"[Ginsberg's] powerful mixture of Blake, Whitman, Pound, and Williams, to which he added his own volatile, grotesque, and tender humor, has assured him a memorable place in modern poetry."-- Helen Vendler

    Here’s a body of new work to cheer about.” Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness will be available in May 2010.

    They’re humorous, odd, and full of all the unreasonable truth of love. This book is the real thing.” —Publishers Weekly Weise’s collection “examines the daily life and consciousness of a speaker with a disability willing to confront all taboos associated with sex, intimacy, identity, gender, and love.” - Coldfront MagazineThe Los Angeles Times described Jillian Weise's debut poetry collection as "a fearless dissection of the taboo and the hidden." In this second collection she forwards her bold, sexy poetics by chronicling an affair with a man she names "Big Logos." These poems throw into question sex, the law, identity, sentiment, and power, shifting between lyric and narrative, hyper-realism and magical realism, fact and fiction.I've Been Waiting All NightI reckon you were asleep with your girlbefore the phone rang. Make something up.I've been waiting all night to tell youabout the couple in post-War France,the woman fresh in her graveand the man who didn't like his mistress dead,no sir, and so exhumed her, to the dismayof his wife, who had him arrestedfor the stink he made.She was reburied, returned to the dead.After jail, he dug her up to fuck again.Attached suction cups and crafteda wig from a broom. You can go now.I'm more in the mood than you're used to.Jillian Weise—an above-the-knee amputee with a computerized prosthetic—identifies as a cyborg and has discussed the identity in essays for the New York Times and Drunken Boat. Her books include The Amputee's Guide to Sex (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and The Colony (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2010). She is an assistant professor at Clemson University, a contributing editor at the South Carolina Review, and co-director of the Annual Clemson Literary Festival.

    In Asymmetry, his first collection of poems in five years, he revisits the themes that have long concerned him: the enduring imprint of history, the beauty of nature, the place of the exile. Though as sanguine as ever, Zagajewski often turns to elegy in this deeply powerful collection, remembering loved ones he's lost: a hairdresser, the philosopher Krzystzof Michalski, and, most poignantly, his parents. A moving reflection on family, the sublimity of everyday life, death, and happiness, Asymmetry is a magnificent distillation of an astounding poetic voice.

    Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."— William StaffordDuskwhere is the name no one answered togone off to live by itselfbeneath the pine trees separating the houseswithout a friend or a bedwithout a father to tell it storieshow hard was the path it walked onall those years belonging to noneof our struggles drifting underthe calendar page elusive asresidue when someone saidhow have you been it wasstrangely that name that triedto answerNaomi Shihab Nye has spent thirty-five years traveling the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. In her newest collection Transfer she draws on her Palestinian American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her extensive travel experiences to create a poetry collection that attests to our shared humanity.Among her awards, Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart prizes. In January 2010, she was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

    The Best American Poetry is not just another anthology; it serves as a guide to who’s who and what’s happening in American poetry and is an eagerly awaited publishing event each year. With Trethewey’s insightful touch and genius for plumbing the depths of history and personal experience to shape striking verse, The Best American Poetry 2017 is another brilliant addition to the series.

    The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life--not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

     Learning is the one perfect religion, its path correct, narrow, certain, straight. —from "Allegiance" Over twenty years, Elizabeth Alexander has become one of America's most exciting and important poets, and her selection as the inaugural poet by President Obama confirmed her place as one of the indispensable voices of our time. Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 gathers twenty pages of new poetry, along with generous selections from her previous work. The result is the definitive volume to date by this American master.

    – Shubhangi Swarup (Latitudes of Longing)

    M. Ocean explores the depths of love deeply felt and violently lost. For those whose wounds are fresh and hearts still raw with ample emotion, Ocean portrays pain and suffering in apt and heart wrenching candour.

    His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."

