Rauan Klassnik's HOLY LAND is not a book for the faint of heart. His poems--dreamlike fables that conflate the domestic and quotidian with the dangerous and the perverse--are bathed in tears and blood: a trip to the bank becomes a journey to Auschwitz; bullets and gore find equivalence in rivers, birds and lush grass. In Klassnik's startling vision, 'the world knows what you want, and it knows what you need. It brings you bodies. And it brings you a gun.--Gary Young

    Over his long career, he studiously avoided joining any one school of poetry, preferring instead to freewheel from French surrealism to the avant-garde and back again—experimenting relentlessly and refusing to embrace straightforward dialectics. Whether drawing from musings on romantic love or propaganda from the Vietnam War, Knott’s quintessential poems are alive with sensory activity, abiding by the pulse and impulse of a pure, restless emotion. This provocative, playful sensibility has ensured that his poems have a rare and unmistakable immediacy, effortlessly crystalizing thought in all its moods and tenses.An essential contribution to American letters, I am Flying into Myself gathers a selection of Knott’s previous volumes of poetry, published between 1960 and 2004, as well as verse circulated online from 2005 until a few days before his death in 2014. His work—ranging from surrealistic wordplay to the anti-poem, sonnets, sestinas, and haikus—all convenes in this inventive and brilliant book, arranged by his friend the poet Thomas Lux, to showcase our American Rimbaud, one of the true poetic innovators of the last century.I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014 celebrates one of poetry’s most determined outsiders, a vitally important American poet richly deserving of a wider audience.

    White's deliberate, dominating voice evokes a Plath-like dynamism turned on to queer pleasure and displeasure, indulgence and raison d'être, the bedevilments of a gay bitch on the pole.

    Her radio play 'Three Women', also included here, was written slightly earlier, in the transitional period between 'The Colossus' and 'Ariel'.

    The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t

    Alternating between grand, Whitmanic tone and scope, Dickinsonian minute detail, Beat rhythms, New York School wit and Objectivist sensibility, this epic poem engages traditional lyricism with a breathtaking contemporary style and graceful urgency.A native of California, Eleni Sikelianos has lived in New York City, Paris and Athens. She is the author of the poetry collection, Earliest Worlds, the memoir, Book of Jon (forthcoming from City Lights), and the National Poetry Series award-winning collection The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls.

    Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous" (San Diego Union-Tribune).from "To Kiss Frank," make out with him a bit, this is what my friend would like to do oh these too many dead summers later, and as much as I want to stroll with her into the poet's hazy fancy all I can see is O'Hara's long gone lips fallen free of the bone, slumbering beneath the grainy soil.

    Cross-Genre. Asian American Studies. In INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS, Bhanu Kapil "explores/creates a shiftful place for she who is neither one thing nor another. Girl as hybrid of light and dark, of human and machine, of baby and mother, of all motherless, body-bound things. Laloo is a traveler, hitchhiking through landscapes American and otherwise. A frightening, transforming, longing book." Rebecca BrownThis work "celebrates the cobbling together of lives-tracing the simplest desires to connect bodies, words, cultures, just as they threaten to become prosthetic, amputations. With a global body and sharp mind, Bhanu Kapil maps the poetic, exhilarating journey between pain and insight. A true landmark." Thalia Field"

    The woman who loves him is left scarred and haunted. In her fierce, one-of-a-kind debut, Rebecca Lindenberg tells the story—in verse—of her passionate relationship with Craig Arnold, a much-respected poet who disappeared in 2009 while hiking a volcano in Japan. Lindenberg’s billowing, I-contain-multitudes style lays bare the poet’s sadnesses, joys, and longings in poems that are lyric and narrative, at once plainspoken and musically elaborate.Regarding her role in Arnold’s story, Lindenberg writes with clear-eyed humility and endearing dignity: “The girl with the ink-stained teeth / knows she’s famous / in a tiny, tragic way. / She’s not / daft, after all.” And then later, playfully, of her travels in Italy with the poet, her lover: “The carabinieri / wanted to know if there were bears / in our part of America. Yes, we said, / many bears. Man-eating bears? Yes, of course, / many man-eating bears.” Every poem in this collection bursts with humor, pathos, verve—and an utterly unique, soulful voice.This widely anticipated debut, already selected as a finalist for several prominent book awards, marks the first collection in the newly minted McSweeney’s Poetry Series. MPS is an imprint which seeks to publish a broad range of excellent new poetry collections in exquisitely designed hardcovers—poetry that’s useful and meaningful to anyone in any walk of life.

    Starting with Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and concluding with recent limited-edition chapbooks and broadsides, this selection traces the more than thirty year career of a major writer who - along with Ezra Pound - may be one of the most significant, and least understood, American poets of our century. Edited by noted poet and translator Paul Vengelisti, Transbluesency offers an ample selection of works from every period of Baraka's extraordinarily innovative, often controversial struggle as a serious and ideologically committed American artist - from Beat to Black Nationist to Maxist-Leninist. This volume reveals a writer shaping a body of poetry that is well a body of knowledge; a passionate reflection upon the cultural, political, and aesthetic questions of his time.

    These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.From the Hardcover edition.

    Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet. In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. “Take everything,” Wright suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.” With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, Kindertotenwald pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.

    Desperate for something solid to believe in, Capps still mistrusts authority, feeling disenchanted with God, family, eros, even her own impulsive self. And yet while the absence of faith hints at despair, these poems often achieve, almost inspite of themselves, an odd buoyancy. Playful, fearless, wary, there's a dazzling resilience in this book. One poem can make a grand and eccentric claim, "I forgive the afterlife," while another takes as its title something humbler and more poisonous, "God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake." No matter how adrift this poet may feel, poetry itself remains her anchor and lifeline.

    Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.“In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar exquisitely and tenaciously braids astonishment and atonement into a singular lyric voice. The desolation of alcoholism widens into hard-won insight: ‘the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven.’ Doubt and fear spiral into grace and beauty. Akbar’s mind, like his language, is perpetually in motion. His imagery—wounded and resplendent—is masterful and his syntax ensnares and releases music that’s both delicate and muscular. Kaveh Akbar has crafted one of the best debuts in recent memory. In his hands, awe and redemption hinge into unforgettable and gorgeous poems.” —Eduardo C. Corral

    The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions' founder James Laughlin who initially presented some of Williams' verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams's poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright's collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an Introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis.The CD included with this edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads,"poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."