Trained in classical Greek and Latin, Phillips seems to excavate as he forms words into lines, breaking images into tiny parts of thought as he digs for meaning and accuracy. As part of this excavation, Pastoral explores what flesh, wanting, and belief are made of. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips has produced four collections of accomplished verse in the past few years. In each book, the influence of classical syntax and rhythm can be heard. And with each book, Phillips refines his poetic voice, combining the prayerlike and the erotic, and often elegantly swooping from a whisper to a scream in the space of a few stanzas.This time, the poems fall along a wide range of tones, from italicized commands like "Let me" and "Now" in the poem "Lay Me Down" to a hesitant question, or a deepening well of self-doubt. Phillips is always original, and he's always remembering, even when a poem is firmly written in present tense. He is hyperaware not only of the ancient poets, but also of history, especially the great destructions.In the ominously titled "The Kill," he remembers a familiar daily scene. The speaker analyzes his own love for another in clinical detail that suddenly veers into longing. The way these lines break adds to the sense of tragic fragment, of an ache:      The last time I gave my body up,      to you, I was minded       briefly what it is made of,       what yours is, that      I'd forgotten, the flesh      which always       I hold in plenty no       little sorrow for because -- oh, do      but think on its predicament,      and weep.In just four stanzas, Phillips moves from an image of both love and surrender to a consideration of temporality -- the bald fact that his lover is mortal. This thought of "its predicament" makes him weep, even though death is not a stated issue here.In "The Kill," the last poem in the volume, the speaker anticipates the need to remember. The second poem in the book referred to Pompeii, and the shadow of Pompeii is still resonant as the speaker describes his lover's body, still current and alive despite the title's warning.He remembers a body he has felt before, and probably will feel again -- judging by the present tense of "what yours is." And yet, the speaker here feels the need to freeze that body in time, to memorialize it. The next stanza explains this strong urge to hold on:      We cleave most entirely      to what most we fear      losing. We fear loss      because we understand       the fact of it, its largeness, its      utter indifference to whether      we do, or don't,       ignore it. The "largeness" of loss is what these poems are loath to accept, even as they seek to understand. Each poem tries to break loss down into questions, confessions, prayers, or simple expressions of doubt. While the poems fight against death and inevitable loss, they also seem to seek moral guidance to help with these losses.Nowhere is the search for answers and guidance more apparent than at the endings of these poems, which are frequently questions. Phillips is fond of abrupt, mysterious dashes as conclusions. In his quest for a moral compass, he also quotes from "Lamentations" and draws on familiar Biblical stories. The wanderings of Cain, for example, seem to appear in the backgrounds of poems where man seeks. What's more, the epigraph is from George Herbert, the great poet of faith and the war between faith and flesh. The sense of struggle between opposing ideas is something Phillips incorporates and modernizes into a contemporary parable of carnal love and constant questioning of that love. There's a frequent seesawing in the book, a back-and-forth on the big questions that permeates even the simplest narrative. For example, in "Favor," the second section of a five-part poem called "And Fitful Memories of Pan," Phillips sees a man in the distance:      Even from a distance, I can tell:       a man, clearly.       Gods cast no shadow. The struggle between man and God, between flesh and faith, is hinted at in the first stanza. Man, for Phillips, is an instrument of struggle, a tortured wanderer. The poem continues:      Also, that he tires,       stops to rest, looks like      sleeping, or could use some.       How long he has been,       coming, how long it takes, just      to cross it, the lush      measure that -- all summer -- has      been these well-groomed,       well-fed grounds, the lake      unswum and gleaming, the light      catching, losing      the useless extravagancePhillips basically forms the scene of a man walking into a discussion of man's temporality, the fact that man tires. While what God makes -- "the lake unswum and gleaming" -- needs to make no effort to be beautiful, man exhausts himself just surviving. By the last two stanzas, the speaker concludes that the body must make bets with itself:      Always, the body      wagering --      up, through itself --       Give. What he wants, he shall have.In Phillips's work, man -- though mortal -- still has great power. Man can demand, man can inspire love, and man can pray. In the struggle between man and God, in that constant "wagering," man sometimes wins.&3151;Aviya Kushner

    The author of the critically acclaimed collections The Frost Fairs and Spacecraft, Brighton-based John McCullough pulls no punches in this latest - and his most powerful -collection. These are poems of skill, joy and quiet musicality that reflect the conflict and complexity of being.

    Middle Eastern studies. Translated from the French by the author. Reprinted with a new foreward by Jalal Toufic. This book, a masterwork of the dislocations and radiant outcries of the Arab world, reaffirms Etel Adnan, who authored the great poem, Jebu, as among the foremost poets of the French Language. THE ARAB APOCALYPSE is an immersion into a rapture of chaos clawing towards destiny, and nullified hope refusing its zero. Is is also the journey of soul through the cartography of a global immediacy rarely registered by maps, replete with signposts like hieroglyphs in a storm of shrapnel and broken glass. And above all it is a book that, though capable of being read in its orderly sequence, has so surrendered to 'being there, ' it can rivet the sensibility to the Middle Eastern condition at any point in the text--so rapid are its mutations, so becoming its becomingness--like a wisdom book or a book of Changes--Jack Hirschman.It has a power and intensity that few poets today can muster--only Allen Ginsberg's Howl comes to mind.--Alice MolloyThe power of Adnan's language and imagery reminds us that she is indeed one of the most significant post-modern poets in contemporary Arab culture.--Kamal BoullattaTHE ARAB APOCALYPSE is, to date, Adnan's most triumphant battle with the exactness of words.--Douglas PowellThe poem invokes a mythic past of Gilgamesh, Tammouz, and Ishtar to presage a present that resists narration, THE ARAB APOCALYPSE contests an uncritical reflection on the immediate historical past.--Barbara Harlow