    With the sort of smart, persuasive voice associated with Simon Armitage and Michael Donaghy, these poems worry at the world in search of consolation, or else meet life's absurdity and strangeness half-way; whether sitting proudly atop an unexploded bomb, or injecting blood under the skin of a banana, playfulness and imagination are vehicles for confronting 'the fearful and forgotten things I've lied to myself about'. Here are poems which address anxiety about fatherhood, remorse for lost lovers and friends, or mourn for a miscarried sibling. Happiness is a collection preoccupied with the ephemerality of happiness itself, at the ever-present possibility of its departure, and the ways we try to grasp and keep hold of it. 'Every single thought I'm having is about LOVE', here meaning both the pleasure and panic of love, its peculiarity; love as a feeling of risk, love for one's own body, familiar yet estranged, of 'cack-handed LOVE at his console', love like 'pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain'.

    Those who turn to poetry to become confidants for another's stories and secrets will not be disappointed.”—Publishers Weekly“In her fifth book of poetry, Bass addresses everything from Saturn’s rings and Newton’s law of gravitation to wasps and Pablo Neruda. Her words are nostalgic, vivid, and visceral. Bass arrives at the truth of human carnality rooted in the extraordinary need and promise of the individual. Bass shows us that we are as radiant as we are ephemeral, that in transience glistens resilient history and the remarkable fluidity of connection. By the collection’s end—following her musings on suicide and generosity, desire and repetition—it becomes lucidly clear that Bass is not only a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller.”—BooklistEllen Bass brings a deft touch as she continues her ongoing interrogations of crucial moral issues of our times, while simultaneously delighting in endearing human absurdities. From the start of Like a Beggar, Bass asks her readers to relax, even though "bad things are going to happen," because the "bad" gets mined for all manner of goodness.From "Another Story":After dinner, we're drinking scotch at the kitchen table.Janet and I just watched a NOVA specialand we're explaining to her motherthe age and size of the universe—the hundred billion stars in the hundred billion galaxies.Dotty lives at Dominican Oaks, making her way down the long hall.How about the sun? she asks, a little farmshit in the endlessness.I gather up a cantaloupe, a lime, a cherry,and start revolving this salad around the chicken carcass.This is the best scotch I ever tasted, Dotty says,even though we gave her the Maker's Markwhile we're drinking Glendronach...Ellen Bass's poetry includes  Like A Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Human Line  (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), which was named a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award.  She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). Her work has frequently been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Sun  and many other journals. She is co-author of several non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008) which has sold over a million copies and been translated into twelve languages. She is part of the core faculty of the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

    The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one’s wild oats, having one’s mind expanded or blown, losing one’s wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.

    African American Studies. TWERK unveils an identity shaped by popular media and history, code switching and cultural inclusivity. The poems, songs, and myths in this long-awaited first book are as rooted in lyric as in innovation, in Black music as in macaronic satire. TWERK evokes paradox, humor, and vulnerability, and it offers myriad avenues fueled by language, idiom, and vernacular. From a poet unafraid to take risks, this book asks only that we imagine America as it has always existed, an Americana beyond the English language."Here it is: a dope jam of dictions; a remixed, multicultural, polyphonic dance of vocabularies; a language of high stakes, hi-jinx, and hybridity. TWERK is subversive, vulnerable, and volatile. TwERK twists tongues. TwERK tweaks speech. Reading these amazing poems mostly makes me say, Wow! Open your ears to take this music in, open your mouth to say it out loud. And: Wow!"--Terrance Hayes"Tweaking parallel languages, rebooting and putting them to (hard, hard) work, TWERK's non-stop shimmy-shimmy embarks on an anime-iigjag idio-lingual-lectical booty-roll and doesn't come down until the break of dawn. La Reina de Harlem responds to Lorca's Big-Apple-opolis heteroglossia with her own inimitable animations, incantations and ululations, twisting tongues so mellifluously that you don't even realize you've been dancing on Saturn with Sun Ra for hours and still could have begged for more. Welcome LaTasha Diggs: this is her many-splendored night out!"--Maria Damon"From this time forward, TWERK, can refer to a collection of cultural coordinates of a radically transformed Americas. TWERK--is rare poetics, a vine enmeshed onyx slab of gypsum glyphs inscribed. Cut, swirly, and nervy, N. Diggs's fractal-linguistic urban chronicles deftly snip away at the lingering fears of a fugitive English's frisky explorations. In her first major work, N. Diggs doesn't so much 'find' culture as she conjures up the new emerging happy peoples herein. Five thousand updates--download now!"--Rodrigo Toscano