woman, he encourages you to feel the same way. This is more than a self-help book, more than just relationship advice for women--though it does include both of those things. No, this inspirational open letter, full of poetry and wisdom, is life advice just for you.Do it for you: You are an amazing woman. Deep down, you know that. Dear Woman isn't here to tell you that you need to improve. Rather, it's here to tell you that you can be your true self--for yourself. This is the life advice you need, because you deserve to thrive for no other reason than the fact that you are a woman. Dear Woman was written in hopes of shedding a little light and love. Let it add some brightness to your life. After reading this book, you will:Love yourself whole-heartedlyKnow that you deserve the bestBe confident regardless of what life throws at you

I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky


Arseny Tarkovsky - 2015
    Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev's translations—succinct and allusive, stingingly direct and yet sweeping, mournful and celebratory—are marvels."—PEN/Heim citation"How does one translate the work of Russian classic, Arseny Tarkovsky? Imagine trying to translate Yeats: high style rhetoric, intense emotion, local tonalities of language, complicated historical background, the old equation of poet vs. state, the tone of a tender love lyric, all meshed into one, all exquisite in its execution—and all so impossible to render again. And yet, one tries. In the case of Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev, one tries brilliantly, with gusto, with passion, with attentiveness that is akin to that of a prayer, with the ear of real poets. The result? The gravity and directness of Tarkovsky's tone is brought into English without fail, it is here, honest and pained, piercing and even shy at times, like a deer that looks straight at you before it runs. Tarkovsky's ambition was to seek us—those who live after him—through earth, through time. He does so in this brilliant translation."—Ilya Kaminsky"Arseny Tarkovsky was ten years old at the time of the Russian Revolution and died six months before the opening of the Berlin Wall. He spent his career as a poet creating elegant and starkly interior transfigurations of simple happiness and pure grief, triumphs of the individual self against the brutal realities of daily life in wartime and Communist Russia. Through this meticulous translation of his work, readers will encounter a metaphysical complex poetry, at once searing and brooding, very much in dialogue with such great Soviet poets as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova. Tarkovsky writes of a country where 'we lived, once upon a time, as if in a grave, drank no tea' but still succeeded in making 'bread from weeds,' where the 'blue sky is dim' but nonetheless manages to be the 'wet-nurse of dragonflies and birds.'"—Michael Dumanis

How The Light Gets In: And Other Headlong Epiphanies


Brian Doyle - 2015
    A rich treasury of prose poems on matters theological, spiritual, mystical, and everyday, by award-winning author Brian Doyle

Sad Math: Poems


Sarah Freligh - 2015
    Here, time is measured not only in days and years but in physical distance, a past that is understandable only when viewed through a rearview mirror. Along the way, there are not only losses, but also the accumulation of experience and the insistence of possibility.

Deep Lane: Poems


Mark Doty - 2015
    “Pure appetite,” he writes ironically early in the collection, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.” And the following poem answers:Down there the little star-nosed engine of desireat work all night, secretive: in the morninga new line running across the wet grass, near the surface,like a vein. Don’t you wish the road of excessled to the palace of wisdom, wouldn’t that be nice?Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker aboveground: gardens and animals, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.

Cherry Pie


Hollie McNish - 2015
    The poems collected in Cherry Pie hold personal meaning for Hollie and are also those which have been most requested by audiences in theatres, pubs, festival tents, schools and youth clubs up and down the UK. The book is illustrated by some of Hollie’s favourite artists and illustrators.Cherry Pie includes Hollie’s poem Mathematics (1.9 million hits on YouTube) as well as Bungalows and Biscuits which was shortlisted for Best Factual New Media Content About Older People’s Issues in the Older People in Media Awards. Her poetry has received over 3.5 million YouTube views; more than David Cameron’s speeches, less than a cat dancing to 80’s pop music.

Wildlives


Sarah Jean Alexander - 2015
    In her debut collection, Sarah Jean Alexander asks (and answers) the hardest questions about love and loneliness and 21st century human survival. Wildlives excavates the depths of heartbreak, hope, and helplessness that can exist between two people in a small, human world.http://biglucks.bigcartel.com/product...

Koi Deewana Kehta Hai


Kumar Vishwas - 2015
    The poet's imagination of romanticism is captured in the vividly described poems. The poems are written in Hindi and the poet not only narrates the poems in the book but has also sung it in tune. The poems are appealing to the young generation and have been read widely by people in India and abroad

Wrong Side of a Fistfight


Ashe Vernon - 2015
    With a gift for delicate, violent imagery, Ashe invites us to lose ourselves in her world. Wrong Side of a Fistfight feels like getting lost in the woods, with someone holding your hand promising to guide you home. This is the second book of poems by Ashe Vernon, spoken word poet and author of the blog Late Night Corner Store.

