Secrets from the Center of the World


Joy Harjo - 1989
    "Stephen Strom's photographs lead you to that place," writes Joy Harjo. "The camera eye becomes a space you can move through into the powerful landscapes that he photographs. The horizon may shift and change all around you, but underneath it is the heart with which we move." Harjo's prose poems accompany these images, interpreting each photograph as a story that evokes the spirit of the Earth. Images and words harmonize to evoke the mysteries of what the Navajo call the center of the world.

The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems 1967-2001


Norman Dubie - 2001
    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

The History of Anonymity: Poems


Jennifer Chang - 2008
    Chang sweeps together myth and fairy tale, skirting the edges of events to focus on the psychological tenor of experience: the underpinnings of identity and the role of nature in both constructing and erasing a self. From the edge of the ocean, where things constantly shift and dissolve, through "the forest's thick, / where the trees meet the dark," to an imaginary cliffside town of fog, this book makes a journey both natural and psychological, using experiments in language and form to capture the search for personhood and place.

The Arab Apocalypse


Etel Adnan - 1980
    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

Broken World


Joseph Lease - 2007
    In a country where “money has won everywhere,” but the essential promise of democracy still beckons, these poems uncover our troubled psyches and show us what it might mean to be “Free Again.”

Black Wings and Blind Angels


Sapphire - 1999
    From the city streets to the rich landscape of dreams, each of these poems holds out the "black wings of expectation" offering the chance to emerge from the pain of the past and arrive at "the day you have been waiting for/when you would finally begin to live." At turns alarming and inspiring, the raw lyrics and piercing wisdom of Black Wings & Blind Angels remind us of Sapphire's place as a unique and fearless voice.

Lake Michigan


Daniel Borzutzky - 2018
    Thinking about the ways in which economic policy, racism, and militarized policing combine to shape the city, Lake Michigan's poems continue exploring the themes from Borzutzky's Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. But while the influences in this book (Césaire, Vallejo, Neruda) are international, the focus here is local as the book takes a hard look at neoliberal urbanism in the historic city of Chicago.  Named a 2018 Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library.

Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry (City Lights Pocket Poets Number 17)


Malcolm Lowry - 1962
    First published in 1962 and long out of print, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry is the only comprehensive selection of his poetry to be published, and it remains the perfect introduction to his extensive poetic canon. Edited by Lowry's good friend, renowned Canadian poet Earle Birney, with the assistance of his widow, Margerie Lowry, the selection includes extraordinary poems written during Lowry's stay in Mexico, many of which are closely related to his novel. This new edition includes a "Publisher's Note" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

No Planets Strike


Josh Bell - 2004
    Subversive in their treatment of the contemporary voice, broad in their subject matter, and often delightfully funny, the poems in this collection have a brilliant ear language.

A Tomb for Anatole: Poetry


Stéphane Mallarmé - 1961
    Eliot to Wallace Stevens), suffered many tragedies. His mother died when he was just five years old, but in 1879 the cruelest blow of all struck when his beloved son Anatole died at the age of eight. A Tomb for Anatole presents the 202 fragments of Mallarme's projected long poem in four parts. By far the poet's most personal work, he could never bring himself to complete it. To speak publicly of his immense sorrow, Mallarme concluded, "for me, it's not possible." Unpublished in France until 1961, these works are very far from the oblique, cool "pure poetry" Mallarme is famous for, poetry that sought to capturepainstakingly"l'absente de tous bouquets" (the ideal flower absent from all bouquets). Paul Auster, who first published A Tomb for Anatole with the North Point Press in 1983 (a volume long out of print), notes in his excellent introduction that facing "the ultimate horror of every parent," these fragments "have a startling unmediated quality." As Mallarme writes, it is "a vision / endlessly purified / by my tears."

The Waste Land And Other Poems


John Beer - 2010
    Winner of the 2011 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. John Beer's first collection, THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS, employs the wit of a philosopher and the ear of a poet to stage ways of reading that are political, personal, and theoretical. The speaker of these poems also brings humor to the dissecting table, to prod the legacies of great works of the imagination while balancing irony and affection.

Amplitude: New and Selected Poems


Tess Gallagher - 1987
    Poems consider women's roles in society, childhood, home, nature, language, communications, the past, and mortality.

Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream


Kim Hyesoon - 2011
    East Asia Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. "Her poems are not ironic. They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women"--Pam Brown

Chord: Poems


Rick Barot - 2015
    He is the author of The Darker Fall and Want and teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Poeta En San Francisco


Barbara Jane Reyes - 2005
    Asian American Studies. POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO is the winner of the highly prestigious James Laughlin Award for 2005, awarded annually from the Academy of American Poetry and the only prize for a second book of poetry in the United States. Although Reyes' first book was not as widely known as the first book of many of the other eligible poets, the judges nevertheless courageously chose this risky, radical, and deserving second book put out by an energetic but very small publisher. Reyes received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, where she also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Filipino American literary publication Maganda. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, Gravities of Center, was published by Arkipelago Books (SF) in 2003.