    From the body’s first mysterious eroticism to its final humiliation and pain, Gil Cuadros gives voice to both the beauty and sorrow of our common fate. His writing cuts like a double-edged sword—at times artful and sharp, at times unfiltered and raw. This is an awesome and haunting book.”—David Trinidad“The sensual, the expressive, the daring, the transformed become the matryrs of every era, every family. Their memoirs, heroics are our most devastating works of art. Gil Cuadros’s story ‘Unprotected’ is a classic of AIDS fiction and deserves a place of honor in the mosaic of American writing.”—Sarah Schulman“In a voice poised between plainspokenness and urgency, Gil Cuadros writes about the remnants of love in a devastated world. The poems and stories in City of God are as dire as they are beautiful, and sharp as a blow to the body.”—Bernard Cooper“I accuse Gil Cuadros of literary seduction in the nth degree…He makes me read on when I want to cry…I do not want to look at his words, and yet I cannot take my eyes away. His images sooth, burn, inspire. I accuse Gil Cuadros of language abuse—his stroke of silk, his pen a bludgeon. I accuse him of heart-bashing.”—Wanda ColemanGil Cuadros published stories and poems in Indivisible, High Risk 2, and Blood Whispers. His work is also on the compact disc, Verdict and the Violence: Poet’s Response to the LA Uprising. He was awarded the 1991 Brody Literature Fellowship, and was one of the first recipients of the PEN Center USA/West grant to writers with HIV. He lived in Los Angeles until his death in 1996.

    With a gift for delicate, violent imagery, Ashe invites us to lose ourselves in her world. Wrong Side of a Fistfight feels like getting lost in the woods, with someone holding your hand promising to guide you home. This is the second book of poems by Ashe Vernon, spoken word poet and author of the blog Late Night Corner Store.

    Not so with Daphne Gottlieb. In Why Things Burn, Gottlieb tackles sexuality, lesbian issues, rape, urban life, and a host of other topics with the same power of her live performances.

    Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sanchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more.

    Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one’s own path in identity, life, and love.In the HospitalMy mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, shortskeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday.My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend.Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonablepigeons. No one had the time & our solution to itwas to buy shinier watches. We were enamored withwhat our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital& I didn’t want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale,bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café. My mother was in the hospital& she didn’t want to be her friend. She wanted to be the familygrocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn’t trust my fatherto be it. You always forget something, she said, even whenI do the list for you. Even then.

    Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, some of us all at once. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

    Eloquence is only a grasping in the space of ineffable air. There are few words or phrases that do justice to the soul singing its own revelations. That place is where Last Psalm at Sea Level lives, where it is as solid as gold burning itself into light. --Afaa Michael Weaver

    It is a voice thick with the humidity and whirring cicadas of Kentucky, but the poems are dangerous, smelling of the crisp cucumber scent of a copperhead about to strike. Epistolary in nature, and with a novel's arc, Sister is a story that begins with a teen giving birth to a baby girl--the narrator--during a tornado, and in some ways, that tornado never ends. In the hands of a lesser poet, this debut collection would be a standard-issue confession, a melodramatic exercise in anger and self-pity. But melodrama requires simple villains and victims, and there is neither in this richly complex portrait. Ultimately, Sister is more about the narrator's transgressions and failures, more about her relationships to her sister and their mother than about that which divided them. With equal parts sass and sorrow, these poems etch out survival won not with tender-hearted reflections but by smoking cigarettes through fly-specked screens, by using cans of aerosol hair spray as a makeshift flamethrowers, and, most cruelly, by leaving home and trying to forget her sister entirely. From there, each poem is a letter of explanation and apology to that younger sister she never knew.Sister recounts a return to a place that Brown never truly left. It is a book of forgiveness, of seeking what is beyond mere survival, of finding your way out of a place of poverty and abuse only to realize that you must go back again, all the way back to where everything began--that warm, dark nest of mother.

    These poems are honest, vulnerable, and unflinching in their ability to look into the speaker's complications. The poems trace the author's childhood, adulthood, and hopeful future, all of them asking the central question of how a person continues to love themselves, even as all they know evolves and vanishes.

    "love is a wonderful thing,but it's not the only wonderful thing."Non-binary poet Parker Lee (formerly known as Cyrus Parker) brings to you a revised edition of shot glass confessional, a collection of 50 shot-glass-sized pieces of poetry, prose, and aphorisms about discovering your worth and reclaiming your power, both in the context of relationships, and outside of them.

    LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. In these poems, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of color resist and transform violence through love and desire. Remembering and testifying about the damage caused by the racial profiling of South Asian and Arab people post 9/11, border crossings and internal and external wars in Sri Lanka and the diaspora, LOVE CAKE also documents the persistence of survival and beauty--especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of color loving and desiring. LOVE CAKE maps the joys and challenges of reclaiming the body and sexuality after violence, examining a family history of violence with compassion and celebrating the resilient, specific ways we create new families, take our bodies back, love, fight, and transform violence.

    They explore the richness of her cultural and linguistic heritage, which spans the globe from Mexico to the Philippines. They defend with vigor and humor the color purple. And they analyze the insecurities of the letter ′h′ -- among other things.For thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.