Continuing in her tradition of engaging autobiographical work, How to Love the Empty Air explores what happens when the impossible becomes real―for better and for worse. Aptowicz’s journey to find happiness and home in her ever-shifting world sees her struggling in cities throughout America. When her luck changes―in love and in life―she can’t help but “tell the sun / tell the fields / tell the huge Texas sky…. / tell myself again and again until I believe it.” However, the upward trajectory of this new life is rocked by the sudden death of the poet’s mother. In the year that follows, Aptowicz battles the silencing power of grief with intimate poems burnished by loss and a hard-won humor, capturing the dance that all newly grieving must do between everyday living and the desire “to elope with this grief, / who is not your enemy, / this grief who maybe now is your best friend. / This grief, who is your husband, / the thing you curl into every night, / falling asleep in its arms…” As in her award-winning The Year of No Mistakes, Aptowicz counts her losses and her blessings, knowing how despite it all, life “ripples boundless, like electricity, like joy / like... laughter, irresistible and bright, / an impossible thing to contain.”

    But when the runaway bride parks her truck in front of a small town bar the last thing she's expecting is Leo Bonham.Butch, sexy, and older, Leo is everything that Sammie has never wanted. Not least because she's female. And Leo isn't too pleased about meeting Sammie either. She's off relationships for good, and anyway, that huge RV is deterring customers.Sammie's too straight, too young, and too beautiful for Leo's taste. And Leo's too broken, too stubborn, and too old for Sammie's games. And yet the bubbling excitement between them can't be denied.It should have been just a stop on the road, just another customer, but somehow their lives got tangled together. Right up until one cuts the other free. An escape story turned into a romance, which turned into a tragedy. And the only way to get a happy ending is to leave the past behind...One For The Road is a new stand-alone lesbian romance from Sienna Waters, author of the Oakview and Monday's Child lesfic series.

    (It was John Findura in Verse Magazine.) She's also been compared to comedian Sarah Silverman, artist Jeff Koons, a 10-year-old who can't keep her mouth shut, and cartoonist R. Crumb. None of these equations is quite right, however. Jennifer L. Knox's work is unmistakably her own: darkly hilarious, surprisingly empathetic, utterly original. DRUNK BY NOON is the eagerly awaited sequel to Knox's first book, A GRINGO LIKE ME, which is also available from Bloof in a new edition. Jennifer L. Knox is a three-time contributor to the Best American Poetry Series and her poems have also appeared in Great American Prose Poems and Great American Erotic Poems. For more information, see www.jenniferlknox.com.

    In settings as various as a patio in Arizona, the bistros and boulevards of Paris, the sun-drenched pyramids of Mexico—and directly from the Greek myth itself—Rita Dove explores this relationship and the dilemma of letting go.

    The poet wonders at his own existence and struggles between actual living and the desire to die."Cyril Wong continues to explore the nuances of relationships, in language that is lyrical, beautifully crafted, and erotically charged. There are several fine love poems that reach out to embrace a common humanity. Wong swims into the undercurrents of family tensions, hidden desires, and the meaning of a self... as well as questioning our understanding of both life and death."- Rebecca Edwards, author of Scar Country and Holiday Coast Medusa"Reading Cyril Wong is always to encounter risk, the painful suturing of art and life, trials of faith and baptisms of fire. I have only the deepest respect for someone who has razed the walls between the private and the public, and in doing so, carved more space for all of us."- Alfian Sa'at, author of One Fierce Hour and A History of Amnesia

    In its first American edition, this poetry is presented in Spanish and Enlgish, so that readers of both languages may listed to Zurita's voice.Anteparadise can be read as a creative response, an act of resistance by a young artist to the violence and suffering during and after the 1973 coup that toppled the democratically elected Allende government. Zurita thus follows the example of several Latin American pets such as the Peruvian César Vallejo and Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, sharing their passion and urgency, but his voice is unique.

    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.

    In a country where “money has won everywhere,” but the essential promise of democracy still beckons, these poems uncover our troubled psyches and show us what it might mean to be “Free Again.”

                Two empty suitcases sit in the corner, if that’s any kind of clue.                                —from “Almost Sixty” Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore’s poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting losses of friends to death or divorce, the accounting of frequent flyer miles and cups of coffee, and the poet’s own process of writing. It is a world of both diminishment and triumphs. Moore has assembled his most emotionally direct and lyrically spare collection, one that amounts to his book of days, seasons, and stark realizations.

    H. Auden endowed poetry in the English language with a new face. Or rather, with several faces, since his work ranged from the political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral, from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plain-spoken.This collection presents all the poems Auden wished to preserve, in the texts that received his final approval. It includes the full contents of his previous collected editions along with all the later volumes of his shorter poems. Together, these works display the astonishing range of Auden's voice and the breadth of his concerns, his deep knowledge of the traditions he inherited, and his ability to recast those traditions in modern times.

    . . Like Frida Kahlo's painting--impossible to look away from. --Kai Maristed, Los Angeles TimesAt the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced through by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits.A vibrant series of prose poems, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on Frida Kahlo, one of the twentieth century's most compelling artists. Carole Maso brings together pieces from Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries to assemble a text that is as erotic, mysterious, and colorful as one of Kahlo's paintings.

    All these creative talents come into play in delightful, unexpected ways in his new bilingual collection Green Poems, which celebrates his innate connection with nature.Gulzar writes about rivers, forests, mountains; snow, rain, clouds; the sky, the earth and space; a familiar tree, a disused well; Kullu, Chamba, Thimpu. Like glimpses of nature, the poems are often short, an image captured in a few words. And sometimes the image gives rise to a striking thought: 'When I pass through the forest I feel my ancestors are around me ...'.For those new to Gulzar's work as well as his many fans, Green Poems will prove to be a true joy.

    Found the sun. And became the rainbow…Sam Payne’s debut poetry collection, this boy is a rainbow, tells a touching story of gay love and heartache, healing and empowerment. It is the story of a boy who lost love and thought he would never be whole again. Divided into three chapters, it follows his journey as he endured the storm, found the sun, and became the rainbow.Featuring over two-hundred original poems and illustrations, the collection encourages readers not only to survive the storm, but to thrive in it. And when the storm is over, be ready to let love in again. For love is everywhere, if only you open your heart.thank you
for throwing me
into the bared teethof a treacherous stormif you hadn’t
i wouldn’t be
the rainbow
i am today

    The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can.     This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels”Let me beas streamlined as my knife when I say this.As cold as my three-pronged fork thatcools the meat even as it steadies it.A pettiness in me was honedin this cutlers’ town, later bombed,in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born therealongside my wedding pattern, could hearthe constant sharpening of kniveslike some children hear the corn in their hometownstalking to them through the wind.The horizon is just the score they breathe throughlike a box of chickensbreathing through a slit.

    This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle though the insurgencies, context, and kinesis of our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle.Copies for purchase now available: https://communeeditions.com/cruel-fic...