The Mouse in the Manor House (and other poems)


Sam Garland - 2015
    When she discovers the misfortune that has befallen him, she must devise a plan to save the day...The story is followed by several illustrated poems fit for children and adults alike.

Application for Release from the Dream: Poems


Tony Hoagland - 2015
    —from "Note to Reality"Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our forgetfulness? Application for Release from the Dream, Tony Hoagland's fifth collection of poems, pursues these questions with the hobnailed abandon of one who needs to know how a citizen of twenty-first-century America can stay human. With whiplash nerve and tender curiosity, Hoagland both surveys the damage and finds the wonder that makes living worthwhile. Mirthful, fearless, and precise, these poems are full of judgment and mercy.

Pelvis with Distance


Jessica Jacobs - 2015
    A narrative-driven collection that reads like a novel, this book delves into issues of creativity, feminism, and relationships, while exploring turn-of-the last century New York City and the New Mexico high desert of the 1930s and today.

Pelican


Emily O'Neill - 2015
    Through naming and claiming these absences, this brilliant book makes known the possibility for transformation: “a rabbit crushed//into a bottomless satin hat./Now, you see it. Now, it's hope.”—Jericho Brown, The New TestamentPelican is a generous debut collection of poetry that gifts its audience with an unflinching portrayal of addiction, love, and the blind survival that follows grief. Like bloodied pearls strewn across a nightstand, these poems demand dignity in the face of mayhem.—Rachel McKibbens, Pink ElephantO'Neill's poems sing with an irresistible physicality. We are sucked into her buzzing fluorescent dioramas: rooms within rooms, worlds within worlds. All of them filled with animate objects, the ones we collect & the ones we hold. Everything, even the lightlessness, is bright here, but nothing is hazy. This isn't a dream. O'Neill is acute. This is about being awake.—Brian Ellis, American Dust Revisited

Poems From The Pond: 107 Years of Words and Wisdom - The Writings of Peggy Freydberg


Laurie David - 2015
    Please contact PoemsfromthePond@gmail.com with any questions.**Peggy Freydberg is proof positive that creativity has no age limit! Just when most people are winding way down, Peggy began writing a lifetime's worth of poems at age 90! Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks describes Peggy's poetry as having a "stunning intensity and searing emotional impact."Edited by Laurie David, these poems will resonate with anyone who is trying to unravel life's questions about life, love, fear, aging, and loss. Peggy's beautiful poetry proves it's never too late to start writing and be discovered - even if you are 107-years-old!"Reading these poems made me feel like I was being let in on a secret, a secret I'm dying to whisper to lots of other people," Billy Collins, Two-Term Poet Laureate of the United States"With an unflinching eye and a compassionate heart, Peggy Freydberg has looked deeply into what it means to live a long life. In pulse-quickening poems of stunning insight and artistry, she probes the necessity of loss and the exhilarations of love," Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist

Said the Manic to the Muse


Jeanann Verlee - 2015
    When unexpectedly delivered into life-changing tumult, the author experienced a rash of manic episodes and a severe depression which culminated in a psychotic break and eventual attempt to take her own life all in the span of a single year. Introduced through the careful prophecy of three archetypes: Medea, Jezebel, and Kali each a woman largely misrepresented and wholly misunderstood these poems detail the story of one woman s struggle to maintain both strength and sanity in the face of abandonment and aging. From dangerous trysts and barroom brawls to grief-induced psychosis, Said the Manic to the Muse recounts the year she lost everything, including her mind. The year of fire. The year of the river. The year she almost didn t survive."

Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners


John Wieners - 2015
    The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise LevertovSupplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.

some planet


jamie mortara - 2015
    some planet is what it’s like to be a human. existing in one’s mind, in one’s body, in one’s world, in one’s galaxy, all tiny universes inside tiny universes all locked in fevered conversation. some planet is the coin in your pocket when you don't know how to choose. some planet is when everything is both itself and simultaneously else. jamie mortara is leading you through the woods by the hand, trying to get you home safe before sun goes down.

