The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between. One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson's trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display in You Better Be Lightning, welcoming and inviting readers to be just as they are.

    In the singular landscape of Matthew Rohrer's first book of poems, the weather, the food, even the household appliances come to life. "A few pages into this book," says the Minneapolis City Pages, "and you'll start glancing sideways at the terrain, which . . . looks suddenly vital." These quirky poems entertain and delicately point to truth. Rohrer illuminates a land of skewed realities where the impossible seems familiar, the sacher torte is afraid to be eaten, and it's always dusk in the forest.

    We find her awake in the middle of the night, contemplating love and heartbreak in all their exhilarating and anguished specifics. With astonishing openness, in language both passionate and enchanting, she offers us an intimate map of a troubled and far-flung heart: “Can you believe I thought that?” she asks, “That we would always go/roaming brave and dangerous/on wild unlit roads?”At once witty and tender, with Dorothy Parker–like turns of the knife and memorable partings from lovers in New York, London, Rome and beyond, these poems capture a restless movement through loves and locales, and charm us at every turn with their forthrightness.From the Hardcover edition.

    Each of Levin's poems is an astonishing investigation of human darkness, propelled by a sensuous syntax and a desire for healing."This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive...Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels."-Louise Gluck, from the IntroductionDana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Arts Council, and New York University, where she received her M.F.A. She lives in New Mexico and teaches Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.

    John Cooper Clarke for several decades3and a brilliant, scabrous, hilarious collection from one of our most beloved and influential writers and performers. From the "Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman" to a hymn to the seductive properties of the pie—by way of hand-grenade haikus, machine-gun ballads and a meditation on the loss of Bono’s leather pants—The Luckiest Guy Alive collects stunning set pieces, tried-and-tested audience favorites and brand new poems to show Cooper Clarke still effortlessly at the top of his game. Cooper Clarke’s status as the "Emperor of Punk Poetry" is certainly confirmed here, but so is his reputation as a brilliant versifier, a poet of vicious wit and a razor-sharp social satirist. Effortlessly immediate and contemporary, full of hard-won wisdom and expert blindsidings, it’s easy to see why the good Doctor has continued to inspire several new generations of performers from Alex Turner to Plan B: The Luckiest Guy Alive shows one of the most compelling poets of the age on truly exceptional form.

    from "The House on the Hill" . . . from out of the fog, a large, welcoming house would emerge made out of invention and surprise. No things without ideas! you'd shout, and the doors would open, and the echoes would cascade down to the valleys and the faraway towns.

    Doggie laureates not only chew on quite a lot of things, they also reveal their creativity, their hidden motives, and their eternal (and sometimes misguided) effervescence through such musings as "I Dropped a Ball," "I Lose My Mind When You Leave the House," and "Can You Smell That?" Accompanied throughout by portraits of the canine poets in all their magnificence, I Could Chew on This is a work of unbridled enthusiasm, insatiable appetite, and, yes, creative genius.

    Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry.  This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.

    Predator, the debut collection by Michael Robbins, became one of the hottest and most celebrated works of poetry in the country, winning acclaim for its startling freshness and originality, and leading critics to say that it was the most likely book in years to open up poetry to a new readership.   Robbins’s poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and irrationally exuberant, mashing up high and low culture with “a sky-blue originality of utterance” (The New York Times). The thirty-six new poems in The Second Sex carry over the music, attitude, hilarity, and vulgarity of Alien vs. Predator, while also working deeper autobiographical and political veins.

    Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory.In Collected Early Poems, readers will once again bear witness to Rich's triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political lives.

     Bone. Visceral. Close to. Stark. The poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward's collection bone are exactly that: reflections on a particular life honed to their essence--so clear and pared-down, they become universal. From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society's expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward's bone resonate to the core of what it means to be human. "You will come away bruised. You will come away bruisedbut this will give you poetry."

    Le Guin's.”  —Grace Paley  Late in the Day, Ursula K. Le Guin’s new collection of poems (2010–2014) seeks meaning in an ever-connected world. In part evocative of Neruda’s Odes to Common Things and Mary Oliver’s poetic guides to the natural world, Le Guin’s latest give voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate with us nevertheless through and about the seasonal rhythms of the earth, the minute and the vast, the ordinary and the mythological. As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Deceptively simple in form, the poems stand as an invitation both to dive deep and to step outside of ourselves and our common narratives. The poems are bookended with two short essays, “Deep in Admiration” and “Some Thoughts on Form, Free Form, Free Verse.”

    Who's the queen of kundalini bloopers, Emily Dickinson's attitude problem (that bitch) and California dreams? It's Melissa Broder, who will charm your pants off and show you a little tough love in this vivid, witty first collection of poems. Each poem is artisan-crafted in controlled couplets, weighty triplets, tight syllabics and assonance that will take the top of your head off. But you won't have the time to absorb the academic monkeyshine--so absorbed you'll be on the flip side of Bat Mitzvah stress-syndrome, Aunt Sheila's in Taos, vampires in absentia, and brand names, brand names, brand names. From junkie fetishism to a housewife with a special "thing" for laundry, Broder does dark with magnetic charisma and enchanting humor.

    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

    This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.