Like the boundary between our sun's sphere of influence and interstellar space, from which the book takes its name, the poems in Heliopause locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond. Christle finds striking parallels between subjects as varied as the fate of Voyager 1, the uncertain conception of new life, the nature of elegy, and the decaying transmission of information across time. Nimbly engaging with current events and lyric past, Heliopause marks a bold shift and growing vision in Christle's work. An online reader's companion will be available.

    With Hoagland’s trademark humor and social commentary, these poems are exhilarating for their fierce moral curiosity, their desire to name the truth, and their celebration of the resilience of human nature.

    It is at once a textbook for independent travel in Africa, an illustrated atlas, a collection of life stories, an intimate confession, a list of little secrets and shame. Alternating between three narrators, it is a story of division, isolation and contact. Bantustans were reservations for Black Africans set up by the apartheid regime; in this book, bantustans refer to the bubbles in which we all live our lives. The three protagonists, as well as the people they encounter along the way, are constantly struggling to escape these multi-layered bubbles – of ego, family, social circle, class, race, religion, ethnicity, language, nationality etc – and establish contact with the rest of the world. Such attempts are often painful and sometimes downright disastrous, leading to a series of conflicts, disappointments and crises, but ultimately confirming the possibilities and importance of human connections.With a collection of maps, infographics and data visualizations for non-linear reading, BANTUSTAN is an example of ergodic and interactive literature. Readers can choose how to move through the book: in the traditional linear fashion, or using the maps as visual interfaces for skipping from one story to another. The maps represent a tapestry of pictograms, ideograms, scripts, labyrinths, emblems, motifs, secret messages and hidden clues for the reader to discover and decipher.BANTUSTAN contains a total of 32 full-page illustrations (19 of which are maps), as well as 25 smaller illustrations/glyphs.

    Invoking both the personal and the civic self, they chart uncertain new beginnings in a shattered nation. What emerges is both a poignant meditation on a daughter's relationship with her mother and a citizen's relationship to her country. from "Frontier" . . . At times, I felt sick, intoxicatedby BPA and mercury.At other times I fasted and the starsstumbled clear from the vault.Up there, the universe stands around drunk.I hope the Lord is kind to us,for we engrave our every mistake . . .

    In this ambitious lyric sequence, the speaker’s fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an imperiled planet on which all inhabitants are “soft targets.” Her melancholic examinations recall life’s uncanny ability to transform ordinary places―subways, cafes, street corners―into sites of intense significance that weigh heavily on the modern mind.“O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon/enough what’s the rush,” Landau writes, contemplating a world beset by political tumult, random violence, terror attacks, and climate change. Still there are the ordinary and abundant pleasures of day-to-day living, though the tender exchanges of friendship and love play out against a backdrop of 21st century threats with historical echoes, as neo-Nazis marching in the United States recall her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany.

    Her poems are haunted by demons, ghosts, and even the living who wander exotic landscapes that appear at once threatening and seductive. In these poems, her sly speaker renames a pink hibiscus on display at Lowe's, "Lucifer's Panties"; another character chants, "I'd fall devil / over heels over edge over oleander"; and one woman writes a letter to the underworld:Dear black bayou, once, by a riverI bit a man's neck. His scent: the rawteak air husked inside stomachs of sixRussian nesting dolls--the ones in the attic I pulledapart and open. The ones Ipulled apart and open like Styrofoam cups.

    Meanwhile, her husband Daniel mourns the demise of his marriage and his life.Full of Dorothy Porter's customary bite and sensuality, Wild Surmise is an engrossing duet between two passionately estranged voices. An intensely moving verse novel of passions and vulnerabilities, love and death.

    . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity."—Allen GrossmanTimothy Donnelly's long-awaited second collection is a tour de force, fully invested with an abiding faith in language to illuminate the advances of personal and political contingency.Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation won the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award. Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit was published by Grove Press in 2003. He is poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

    He references his own contributions to the canon of popular music, and he provides fascinating insider portraits of the industry and its protagonists. But above all, he questions our ideas of music and our attitude to sound, introducing us throughout this provocative and superbly written book to his current work, The17.

    The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one’s wild oats, having one’s mind expanded or blown, losing one’s wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.

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

    With language delicate, smooth, and wryly funny, Louise is on a voyage without destination, traveling with a cast of enigmatic others, including her lover, Ham. Louise is as musical as she is mysterious and the reader is invited to listen. In her world, anything goes, provided it is breathtaking. Bang, whose first collection was the prize-winning Apology for Want, both parodies and pays homage to the lyric tradition, borrowing its lush music and dramatic structure to give new voice to the old concerns of the late Romantic poets. Louise in Love is a dramatic postmodern verse-novel with an eloquent free-floating narration. The poems, rife with literary allusion, take journeys to distant lands. And, like anyone on a voyage without a destination, they are endlessly questioning of the enigmatic world around them.

    Though officially unsolved, Jane’s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson was born a few years after Jane’s death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche.Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, and documentary sources, including newspapers, related "true crime" books, and fragments from Jane’s own diaries written. Each piece in Jane has its own form that serves as an important fissure, disrupting the tabloid, "page-turner" quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another’s life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane’s powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do—what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.

    A comprehensive collection by one of the most intensely musical and visionary poets writing today.

    The use of enjambment here is impeccable, giving the entire collection a cadence akin to that of a march through the author's own personal underworld."— Owen Green, The Book Nook Review"One of the most authentic autobiographies told in verse."— Steve Quade, Indies Today"This is a very powerful and inspiring book that will touch the hearts of a lot of readers."— Ria Kataria, The Online Book Club"This is an in-depth essay unravelling through complex human emotions. Their beauty lies in their unadulterated voice."— Amina Thajudeen, The Ultimate Reviewer"The true power of poetry is sharing the struggles of life and this book drives that home."— Rob Alex, Book Promotion Club