The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems


T.S. Eliot - 2015
    S. Eliot's Poems establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909-1962, rectifying accidental omissions and errors that have crept in during the century since Eliot's astonishing debut, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." As well as the masterpieces, the edition contains the poems of Eliot's youth, which were rediscovered only decades later, others that circulated privately during his lifetime, and love poems from his final years, written for his wife Valerie Eliot.Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the imaginative life of each poem. Calling upon Eliot's critical writings, as well as his drafts, letters, and other original materials, they illustrate not only the breadth of Eliot's interests and the range of his writings, but how it was that the author of "Gerontion" came to write "Triumphal March" and then Four Quartets. Thanks to the family and friends who recognized Eliot's genius and preserved his writings from an early age, the archival record is exceptionally complete, enabling us to follow in unique detail the progress of a mind that never ceased exploring.This first volume respects Eliot's decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909-1962 as he arranged and issued it, shortly before his death fifty years ago. This is followed by poems uncollected but either written for or suitable for publication, and by a new reading text of the drafts of The Waste Land. The volume concludes with the commentary on all of these poems.The second volume opens with the two books of verse of other kinds that Eliot issued, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and his translation of St.-John Perse's Anabase. Different again are the verses informal, improper, or clubmanlike. Each of these sections has its own commentary. Finally, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a textual history that contains not only variants from all known drafts and the many printings but also extended passages amounting to hundreds of lines of compelling verse."The more we know of Eliot, the better."--Ezra Pound

Black Butterfly


Robert M. Drake - 2015
    Drake wrote this book for those who have lost someone in death and in life. This book is a collection of memories and experiences Drake lived after the death of one of his brothers. He promised he would write him a few words after he failed to complete the task while his brother was alive. This book is everything… this book is for all who are breathing and for all who are no longer here. This book is for you.

Model City


Donna Stonecipher - 2015
    The accumulation of these answers offers a form of sustained and refined negative capability, which by turns is wry, profound and abundant with an unspecified longing for the passing ghost of European idealism. In the various enquiries and explorations of Model City this is also the mapping of a lived condition and its relationships not readily found on every street corner – nor in the broken ideologies from the populist bargain basement proffered by our political cadres. What becomes apparent is that the model city/Model City exists by virtue of a poet’s wit and inventiveness, in its accomplished and elegantly measured language. Stonecipher’s mesmerizing, epigrammatic fables establish the off-centre polis where, oddly, we find ourselves at home. — Kelvin Corcoran

National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry: More than 200 Poems With Photographs That Float, Zoom, and Bloom!


J. Patrick Lewis - 2015
    Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis curates an exuberant poetic celebration of the natural world in this stellar collection of nature poems. From trickling streams to deafening thrunderstorms to soaring mountains, discover majestic photography perfectly paired with contemporary (such as Billy Collins), classics (such as Robert Frost), and never-before-published works.

I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems


Eileen Myles - 2015
    Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles's stomping grounds and the home of her most well-known work, she provides a wide-open lens into a radical life.

My Dear Pink


Mod Sun - 2015
    He focuses on positivity, loving yourself, and empowerment.

The Verging Cities


Natalie Scenters-Zapico - 2015
    Deeply rooted along the US-México border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, these poems give a brave new voice to the ways in which international politics affect the individual. Composed in a variety of forms, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and field notes, each poem distills violent stories of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and the people who fall in love with each other and their traumas. The border in Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities exists in a visceral place where the real is (sur)real. In these poems mouths speak suspended from ceilings, numbered metal poles mark the border and lovers’ spines, and cities scream to each other at night through fences that “ooze only silt.” This bold new vision of border life between what has been named the safest city in the United States and the murder capital of the world is in deep conversation with other border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while establishing itself as a new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle.

sad boy/detective


Sam Sax - 2015
    LGBT Studies. From his first appearance on the page, "we knew he was bound for something unsolvable." But a little thing like futility can't stop our hero from holding up a magnifying glass to a world "so bright it's impossible to understand." In this searching, provocative collection of coming-of-age sonnets, the sad boy detective listens close, collects the evidence, and reimagines the strange landscapes of a life, a body, a boy, a self. Through a questioning, fervent lens, sam sax's SAD BOY / DETECTIVE reminds us how deeply bizarre and at times undecipherable all this existence stuff truly is. "Sam Sax's SAD BOY / DETECTIVE uses the unholy sonnet in ways that would make Jarman marvel and sigh. The entirety of this volume destabilizes our ideas of what it means to write the coming of age novel, what it means to be undetectable. And Sax is forever fighting the fight of a poet who is made aware of his separation from the world by the fact that he is-in sorrow, sex, danger, or celebration moored to all he sees because his seeing is a searchlight." Jericho Brown "The SAD BOY / DETECTIVE of this book is on the case of his biggest mystery yet: the strangeness of existence itself. Reading these cleverly serialized sonnets is like pressing your ear to a door full of wonders you're unsure you're prepared to inherit. The book enacts a powerful awakening. Sam Sax is a terrific emerging poet. Like a sleuth with a magnifying glass, you're going to want to follow him everywhere." Dobby Gibson"

Many Small Fires


Charlotte Pence - 2015
    Questions about how we came to create communities and homes play out against more intimate questions of the speaker’s strange community and roving home. As the book moves from the speaker’s childhood in Georgia to her travels in Flores, Indonesia, we begin to understand a complex relationship between two people locked together by family, who sometimes understand, sometimes ignore, sometimes commit cruelty upon one another in competition, not just for resources, but survival.

