. . . Berryman becomes Everyman attempting, falling shortof, and often achieving greatness." Young's selection, the first newselection of Berryman's poems in over 30 years, encompasses the formalaccomplishments of his early work, epitomized in the masterful Homage toMistress Bradstreet, the explosive and mesmerizing diction of Dream Songs,and his wrenching religious poems. Kevin Young's poetry and essays haveappeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review,and elsewhere, and have been featured on NPR's "All Things Considered."

    We at Zoo are eminently pleased to have such a fine book of verse for our inaugural Kenyon Review Prize volume. Fennelly's poems are well poised in their witty and sometime sassy ruminations, often "maximalist" in their scope (see "From L' HUtel Terminus Notebooks") and the pleasure one takes within them is of the rarest breed: it is the pleasure of unexpected revelation. Open House comes introduced by series judge and Kenyon Review poetry editor, David Baker.

    This volume brings together new poems and a generous selection of work from Dobyns's seven previously published collections.

    This full-length collection includes individual lyric poems as well as a previously published chapbook Sea Lyrics and a new collaborative piece "Dumb Duke Death" with illustrations by Jennifer Jarnot.

    Here are poems that bring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself.The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.

    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

    During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.

    Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

    The volume features poems from Duhamel's five previous collections, which include Smile!, The Star-Spangled Banner and Girl Soldier.

    The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation.With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension—state lines, lakes' edges, the space "between the m and the e in the word amen." From what she calls "this place inbetween" come profane prayers in which "the sound of hope and the sound of suffering" are revealed to be "the same music played on the same instrument."Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. "We receive beauty," Seuss writes, "as a nail receives / the hammer blow." This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open—the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.

    Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now--these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life--all life--of which mankind is only a part.

    Haunted by their childhoods of material and emotional poverty, Jimmy and Rita float through days in urban San Francisco.

    It is a voice thick with the humidity and whirring cicadas of Kentucky, but the poems are dangerous, smelling of the crisp cucumber scent of a copperhead about to strike. Epistolary in nature, and with a novel's arc, Sister is a story that begins with a teen giving birth to a baby girl--the narrator--during a tornado, and in some ways, that tornado never ends. In the hands of a lesser poet, this debut collection would be a standard-issue confession, a melodramatic exercise in anger and self-pity. But melodrama requires simple villains and victims, and there is neither in this richly complex portrait. Ultimately, Sister is more about the narrator's transgressions and failures, more about her relationships to her sister and their mother than about that which divided them. With equal parts sass and sorrow, these poems etch out survival won not with tender-hearted reflections but by smoking cigarettes through fly-specked screens, by using cans of aerosol hair spray as a makeshift flamethrowers, and, most cruelly, by leaving home and trying to forget her sister entirely. From there, each poem is a letter of explanation and apology to that younger sister she never knew.Sister recounts a return to a place that Brown never truly left. It is a book of forgiveness, of seeking what is beyond mere survival, of finding your way out of a place of poverty and abuse only to realize that you must go back again, all the way back to where everything began--that warm, dark nest of mother.

    Highly recommended."—Library Journal"Intimate and hypnotic."—Ploughshares"Levin has the skilled ear, magnificent tongue, and fierce mind of the truly prophetic."—Rain Taxi"Levin's work is phenomenological; it details how it feels to be an embodied consciousness making its way through the world."—Boston Review"Death is the new and unshakeable lens through which I see," writes Dana Levin about her third book, in which she confronts mortality and loss in subjects ranging from Tibetan Buddhist burial practices to Aztec human sacrifice. Shaped by dreams and "the worms and the gods," these poems are a profound investigation of our inescapable fate. As Louise Glück has said: "Levin's animating fury goes back deeper into our linguistic and philosophic history: to Blake's tiger, to the iron judgments of the Old Testament."They took you in an ambulance even though you were dead,they took youand my sister saidWhy are you saving her if she is dead?     shey shey—Curve of sky a crescent blade.Vultures wheeling     on thermal parapets, shunyata,     void that flays—Yak butter,     barley flour and tea: you watch him     make the paste.Dana Levin's debut volume In the Surgical Theatre won the prestigious APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

    "An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting" Cole Swensen."