Like a fantastic film, a feverish delirium, or a dream state, these prose poems use an experimental lexicon of imagery that goes beyond anything typically poetic. Tost's point of departure is the loss of the Other that makes the I: Agnes, And in a sort of coming-of-age soliloquy song, he meditates on a range of topics: fatherhood, childhood, identity, poetry. Together his poems express the unburdening of consciousness, a consciousness that contains the likes of Blake, Italo Calvino, Allen Grossman, and Frank Stanford, among others (including Tost himself), Surreal and surprising, Invisible Bride showcases the prose artistry of a new American talent.

    The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

    It will then be about them only. It will be all about the one they loved like thunder, about the one they struggled hard to keep, about the one who had left them in the middle of their 'forever', about their world shattering into pieces, about them gluing together every piece, and about them falling in love one more time.And if you still think it is about you and me, you haven't loved someone like thunder, yet.

    As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine. "We see that everything is in fact miracle fruit, including this book itself"-Andrew Hudgins.

    She's as tough as they come, but while she puts food on the table and tries to fit in at school, her mum and abusive step-father sleep off their hangovers at home.As often as she can, Robyn escapes to her nan's cosy flat on the other side of town, where she reads Anne of Green Gables and nibbles on tea and toast. But she can't stay there forever. And when her father's cruelty escalates at home she knows it's time to disappear. Pushed beyond endurance, Robyn sleeps rough on city backstreets, until help from a stranger offers the first steps to change in her terrorized life.

    Heartbreaking and humorous, Atlantis is a journey about picking up the pieces from the ruins of a life they said would be good for you.

    Wily, witty and weird, often haunting, sometimes heartbreaking, [Frey's] poems…dive deep, for all their individual brevity.

    Like a literal road atlas, the poems carry lines and themes from one to the next. Like Atlas holding up the world, they hold patterns of all kinds aloft with an attention that transforms. The poems also are an atlas of the known world, capturing the way events repeat across time and place, as in one poem that links the image of her sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a woman just "made over" on that day's episode of Oprah. Vandenberg's poems use family artifacts, memory, and imagination to plot the intersections of love, death, history, art, and desire. In the first section, "Trade Routes," about connections, each poem moves back one generation to investigate the ways events reverberate across time. The second section, "The Red Fields of Lisse (A Love Story)," focuses on a former partner, a hemophiliac with AIDS, and tulips. The third section, "Catalog of Want," contains poems about desire in various guises. The last section, "A Place Ten Years Away," reexamines the themes of the first three sections.

    Playing off the book’s title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait—by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic—of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture. The Common Man’s accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Manning’s reputation as one of his generation’s most important and original voices.

    Yet her mom, always critical of her, is furious that Elinor is touching any part of the overflowing collection of random possessions. When county inspector Race Ericson threatens a court summons if the hoard isn’t massively reduced in a hurry, he pushes Elinor to choose: Surrender to her mother’s insistence that she do nothing, obey her bossy elder sister’s edict that she sort carefully through every single pile, or satisfy Race’s demand that she ruthlessly clear out the junk? Elinor has never been shy with attractive men. Satisfying Race would be a pleasure. But when family secrets come to light and surprises turn up on her doorstep, Elinor’s task gets even more complicated, forcing her to reevaluate her long-held beliefs about her family—and her life choices. Cleaning Her House is a meaty stand-alone women's fiction novel featuring a rich variety of characters, a romance with a hint of steam, family secrets, and a ton of clutter. There's a happy ending, too. (Maybe not for the clutter.)

    Guest editor Robert Bly, an award-winning poet and translator -- famous, too, for his leadership role in the men's movement and his bestselling book, Iron John -- has made selections that present American poetry in all its dazzling originality, richness, and variety. The year's poems are striking in their vibrancy; they all display that essential energy that Bly calls "heat," whether the heat of friendship, the heat of form, or the heat that results when a poet "brings the soul up close to the thing" he or she is contemplating. With comments from the poets illuminating their work, The Best American Poetry 1999 reflects the most exciting and memorable poetry being written at the end of the millennium.

    . .--from "The Window"Lynda Hull's Collected Poems brings together her three collections--long unavailable--with a new introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, and allows, for the first time, the full scale of her achievement to be seen. Edited with Hull's husband, David Wojahn, this book contains all the poems Hull published in her lifetime, before her untimely death in 1994.Collected Poems is the first book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. Each volume--chosen by series editor Mark Doty--is introduced by a poet who brings to the work a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series brings all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry into the hands of a new generation of readers.

    / The elms made tents of solace over grimy / streets and alley cats purred me to sleep.” She writes in graphic, unflinching language about the poor, banished now by politicians because they are no longer “real people like corporations.” There are elegies for her peer group of poets, gone now, whose work she cherishes but from whom she cannot help but want more. There are laments for the suicide of dolphins and for her beloved cats, as she remembers “exactly how I loved each.” She continues to celebrate Jewish holidays in compellingly original ways and sings praises of her marriage and the small pleasures of daily life.This is a stunning collection that will please those who already know Marge Piercy’s work and offer a splendid introduction to it for those who don’t.

    Black Maria–the title is a slang term for a police van as well as a hearse–is a twisting tale of suspicion, passion, mystery, and the city. Young channels the world of detective movies, picking up its lingo and dark glamour in five “reels” of poetry–the adventures of a “soft-boiled” private eye, known as A.K.A. Jones, and an ingenue turned femme fatale, Delilah Redbone, who’s come to town from down south (“Mama bent till dark / tending rows to send / Me to school . . . I wanted / To head on & hitch . . . strike it / Big”). We follow Jones and Delilah through a maze of aliases and ambushes, sex and suspicions, fast talk and hard luck, in Shadowtown where noir characters abound. The Killer, The Gunsel, The Hack, The Director, The Champ, and The Snitch are among the local luminaries and beautiful losers who mingle with Jones and his elusive lady as they stalk one another through the scenes of the poet’s dazzling “treatment.” Charming, funky, bleak, humorous, picaresque, and full of pathos, Black Maria is brimming with the originality and stark lyricism we have come to expect from this remarkable poet.When we met her first request:Got a light?*I only had darkso gave her that instead.*Ashtray full of butts& maybes.*The sound of her heels down the hallto me means reveille.(from “Stills”)Click on the poem titles below to hear Kevin Young read from Black Maria.

    Her poems sing the body electric, from the joy and anguish of becoming a mother, through its darkest hours to its brightest days. With honesty and unabashed beauty, they bear witness to that most tender of times – when a new life arrives, and everything changes.