One Hundred Poems of Tukaram


Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre - 2015
    Tukaram's poetry hold its rejuvenating powers even in the turbulent times of our own twenty-first century. One Hundred Poems of Tukaram is a translation of selected poems of this visionary poet who makes his reader see every aspect of life in a new light, enabling them to rethink the whole world in more positive terms. Tukaram’s reputation as one of the greatest poets born in India resides on his four thousand or so extant poems which he composed in Marathi, his mother tongue. Unlike most of the poets of the seventeenth century, Tukaram did not write in highly Sanskitised Marathi, instead he chose the colloquial language spoken by the common-most people of his times. This has given a distinct vigour to his compositions which appeal straight to the heart of his readers. By temperament, Tukaram is as candid and as forthright as imaginable and does not hesitate to write about anything under the sun nor does he consider anything too holy to be left untouched. This makes his poems penetratingly consistent in taking aim at the very core of the questions grappling human existence. Though he wrote almost four hundred years ago, in a very different social milieu than today’s globalised and digitized world, somehow he seems to be dealing with and overcoming exactly the same dilemmas faced by the human populace in the twenty first century the world over. This continuum of human condition is what drew me more and more to the poems of Tukaram. Despite the fact that Tukaram was a widely revered saint, arguably the greatest of his times, his poetry is not conventionally devotional. Of course, the predominant theme in his poems is that of spirituality. Yet, even at a cursory reading, one understands Tukaram’s poems to be markedly different from other devotional/spiritual poems. The reason is Tukaram’s honesty when it comes to self-expression. He does not only harp upon his ‘oneness’ with the Lord or the bliss attained thereof or the knowledge obtained thereby, but he goes on to expressing in his poems his entire spiritual and worldly journey with all its dramatic ups and downs - with ‘downs’ seemingly outnumbering ‘ups’. Resultantly, in his poems we do not come across some spiritually enlightened ‘being’ talking down to us from his high pedestal but someone from amongst us who has started from the bottom and knows exactly how steep the climb is. Therefore, while reading Tukaram, one cannot help but feel that it is not just the poet’s journey that is unfolding; it is the journey of each one of us. As if Tukaram holds our hand and takes us on that path leading to the ultimate goal of human life. Thus Tukaram’s poetry does not remain the expression of one individual but of the entire humanity existent in all places at all times! While reading Tukaram, one gets an eerie feeling that Tukaram is a contemporary poet, that the content of his poems is of the present times, that he writes for the current generations. Thus we come across in his poems all that angst that we today experience on seeing innocent people suffering at the hands of the terrorists, when he exclaims: “Eyes cannot bear to see Such is the devastation Pains of others grieve My heart”It hardly matters that Tukaram is writing in this poem about the horrific droughts of his times that wiped out an entire generation; this becomes an expression of my heart writhing in pain seeing the images of the thousands of Nigerians killed in the Boko Haram attack. It hardly matters that Tukaram is talking about a nature-inflicted calamity, while our miseries today are self-inflicted. Tukaram’s words catch hold of our aching nerve like no contemporary of ours can.

Bright Scythe: Selected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer


Tomas Tranströmer - 2015
    Known for sharp imagery, startling metaphors and deceptively simple diction, his luminous poems offer mysterious glimpses into the deepest facets of humanity, often through the lens of the natural world. These new translations by Patty Crane, presented side by side with the original Swedish, are tautly rendered and elegantly cadenced. They are also deeply informed by Crane’s personal relationship with the poet and his wife during the years she lived in Sweden, where she was afforded greater insight into the nuances of his poetics and the man himself.

Appalachian Frankenstein: The John Dorsey Reader


John Dorsey - 2015
    2 volumes with a letterpressed vellum wrap. 5x6".Praise for John Dorsey:When I teach the poems of John Dorsey to my students, they almost universally say, “yes.” Through their largely young eyes, I try to imagine what part of the universe Dorsey has touched within them. For years now I’ve been trying to figure out the same thing for myself as over, and over again, I come back to Dorsey’s collections hoping there’s one I’ve missed…as if the poems have grown up and had children between the pages and new words lay there just waking up. I am never disappointed. Dorsey’s poems reinvent themselves for us every time we read them. That is what my students see – they see themselves, both past and future. I seem to always see myself in his present. —D.E. Oprava