Something is wrong.” Frederick Seidel—the “ghoul” (Chicago Review), the “triumphant outsider” (Contemporary Poetry Review)—returns with a dangerous new collection of poems. Nice Weather presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel—and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, elegiac, this book adds new music and menace to his masterful body of work.

    . . Assigned toAdventure said the motto on our buttons. The last thing we knewBefore we left with our satchels concerned how love withdrawsMoving backward taking with it everything, our names, this way.Dara Wier directs the MFA program at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This is her ninth book, and first new collection of poetry since 2006.

    I love how thick this writing is, sublimely claustrophobic yet expansive, like a child's nightmare of scale."—Dodie Bellamy"Autodidact and knight-errant, Ward often betrays the procedural forms he tries to impose on his labyrinthine ruminations in order to remain faithfully engaged to the traditional task of the post-Romantic poet, an 'ecstatic commingling' of okay-you know and 'starry anaphor.'"—Tyrone Williams"I should write a real blurb with real blurb-like things in it, but TCOIW, a kind of lullaby arranging the psychic terrain of my future prosodically, is saving my stupid ass."—Anselm Berrigan

    Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order -Bruce Boone.

    She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also "words chosen out of desire."

    In scenes of a mixture of pride, madness, and comedy, Carlos plays out his role as deity among the naked islanders, living a fantasy that most readers will find believable, if horrific. Along with the horror, the book does offer some beautiful moments of discovery, as when, as Winkler narrates, the ship takes the Mona Passage to Jamaica...we hear of an Edenic island, green and aromatic, opened like a wildflower. For all of its scenes of braggadocio and brutality, the book often works on you like that vision."--Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered"Readers are transported to Jamaica, into Winkler's richly invented 16th century, where his flawless prose paints their slice of time, in turn both brutally graphic and lyrically gorgeous. Comic, tragic, bawdy, sad, and provocative, this is a thoroughly engaging adventure story from a renowned Jamaican author, sure to enchant readers who treasure a fabulous tale exquisitely rendered."-- Library Journal "A tale of the frequently tragic--and also comic--clash of races and religions brought on by colonization...Anthony Winkler spins an enlightened parable, rich in historical detail and irony."-- Shelf Awareness "Darkly irreverent...With a sharp tongue, Winkler, a native of Jamaica, deftly imbues this blackly funny satire with an exposé of colonialism's avarice and futility."-- Publishers Weekly "With perceptive storytelling and bracing honesty, Mr. Winkler, author of a half-dozen well-reviewed books, has a lovely way of telling a good story and educating concurrently...God Carlos teaches history in a subtle but meaningful way. Too literary to be lumped in with typical historical fiction, and too historical to be lumped in with typical literary fiction, God Carlos defies categorization."-- New York Journal of Books "God Carlos provides a welcome opportunity to glimpse...the lives of ordinary people, both European and Caribbean, as they experience the calamitous effects of the encounter of two worlds."-- Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, & Culture "The author's piercing narrative drives home...Here, Winkler's brilliance as a storyteller is unmistakable...God Carlos is a literary tour de force--atmospheric and incisive. It effuses raw emotion--perplexing, bewildering, and dark...On multiple levels, Winkler proves his salt as a genuine raconteur...the architect of an invaluable literary work."-- The Jamaica Gleaner "Well-written...Winkler's descriptions of sea and sky as seen from a sailing ship, and of the physical beauty of Jamaica, are spot-on and breathtaking."-- Historical Novel Review "In God Carlos and The Family Mansion, Anthony Winkler, the master storyteller, has provided us with texts of both narrative quality and historical substance that should find place in the annals of Caribbean literature."--SX SalonGod Carlos transports us to a voyage aboard the Santa Inez, a Spanish sailing vessel bound for the newly discovered West Indies with a fortune-seeking band of ragtag sailors. She is an unusual explorer for her day, carrying no provisions for the settlers, no seed for planting crops, manned by vain, arrogant men looking for gold in Jamaica.Expecting to make landfall in paradise after over a month at sea, the crew of the Santa Inez instead find themselves in the middle of a timid, innocent people--the Arawaks--who walk around stark naked without embarrassment and who venerate their own customs and worship their own Gods and creeds. The European newcomers do not find gold, only the merciless climate that nourishes diseases that slaughter them. That the Arawaks believed that the arrivals were from heaven makes even more complicated this impossible entanglement of culture, custom, and beliefs, ultimately leading to mutual doom.

    Including such subjects as "I Heart Unending Paranoia," "Because You Know You're Avoiding Going Somewhere But Don't Even Know Where Yet," and "I'm Not Going To Change My Clothes Today," Pink's collection is bizarre, funny, and original.

    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.

    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.

    If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."

    Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.

    As unexpected as it is bold, Alsadir's ambitious tour de force demands we pay new attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric - and human relationships - in the 21st century.

    Arguably the central genre of Japanese literature, the 31-syllable lyric made up the great majority of Japanese poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century and was the inspiration for such poetry as haiku and renga. Tanka has begun to attract considerable attention in North America in recent years. Modern Japanese Tanka is the first comprehensive collection available in English.Tanka retains the aesthetic sensibilities that circumscribe Japanese culture, but just as Japan has changed during this tumultuous century, tanka has undergone equally radical shifts. Responding to artistic and social movements of the West, tanka has incorporated influences ranging from Marxism to Avant-Garde.Modern Japanese Tanka includes four hundred poems by twenty of Japan's most renowned poets who have made major contributions to the hisotry of tanka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his graceful, eloquent translations, Makoto Ueda captures the distinct voices of these individual poets, providing biographical sketches of each as well as transliterating Japanese text below each poem. His introduction gives an excellent overview of the development of tanka in the last one hundred years.Tracing the contemporary tanka tradition from Yosana Tekkan in the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth-century poetry of such writers as Taware Machi, Modern Japanese Tankselegantly conveys an authentic sense of Japanese lyric to a Western audience.

    Ted Kooser’s third book in the Pitt Poetry Series is a selection of poems published in literary journals over a ten year period by a writer whose work has been praised for its clarity and accessiblity, its mastery of figurative language, and its warmth and charm.

    I read his work with awe and admiration.”—Ben Marcus “Joe Wenderoth's brave new poetic talent is like nothing so much as a live wire writing its own epitaph in sparks. [His poems] throb brilliantly with a sense of the 'too much.' . . . But in Wenderoth's case the too much is the too little or the too ordinary—a very remarkable discovery to have made so late in the history of poetry. Philip Larkin and a few American poets have approached it, but Wenderoth's instrument is sharper than theirs; he makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible.”—Cal Bedient This clear-eyed new work from a favorite young poet is searching and solemn, dissatisfied with artificial condolences and pat maxims. Joe Wenderoth’s determination in the face of harsh realities is what rescues us, and him, from hopelessness. “Luck” So a screaming woke you just in time An animal’s scream, or animals’. What kind of animal it was doesn’t matter, and cannot, in any case, be determined. The point is you are saved. Your mouth has been opened. Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore and is the author of five books of prose and poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Davis.