In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation—and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

    Johannes Göransson's translation captures the seething instability of Berg's bizarre compound nouns and linguistic contortions.

    I hope that this book makes everyone feel what I felt while writing it, and that love is a universal thing, and my story is not unique. And I hope that this makes them see that there is a beyond and that they can come out happy and clean. And, that this makes them braver than they already are, and gives them that little extra push and strength that they probably need

    The poems take us back to the womb, and from there on to childhood, to a searing sexual awakening, to the shock of childbirth, to the wonder and humor of parenthood--and, finally, to the depths of adult love.Always bold, musical, honest, these poems plunge us into the essence of experience. This is a highly charged, beautifully organized collection from one of the finest poets writing today.

    With her marriage shattered, Erin Belieu sifts the wreckage for the black box, the record of disaster. Propelled by a blistering and clarifying rage, she composed at fever pitch and produced riveting, unforgettable poems, such as the ten-part sequence “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral”:I root through your remains,looking for the black box. Nothing leftbut glossy chunks, a pimp’s platinumtooth clanking inside the urn. I play youover and over, my beloved conspiracy,my personal Zapruder film—look. . .When Belieu was invited by the Poetry Foundation to keep a public journal on their new website, readers responded to the Black Box poems, calling them “dark, twisted, disturbed, and disturbing” and Belieu a “frightening genius.” All true.

    

    . . a contemporary genius with the language itself . . . There is simply no contemporary poet like him.” —David Baker, The Kenyon Review Albert Goldbarth has created an unmistakable signature style—learned, copious, hilarious, and heartbreaking—which has so far spanned an award-winning career of thirty-five years. The Kitchen Sink brings together forty new poems with a rich selection of earlier poetry, ranging from the brief, flickering lyric to the long, narrative sequence. In both forms, Goldbarth exerts a wild showmanship and an ever-widening scope to illustrate the complex character and interconnectedness of humanity, history, and art. The Kitchen Sink is the definitive book by one of America’s most original and entertaining poets.

    It is with a mixture of grief and joy that Hirsch examines what he calls the minor triumphs, the major failures of his life so far, in lines that reveal a startling frankness in the man composing them, a fearlessness in confronting his own internal divisions: I lived between my heart and my head, / like a married couple who can't get along, he writes in Self-portrait. These poems constitute a profound, sometimes painful self-examination, by the end of which the poet marvels at the sense of expectancy and transformation he feels. His fifteen-year-old son walking on Broadway is a fledgling about to sail out over the treetops; he has a new love, passionately described in I Wish I Could Paint You; he is ready to live, he tells us, solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free. More personal than any of his previous collections, Special Orders is Edward Hirsch's most significant book to date. The highway signs pointed to our happiness; the greasy spoons and gleaming truck stops were the stations of our pilgrimage. Wasn't that us staggering past the riverboats, eating homemade fudge at the county fair and devouring each other's body? They come back to me now, delicious love, the times my sad heart knew a little sweetness. from The Sweetness

    Yum! I hope you like it.

    First Songs, poems inspired by the Andalusian countryside are comparable in style and theme to those in his masterpiece Poem of the Deep Song. This charming little book was given by Lorca to his friend Manuel Altolaguirre and his wife as a gift to their first child. Ode to Walt Whitman, a passionate meditation on homosexuality in a society that proscribes it, is perhaps the best-known book to have come out of the poet's New York Cycle of poems, a damning vision of urban life under capitalism. Perhaps Lorca's finest poem, A Flood of Tears for Ignacio Sanchez Mojis, is a moving elegy to his friend, a renowned bullfighter who was also a writer and a hero to a generation of poets. With Six Galician Poems, written in the Galician language, Lorca returns to themes of the simple life and folklore of the Spanish people. Published only a few months before the Spanish Civil War broke out, this book – a classic of Galician literature – never won the prominence it deserved."His real impact, however, surely comes from the stark vividness of his imagery, his ability to conjure up primal subjective realms of love and death: The guitar makes dreams weep. The sobbing of lost souls escapes through its round mouth. And like the tarantula it spins a large star to trap the sighs floating in its black, wooden water tank." —David H. Rosenthal". . . García Lorca's poem dedicated to the New York poet is nothing short of beautiful. The translation does not detract from the emotion and respect that García Lorca has for Walt Whitman." —A.J. Ortega, Front Porch JournalFederico García Lorca (1898-1936) was a poet, playwright, and theater director. He was well-known as a member of the Generation of '27 who introduced symbolism, futurism, and surrealism to Spanish literature. City Lights Publishers also published another book of poetry by Federico García Lorca titled Poem of the Deep Song.Carlos Bauer is the translator of García Lorca's Poem of the Deep Song (City Lights Books), Cries from a Wounded Madrid (Swallow Press), and The Public and Play without a Title: Posthumous Plays (New Directions). He has also translated the work of contemporary writers into Spanish.

    It's for the seekers searching for a new home, for the wanderers leaving their old homes, for the lovers creating a home wherever they are. Sometimes you hold on to what is left, sometimes you just let go to start afresh.

    Huidobro is considered one of the most significant poets of our century and is recognized as one of the seminal figures in modern Spanish-language poetry.

    Plato would have loved them."—Ann LauterbachIn a world where we find "everything helping itself / to everything else," Anna Moschovakis incorporates Craigslist ads, technobabble, twentieth-century ethics texts, scientific research, autobiographical detail, and historical anecdote to present an engaging lyric analysis of the way we live now. "It's your life," she tells the reader, "and we have come to celebrate it."

    In his "daring and urgent" (The New York Times Book Review) memoir, My Bright Abyss, he asks, "What is poetry's role when the world is burning?" Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems might be read as an answer to that question.From the taut forms of his first book to the darker, more jagged fluencies of his second, into the bold and pathbreaking poems of his last two collections, Hammer Is the Prayer bears the reckless, restless interrogations and the slashing lyric intensity that distinguish Wiman's verse. But it also reveals the dramatic and narrative abilities for which he has been widely praised--the junkyard man in "Five Houses Down" with his "wonder-cluttered porch" and "the eyesore opulence / of his five partial cars," or the tragicomic character in "Being Serious" who suffers "the world's idiocy / like a saint its pains."Hammer Is the Prayer brings together three decades of Wiman's acclaimed poetry. Selected by the author, these poems reveal the singular music and metaphysical urgency that have attracted so many readers to his work and firmly assert his place as one of the most essential poets of our time.

    This a rare treat for lovers of French literature, art, and culture.