. . . [Jamaal May's] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel."—Publishers WeeklyFollowing Jamaal May's award-winning debut collection, Hum (2013), these new poems explore parallel landscapes of the poet's interior and an insidious American condition. Using dark humor that helps illuminate the pains of maturity and loss of imagination, May uncovers language like a skilled archaeologist—digging up bones of the past to expose what lies beneath the surface of the fragile human condition.From: "Ask Where I've Been":Ask about the tornado of fists.The blows landed. If you canwatch it all—the spit and blood frozenagainst snow, you can probably tellI am the too-narrow road winding outof a crooked city built of laughter,abandon, feathers and drums.Ask only if you can watch streetlights bow,bridges arc, and power lines sag,and still believe what matters mostis not where I bendbut where I am growing.Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, Michigan, where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, the Believer, NER, and the Kenyon Review. May has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.

    It tells the story of how Orbis Rex, Young Matt and his Circle of Friends, Queen Dido and the blind Dom'nic did battle with 'a wet and withered bat' from Wuhan.

    The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role.  All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry. bird trick iv It’s all about disappearance. About a bird in a cagewith a mirror, a simple twiston the handle at the sidethat makes it come and go at the magician’s insistence. It’s all about innocence.It’s all about acceptance.It’s all about compliance.It’s all about deference.It’s all about silence. It’s all about disappearance.

    Good for poetry. Good for poetry lovers. Good for the rest of us, too.”— Nikki Giovanni Exploring themes of pregnancy, motherhood, ancestry, and life in the borderline slums of Washington, DC, the richly felt and adroit poetry of Erika Meitner’s Ideal Cities moves, mesmerizes, and delights. The work of an important emerging voice in contemporary American poetry—a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by Paul Guest—Ideal Cities gloriously perpetuates NPS’s long-standing tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets.

    In this restless, swerving book simple questions—such as, Why paint a bird?—are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its—and our own—invention.

    . . give / not only take from us." This piercing short collection treats desire in a style that is chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, and almost classical in its precision. In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers--so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other--Michaels embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. Love's sheltering understanding is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering loss of its end. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / not outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive.

    Jeanann Verlee's award-winning debut collection is a series of narratives, prayers, and conjurings which address gender, sex, race, poverty, heartbreak, and survival with such stark intimacy, you will find yourself living inside. These poems cannot possibly be about you, yet they are. They cross boundaries and reclaim hope. They are as the opening poem suggests, nothing short of communion.

    Matt McRaid, whose ancestors left the island more than a century before, joins a team of ruthless treasure hunters in search of untold wealth. One of their number is killed within hours and others soon follow. At first their deaths are put down to freak accidents but after only a couple of days in this mysterious place it becomes apparent to Matt that the true cause is far more strange ... and much more dangerous both to them and the whole of humanity.

    These quotes are a source of inspiration and motivation.Read these quotes to meditate and think about all the wisdom they contain.

    Rumi is one of the greatest poetical geniuses and spiritual masters in human history. His name stands for Love and ecstatic flight into the infinite. Today, Rumi is one of the most widely read poets in the west and has been described to be on par with Beethoven, Shakespeare and Mozart. During a 25 year period, Rumi composed over 70,000 verses of poetry focusing on diverse and varied topics. Rumi’s influence goes beyond nationalities and ethnicities with his work having been translated in numerous languages around the world. His work is mystical and intensely philosophical, with poems of fiery soulful expression, to passionate love verses filled with yearning and desire. Rumi describes the life of mystics as a “gathering of lovers, where there is no high or low, smart or ignorant, no proper schooling required.” He believed in a life journey following a love-based principle free of guilt, fear and shame. The bringing together of a wealthy nobleman and a poor wanderer serve as a reminder to us all that inspiration can come from anywhere and anyone can aid us in advancing our growth.

    In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—from the irreverent and slyly humorous to the tender, the sad, and the heartbreaking—Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language, from the chatty and whimsical to the lyrical and urbane. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit.Vital and imaginative, Ashbery’s poems not only touch on the “big questions” and crises of life in the twenty-first century, but also delicately capture the small moments between and among people. Imaginative, linguistically dazzling, and artistically ambitious, Breezeway is John Ashbery’s sharpest and most arresting collection yet.

    It’s a narrative, the story of an American innocent’s descent into hell and his excruciating return to life on the surface. Weigl may have written the best novel so far about the Vietnam War, and along the way a dozen truly memorable poems.” — Russell Banks

    Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively school -- or refuse to -- the poems explore ways girls are trained in the broadest sense of the word.Gossips, the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In Early Lessons, the third section, children narrate as they also observe similarly solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.The Mannequin above Main Street MotorsWhen the only ladies' dress shop closed, she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable, one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her on a lark -- drunken impulse -- and for years kept her leaning in a corner, beside an attic window, rendered invisible. The dusk was also perpetual in the garage below, punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close over the engines. An oily grime coated the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits, even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel conceding to that place a greater, echoing sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained, back turned forever to the dark storagebehind her, gaze leveled just above anyone's who could have looked up to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing -- her expression still reluctant figure for it.

    It is, to begin with, a book which gives prominence to poems rather than to the poets who wrote them. It is truly international, bringing together poems not just from these islands but from many parts of the English-speaking world. It is the first book to identify a strain in the poetry of the last half-century which is characteristic of the 'strange times' we live in - an age when, as the editors note, scientific discovery itself has encouraged us to 'make free with the boundaries of realism'. It values imagination, surprise, vivid expression, the outlandish and the playful above ideology and sententiousness. It is, in short, living proof that poetry in the English language continues to thrive and to matter.

    The poet crosses challenging threshholds, fear of commitment, of motherhood, shame and panic. 'I am proficient at beginnings,' Caroline Bird says. This book goes further and (with her characteristic energy and exuberance) risks the next level. People run on treadmills facing blue walls, burn talismans in their gardens, mime marriage with invisible wedding rings. Pilots bung bullet-holes with chewing gum. We cling on, to rickety rope-bridges, to something in the air, to one another. Bird's speakers exist in a state of suspension, trapped in liminal space between take-off and landing, a time of pure transition. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff-edge, close their eyes and step out into the air.