Wright is one of America’s leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, “C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.”Rising, Falling, Hovering is a work of profound social, political, and cultural consequence, a collection that uses experimental forms to climb within the unrest teeming around the world and inside the individual. “We are running on Aztec time,” she writes, “fifth and final cycle.”In short lyrics and long sequences, Wright’s language is ever-sharpened with political ferocity as she overlays voices from the United States, Oaxaca, Baghdad, and the borderlands between nations, to reveal the human struggle for connection and justice during times of upheaval and grief.If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or5 cents for 50 chiles can Wal-Mex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on to US.Will they open a Supercenter in Falluja once it is pacified. Once the corpsesin the garden have decomposed. Once the wild dogs have finished off the bones.Does the war never end. Is this the war of all against all.Who will build the great wall between us, the illegals, the vigilantes, theevangelicals. . .C.D. Wright, author of twelve collections of poetry and prose, is a professor of English at Brown University and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. She lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

    To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transform, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively we enter inside of that which we devour.--Nick FlynnThis is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It's the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It's not too late. We can start over from right here and right now.--Marie HoweIn every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading RENDER how deeply I was handing everything over.--Nikky Finney

    This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Brontë sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

    With sharp wit and relentless questioning, Shapero crafts poems a reader can, if not believe in, then trust--to level with us, to surprise us, and to stay with us long after we put the book down. No Object is a fast ride you will not easily forget.

    Andrew Hudgins imagines himself in the life of a now largely forgotten poet, Sidney Lanier, who served as a soldier for the Confederacy.

    "Shroud of the Gnome" is a bravura performance in Tate's signature style: playful, wicked, deliriously sober, charming, and dazzling. Here, once again, one of America's most masterful poets celebrates the inexplicable in his own strange tongue.

    (It was John Findura in Verse Magazine.) She's also been compared to comedian Sarah Silverman, artist Jeff Koons, a 10-year-old who can't keep her mouth shut, and cartoonist R. Crumb. None of these equations is quite right, however. Jennifer L. Knox's work is unmistakably her own: darkly hilarious, surprisingly empathetic, utterly original. DRUNK BY NOON is the eagerly awaited sequel to Knox's first book, A GRINGO LIKE ME, which is also available from Bloof in a new edition. Jennifer L. Knox is a three-time contributor to the Best American Poetry Series and her poems have also appeared in Great American Prose Poems and Great American Erotic Poems. For more information, see www.jenniferlknox.com.

    Includes DVD. What happens when a person loses hope and yet still has the urge to make a photograph or draw with a stick in the dirt? Kate Greenstreet would like you to read this book as if you had found it left behind on the empty bus seat next to you--a document not directly addressing the question Why do we make art, but one that notices that one does make art, despite conditions, and that one would regardless. THE LAST 4 THINGS comes with a DVD of two movies created by the author. A poem is made by composition, by putting things together, and when you read this book your hands tingle. THE LAST 4 THINGS brings craftsmanship to reverie; it turns dreaming into meaningful work. It is a serious approach to the grammar of our emotions and you do well to read it with your hands--Thomas Basboll.

    Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

    and Beatrice, first introduced in The Babies. Unbeknownst to them they have come into being under the laws of Tsim Tsum, a Kabbalistic claim that a being cannot become, or come into existence, unless the creator of that being departs from that being. Along their journey they encounter many beguiling characters including The Healer, The Collector, Walter B.'s Extraordinary Cousin, and the Oldest Animal. These figures bewilder and dislodge what is at the heart of the immigrant experience: survival, testimony, and belonging.

    But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.

    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.

    It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

    White's The Salt Ecstasies—originally published in 1982, shortly after White's untimely death—has earned a reputation for its artful and explicit expression of love and desire. In this new edition, with an introduction by Mark Doty and previously unpublished works by White, his invaluable poetry is again available—clear, passionate, and hard-earned.The Salt Ecstasies is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

    were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry. Long-lined and often laugh-out-loud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything--the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "The world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing."