Starting there, this extended poem—part art criticism, part history—considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.

    Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including "still lifes," "instructions," and "symptoms."From "Symptoms of Aftermath":…When I am saved, a slim nurseleans out of the white light. I needto hear your voice, sweetheart. I seemy escape. I walk into the water.The sky is blue like the ocean,which is blue like the sky.Camille Rankine is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship, her poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, and other publications. Currently, she is assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in Harlem.

    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.

    No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

    This is a major new voice.” — Margaret AtwoodThe Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. Forché's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

    Moving between dramatic and interior monologue, and moving through intersecting histories, the ambiguities of inwardness and the eros of wakeful existence, these poems search for relationships with self, others, the world and God that are authentic—however quirky or strange."This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald JusticeIn Tennessee I Found a FireflyFlashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clungto the dark of it: the legs of the spiderheld the tucked wings close,held the abdomen still in the midst of callingwith thrusts of phosphorescent light—When I am tired of being human, I try to rememberthe two stuck together like burrs. I try to place themcentral in my mind where everything else mustsurround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.There is courtship, and there is hunger. I supposethere are grips from which even angels cannot fly.Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.When I am tired of only touching,I have my mouth to try to tell youwhat, in your arms, is not erased"This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald Justice

    The poems are mercilessly recursive, placing pressure on the lyric as a mode of both the elegiac and the ecstatic. The result is an enforced silence, urgent with grief.

    The historical body of evidence that remains from the Salem witch trials of 1692 touched the hands, mind, and imagination of poet Nicole Cooley, compelling her to seek entry to an inaccessible past of lies. The Afflicted Girls, so named after the young women who claimed to be victims of witchcraft, spans the centuries to give voice to those both audible and silent on history's pages--accusers and accused of several kinds: wife and husband, servant and master, congregant and minister, and, not least, bewitched and witch. Piercing, enchanting, Cooley's poems form a remarkable narrative, one that displays the enormous cultural power the Salem witch trials retain in twenty-first-century America.

    It assures you that tomorrow will be a better day and encourages you to realise your potential and achieve your aspirations. Petit à Petit is centred on themes like self-love, self-confidence and taking life into your own hands.No matter how far-away and impossible your dreams seem, don't be afraid to reach for them.

    Gibson. The pages explore hurt, healing, love, forgiveness, self-discovery and the journey towards becoming a woman. Written in four chapters each piece encourages healing and the journeying of self.

    Whatever our feelings about établissement and French Maoism here at Commune Editions (they aren’t positive), we think the book is incredible, and expect you will too.Get it here: http://communeeditions.com/excess-the...

    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.

    Simic] is one of the wisest poets of his generation, and one of the best".* For this new edition of his selected poems, Simic has added twenty-eight poems and extensively revised others, making this the most complete collection available of his early work.In the spare, haunting vision of these poems, the familiar takes on a disturbing, often sinister, presence. A fork "resembles a bird's foot/Worn around the cannibal's neck" and a bird's chirp is "Like a match flickering / In a new grave". Life's horrors -- violence, hunger, poverty, illness -- lurk unnervingly in the background. And yet, despite the horror, a sense of wonder pervades these poems, transforming the ordinary world into a mysterious place of unknowable forces.Classic displays of the economy and grace of Simic's work, these poems occupy an established place in American poetry.

    The topics may vary widely, from love to mental illness to the most recent "Florida Man" headline, but it's all in the same handwriting. Welcome to The Immortal Soul Salvage Yard.

    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.”