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Fjords Vol.1 by Zachary Schomburg


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Lucky Fish


Aimee Nezhukumatathil - 2011
    With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew,” anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poems is her strongest yet.

Awe


Dorothea Lasky - 2007
    Dorothea Lasky is a daring truth-teller, naming names and boldly pushing the boundaries of confession. The secrets she tells are truths we recognize in ourselves: “Be scared of yourself / The real self / Is very scary.”Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis in 1978. She is the author of several chapbooks and has attended Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Fall Higher


Dean Young - 2011
    Embracing the elegiac, angry, and amorous with surrealistic wordplay and off-kilter music, Young coaxes us to "fall higher" into an intimate, vulnerable, expansive exchange. This is a major new book by one of America's most inventive poets.I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5,but now I want a Russian novel,a 50 page description of you sleeping,another 75 of what you think staring outa window. I don't care about the plotalthough I suppose there will have to be one,the usual separation of the lovers, turbulentseas, danger of de-commission in spiteof constant war, time in gulps and glitchespassing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sledout-racing the wolves on the steppes, the hugeglittering ball where all that mattersis a kiss at the end of a dark hall . . .Dean Young has published ten books of poetry, including finalists for the Pulitzer and Griffin Poetry Prizes. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

The Boss


Victoria Chang - 2013
    Obsessive, brilliant, linguistically playful—the mesmerizing world of The Boss is as personal as it is distinctly post-9/11. The result is a breathtaking, one-of-a-kind exploration of contemporary American culture, power structures, family life, and ethnic and personal identity.

Hard Child


Natalie Shapero - 2017
    Possessing rapid-fire comedic timing, Shapero touches on subjects such as religion, perpetual war, birth, and death—exposing humanity’s often faulty sense of what’s important and displaying a willingness to self-incriminate. These poems exhibit an expansive, searching sensibility that balks at the standard-issue hopes and fears of modern American culture.

Naked Human


Christopher Poindexter - 2015
    Christopher Poindexter's first book is an exploration of humanity at its finest and at its worst. This is a story written between 2011-2015 about the discovery of what makes us human: doing whatever it takes to keep the loneliness away.

Gabriel: A Poem


Edward Hirsch - 2014
    This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.

Destruction Myth: Poems


Mathias Svalina - 2009
    Expanding the palette of contemporary surrealism while harkening back to the stories and prayers at the origin of poetry, DESTRUCTION MYTH is a series of absurdist myths of creation and destruction that are at times both inventively silly and surprisingly emotionally direct. This book attempts the world again and again, only to find that even the most ridiculous of creations contains the seeds of its own destruction.

The Trees The Trees


Heather Christle - 2011
    In THE TREES THE TREES, the follow-up to Heather Christle's acclaimed first collection, THE DIFFICULT FARM, each new line is a sharp turn toward joy and heartbreak, and each poem unfolds like a bat through the wild meaninglessness of the world.

Snowflake


Eileen Myles - 2012
    Snowflake finds the poet awash in an extended and distressed landscape mediated by technology and its distortion of time and space. In different streets, the poet returns home, to the familiar world of human connection. Two books meet as one: more Eileen Myles, more indelible connection, more fleeting ecstasy.

The Salt Ecstasies


James L. White - 1981
    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.

Dispatch from the Future: Poems


Leigh Stein - 2012
    From online dating to beauty pageants, Greek mythology to road trips, Leigh Stein gives us resilient young women in longing and in love. Post-confessional—like Sylvia Plath raised on MTV, or Anne Sexton on Twitter—the poems seduce with a narrative hook or startle with a pop culture reference, all the while wrestling fresh meaning out of our fantasy-saturated modern lives.

Twerk


LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs - 2013
    African American Studies. TWERK unveils an identity shaped by popular media and history, code switching and cultural inclusivity. The poems, songs, and myths in this long-awaited first book are as rooted in lyric as in innovation, in Black music as in macaronic satire. TWERK evokes paradox, humor, and vulnerability, and it offers myriad avenues fueled by language, idiom, and vernacular. From a poet unafraid to take risks, this book asks only that we imagine America as it has always existed, an Americana beyond the English language."Here it is: a dope jam of dictions; a remixed, multicultural, polyphonic dance of vocabularies; a language of high stakes, hi-jinx, and hybridity. TWERK is subversive, vulnerable, and volatile. TwERK twists tongues. TwERK tweaks speech. Reading these amazing poems mostly makes me say, Wow! Open your ears to take this music in, open your mouth to say it out loud. And: Wow!"--Terrance Hayes"Tweaking parallel languages, rebooting and putting them to (hard, hard) work, TWERK's non-stop shimmy-shimmy embarks on an anime-iigjag idio-lingual-lectical booty-roll and doesn't come down until the break of dawn. La Reina de Harlem responds to Lorca's Big-Apple-opolis heteroglossia with her own inimitable animations, incantations and ululations, twisting tongues so mellifluously that you don't even realize you've been dancing on Saturn with Sun Ra for hours and still could have begged for more. Welcome LaTasha Diggs: this is her many-splendored night out!"--Maria Damon"From this time forward, TWERK, can refer to a collection of cultural coordinates of a radically transformed Americas. TWERK--is rare poetics, a vine enmeshed onyx slab of gypsum glyphs inscribed. Cut, swirly, and nervy, N. Diggs's fractal-linguistic urban chronicles deftly snip away at the lingering fears of a fugitive English's frisky explorations. In her first major work, N. Diggs doesn't so much 'find' culture as she conjures up the new emerging happy peoples herein. Five thousand updates--download now!"--Rodrigo Toscano

Bad Bad


Chelsey Minnis - 2007
    . . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger."—Arielle Greenberg"Her poems take some getting used to."—Robert Strong"Many won't find her . . . acceptable at all...—Cole Swensen

The Painted Bed: Poems


Donald Hall - 2003
    Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, "Daylilies on the Hill 1975 - 1989," moves back to the happy repossession of the poet's old family house and its history - a structure that "persisted against assaults" as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing - "mania is melancholy reversed," as Hall writes in another long poem, "Kill the Day." In this book's fourth and final section, "Ardor," the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.