fluid.


Renaada Williams - 2018
    I believe everyone should understand that we all go through things in life, it's all about how we react and recover from them. If you've felt as though you didn't have a voice in a situation, or you weren't sure if you'd get through it "fluid." may be the book for you.

Trouble in Mind: Poems


Lucie Brock-Broido - 2004
    There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet “at the border of her own allegory,” Brock-Broido searches for a lexicon adequate to the extremities of experience–a quest that is as capricious as it is uncompromising. In the process, she reveals, unsparingly, things as they are. In “Pamphlet on Ravening” she recalls, “I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone. / I had had rapture on my side.” The book is laced with sequences: haunted, odd self-portraits; a succession of poems provoked by discarded titles by Wallace Stevens; an intermittent series of fractured and beguiling lyrics that she variously refers to as fragments, leaflets, and apologues.Trouble in Mind is a book that astonishes us afresh at the agility and the uncanny will of language, which Brock-Broido is not afraid to follow where it may lead her: “That the name of bliss is only in the diminishing / (As far as possible) of pain. That I had quit / The quiet velvet cult of it, / Yet trouble came.” Even trouble, in Brock-Broido’s idiom, becomes something resplendent.From the Hardcover edition.

Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979


Susan Howe - 1996
    In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word.Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York—Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

Poems Retrieved


Frank O'Hara - 1977
    Featuring a new introduction by O’Hara expert and friend, poet and art critic Bill Berkson, Retrieved has been completely reformatted and is essential for any reader of twentieth century poetry. As Berkson writes, “The breadth of what Frank O’Hara took to be poetry is reflected in the many kinds of poems he wrote. . . . Turning the pages of any of his collections, you wonder what he didn’t turn his hand to, what variety of poem he left untried or didn’t, in some cases, as if in passing, anticipate.”

Second Empire


Richie Hofmann - 2015
    Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna WarrenThis debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.Antique BookThe sky was crazed with swallows.We walked in the frozen grassof your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.Trees shook down their gaudy nests.The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.I was jealous of the river,how the light broke it, of the skeinof windows where we saw ourselves.Where we walked, the ice crackedlike an antique book, openingand closing. The leavesbeneath it were the marbled pages.Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

National Anthem


Kevin Prufer - 2008
    Set in an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world that is disturbing because it is uncannily familiar, National Anthem chronicles the aftermath of the failure of imperial vision. Allowing Rome and America to bleed into one another, Prufer masterfully weaves the threads of history into an anthem that is as intimate as it is far-reaching.

Begging for It


Alex Dimitrov - 2013
    A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this "American Youth," as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing--whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, "Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you."

Unmarked Treasure: Poems


Cyril Wong - 2004
    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

Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise


Paul Monette - 1994
    Brimming with outrage yet tender, this is a “remarkable book” (Philadelphia Inquirer).Puck --Gert --My priests --3275 --The politics of silence --Mustering --A one-way fare --Getting covered --Sleeping under a tree --Mortal things --Some afterthoughts

The Road to Emmaus: Poems


Spencer Reece - 2014
    Christ has just been crucified, and they are heartbroken—until a third man joins them on the road and comforts them. Once they reach Emmaus and break bread, the pair realizes they have been walking with Christ himself. But in the moment they recognize him, he disappears. Spencer Reece draws on this tender story in his mesmerizing collection—one that fearlessly confronts love and its loss, despair and its consolation, and faith in all of its various guises.Reece’s central figure in The Road to Emmaus is a middle-aged man who becomes a priest in the Episcopal Church; these poems follow him to New York City, to Honduras, to a hospital where he works as a chaplain, to a prison, to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. With language of simple, lyrical beauty that gradually accrues weight and momentum, Reece spins compelling dramas out of small moments: the speaker, living among a group of orphans, wondering "Was it true, what they said, that a priest is a house lit up?"; two men finding each other at a Coming Out Group; a man trying to become visible after a life that had depended on not being seen.A yearning for connection, an ache of loneliness, and the instant of love disappearing before our eyes haunt this long-awaited second collection from Spencer Reece.

Magnetic North


Linda Gregerson - 2007
    "Choose any angle you like," she writes, "The world is split in two." One poem, "Bicameral," moves from a child's cleft palate to a gunshot wound to the hanging skeins of a fabric in a postwar art exhibit. In the wool cut from the sheep to make the materials of art, she finds a tangled record of violence and repair: "The body it becomes will ever / bind it to the human and a trail of woe."Longtime readers of Gregerson's poetry will be facinated by her departure from the supple tercets in which she has worked for nearly twenty years: Magnetic North is a bold anthology of formal experiments. It is also a heartening act of sustained attention from one of our most mindful poets.

Skies


Eileen Myles - 2001
    Although their work conjures the texture of wind and the broad spaces of the sky, these poems are not serenely pastoral. Rather, Myles' sparse blank verse is concerned with the diaphanous qualities of perception, as if her momentary experiences were as slippery and translucent as clouds. A sometimes brutal loneliness and urgent but stoic sensuality results, finding its expression in simple colors: orange, grey, yellow, white, rose.

Torn Awake


Forrest Gander - 2001
    Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.

Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960


Denise Levertov - 1979
    Here are the early poems which first brought Denise Levertov's work to prominence -- from early uncollected poems, selections from The Double Image (London, 1946), and her three books Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958) and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960), which established her as one of the more lyrical and most influential poets of the New American poetry.

Sex & Love &


Bob Hicok - 2016
    Throughout, poetry is discovered to be among our most effective tools to examine the delirium of making contact."Hot":The sexiest thing a woman has ever doneto or with or for me—while wearing the loose breezeof a dress or standing inside its red zero on the floor—while bending over and pulling her shorts downon a racquetball court or to reach the watershutoff valve behind the fridge—as Satiewhispers against our thighs or hummingher brain's native tune as we touchthe smudged glass protecting extinct beetlesin a museum—with her lips swaddling my tongueor finger up my ass—is tell the truth—which makes my wife the hottest womanI've ever known—her mouth erotic every timeshe speaks—she is an animal when it comes to sexand love—comes to us—in that she doesn't primpin front of the mirror of what she thinks I wanther to say or be—the only real flesh—only nakedthat matters––how she looks at meBob Hicok's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the American Poetry Review. His books have been awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and named a "Notable Book of the Year" by Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator. He is currently teaching at Purdue University.