Whether recalling her former career as a naturalist experimenting on white rats or watching birds from her wheelchair, she draws the reader into unforgettable places rich in image and story. Lucia Perillo is the author of four books of poetry that have won the Norma Farber First Book Award, the Kate Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her critically acclaimed memoir, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature, was published in 2007.

    As a poet Robertson has received unrivaled praise for her uncompromising intelligence and style. The Men will not only compliment her previous work, but will add a new layer as a far more personal and lyrical book than anything she has yet published. Who are the men? The Men are a riddle. What do they want? Their troubles become lyric. The Men explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarchs Sonnets, Cavalcanti, Dantes works on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey - a subjectivity that honours all the ambivalence, doubt, and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance. It is this troubled texture of identification that she examines in The Men. How does a woman of the present century see herself, in mens lyric texts of the renaissance, in the tradition of the philosophy of the male subject, as well as in the men that surround her, obfuscating, dear, idiotic and gorgeous as they often seem? What if she wrote his poems? At once intimate and oblique, humorous and heartbreaking, composed and furious, - The Men seeks to defamiliarize both who, and what men are.Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto and for many years lived in Vancouver, where she was a member of the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery. She is the author of The Apothecary (1991, 2007), XEclogue (1993), Debbie: An Epic, which was nominated for the Gevernor Generals Award in 1998, The Weather, awarded the Relit Poetry Prize in 2002, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, a Village Voice top book of 2004, and Rousseaus Boat, which won the 2005 bpNichol Chapbook Award. She now lives in France.

    Depression & Other Magic Tricks explores themes of mental health, love, and family. It is a documentation of struggle and triumph, a celebration of daily life and of living. Benaim's wit, empathy, and gift for language produce a work of endless wonder.

    When Linda Pastan's first book was published in 1971, the Jerusalem Post wrote, she "in large measure fulfilled Emerson's dream -- the revelation of 'the miraculous in the common.'" Since then, Pastan has continued to explore the complexities, passion, and dangers under the surfaces of ordinary life. She speaks in the voices of Penelope and Eve; of daughter, mother, and wife. The new book follows work that over thirty years both darkens and deepens with time.

    Fountain’s voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the “pure holiness in motherhood” with the “thuds the giant dumpsters make behind the strip mall when they’re tossed back to the pavement by the trash truck.” In these wise, accessible, deeply emotional poems, she captures a contemporary longing for spiritual meaning that’s wary of prepackaged wisdom—a longing answered most fully by attending to the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

    Blythe Baird deftly and uniquely charts a course through various modes of womanhood and women's bodies. Through love, loss, and the struggles of disordered eating, If My Body Could Speak uses sharp narratives and visceral imagery to get to the heart of a many-layered existence, speaking to many generations at once.

    No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's knack for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"), among other curious topics. Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join in on her journey of discovering herself and the world around her. It's an honest and powerful collection.

    Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles's stomping grounds and the home of her most well-known work, she provides a wide-open lens into a radical life.

    It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Make a cup of tea and let yourself feel.

    —from "The Doomsday Clock"The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time—our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.

    In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

    Compulsively readable, full of fear and persistence, they resonate with the wildness and generosity of Ginsberg, Whitman, and Ted Berrigan, turning the everyday into an encompassing, harrowing, humorous, necessary vision. Beckman is, as Publishers Weekly notes, “the real thing.”Joshua Beckman is the author of numerous poetry collections, translations, and collaborative works. His awards include a NYFA Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

    He is also co-author of Nice Hat. Thanks. with Joshua Beckman, with whom he has participated in performances at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. He received the Pushcart Prize and his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at New York University.

    There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

    This book chews with its open mouth full of the juiciest words, the most indigestible images. This book undoes me. . . . francine j. harris brilliantly ransacks the poet's toolkit, assembling art from buckets of disaster and shreds of hope. Nothing she lays her mind's eye on escapes. You, too, will be captured by her work."—Evie ShockleyLyrically raw and dangerously unapologetic, play dead challenges us to look at our cultivated selves as products of circumstance and attempts to piece together patterns amidst dissociative chaos. harris unearths a ruptured world dictated by violence—a place of deadly what ifs, where survival hangs by a thread. Getting by is carrying bruises and walking around with "half a skull."From "low visibility":I have light in my mouth. I hunger you. You wantwhat comes in drag. a black squirrel in a black tar lane,fresh from exhaust, hot and July's unearthed steam.You want to watch it run over. to study the sog. You want the stink of gristle buried in a muggy weather.I want the faulty mirage. a life of grass.we want the same thing. We want their deathsto break up the sun.francine j. harris is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow whose first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she is also Cave Canem fellow who has lived in several cities before returning to Michigan. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and currently teaches writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.