That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perceptions, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical.

    Three long poems interspersed with prose pieces, Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point the Labadists, a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland, in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. In Souls, Howe is lured by archives and libraries, with their ghosts, cranks, manuscripts and scraps of material. One thread winding through Souls is silken: from the epigraphs of Edwards ("the silkworm is a remarkable type of Christ...") and of Stevens ("the poet makes silk dresses out of worms") to the mulberry tree (food of the silkworms) and the fragment of a wedding dress that ends the book. Souls of the Labadie Tract presents Howe with her signature hybrids of poetry and prose, of evocation and refraction:     There it is there it is—you     want the great wicked city     Oh I wouldn't I wouldn't     It's not only that you're not     It's what wills and will not.

    The late Kenneth Rexroth ( 1905-1982) is surely one of the most readable of this century's great American poets. He is also one of the most sophisticated.

    Throughout Two and Two, doubles abound: Noah's animals; Duhamel's parents as Jack and Jill in a near-fatal accident; an incestuous double sestina; a male/female pantoum; a dream and its interpretation; and translations of advertisements from English to Spanish. In two Möbius strip poems (shaped like the Twin Towers), Duhamel invites her readers to get out their scissors and tape and transform her poems into 3-D objects.At the book's center is "Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted," a gathering of journal entries, personal e-mails, and news reports into a collage of witness about September 11. A section of "Mille et un sentiments," modeled on the lists of Hervé Le Tellier, Georges Perec, and George Brainard, breaks down emotions to their most basic levels, their 1,001 tiny recognitions. The book ends with "Carbó Frescos," written in the form of an art guidebook from the 24th century.Innovative and unpretentious, Duhamel uses twice the language usually available for poetry. She culls from the literary and nonliterary, from the Bible and product warning labels, from Woody Allen films and Hong Kong action movies--to say difficult things with astonishing accuracy. Two and Two is second to none.

    New and Selected Poems includes the best of his seven full-length collections, plus over 23 new poems previously unpublished in book form. From the charged, short-lined poems of Soto's early writing to an unflinching look at poverty and hard labor in California's Central Valley to the off-beat humor in his longer, more recent work, New and Selected Poems is a timely tribute to a brilliant writer whose work confirms the power of the human spirit to survive and soar.

    Major Jackson, through both formal and free verse poems, renders visible the spirit of resilience, courage, and creativity he witnessed among his family, neighbors, and friends while growing up in Philadelphia. His poems hauntingly reflect urban decay and violence, yet at the same time they rejoice in the sustaining power of music and the potency of community. Jackson also honors artists who have served as models of resistance and maintained their own faith in the belief of the imagination to alter lives. The title poem, a dramatic monologue in the voice of the American jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra, details such a humane program and serves as an admirable tribute to the tradition of African American art. Throughout, Jackson unflinchingly portrays our most devastated landscapes, yet with a vividness and compassion that expose the depth of his imaginative powers.

    For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

    Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics. Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the elements-to their destructive and creative aspects and to their roles in the human and more than human worlds. Both nest and crypt, the book's center holds an alphabet of "shadow georgics," poems of instruction and doubt that link knowledge and the unconscious. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate these poems. In one poem an apple calls the narrator back from the dead to savor the echoes of its varieties in myth and literature. In another, the seeds of a pear tree reveal the essential unity that makes the diversity of existence possible.Stewart's Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.

    Photographs.

    A MOUTH IN CALIFORNIA, Graham Foust's fourth book of poetry, uses the ironies and anxieties of contemporary life as a foil for mordant and sometimes violent humor. Through mangled aphorisms, misheard song lyrics, and off-key phrasing, Foust creates a unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls, a ballet of falling down. Yet the elasticity of Foust's language repels the stiff-necked adversaries of thought: what's the wrong way to break / that brick of truth back into music?

    Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch-"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"-and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."

    Truly this is the best How To book I've read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what’s for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous.” —Robert Creeley

    The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

    could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." —Time Out New York"The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."—Magill Book ReviewsA girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they’ve been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world.This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and “the joy of self-forgetting,” the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other.Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.

    Editor Stephen Cope has made a judicious selection of Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay "The Mind's Own Place" as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments," which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. Most notable are Oppen's "Daybooks," composed in the decade following his return to poetry in 1958. iSelected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is an inspiring portrait of this essential writer and a testament to the creative process itself.