The poem started out as a simple observation of the snow in moonlight, and turned into a poem with more to offer. I'm offering it free to my readers. I've had it on my blog, where it's gotten much response, and wanted to give everyone another way to access it.

    The historical body of evidence that remains from the Salem witch trials of 1692 touched the hands, mind, and imagination of poet Nicole Cooley, compelling her to seek entry to an inaccessible past of lies. The Afflicted Girls, so named after the young women who claimed to be victims of witchcraft, spans the centuries to give voice to those both audible and silent on history's pages--accusers and accused of several kinds: wife and husband, servant and master, congregant and minister, and, not least, bewitched and witch. Piercing, enchanting, Cooley's poems form a remarkable narrative, one that displays the enormous cultural power the Salem witch trials retain in twenty-first-century America.

    "The Himalayas Within Him" finds Heart worrying about the sound of his own heartbeat, wondering why it doesn't "blare like a quartet of trombones" as it reflects his "ardent complexity." In "Goodbye to the Hands That Have Touched Him" Heart, after suffering many sleepless nights, decides "that love exists at the root of his problems. Without love his path would be as smooth as a plate of glass and he'd sleep like a kitten." Dividing the Heart poems is the long "Oh, Immobility, Death's Vast Associate, " a jazzy disquisition on human isolation and inaction in the midst of a planet full of people feeling similarly. Throughout Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides Dobyns has painstakingly sculpted straight-forward language into a distinct sound, creating an unforgettable collection of poems that offers readers unexpected revelations about the complexities of the heart.

    These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines.Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul.From an encomium to a karaoke booth to a conjuration of an inverse Antarctica, this collection is a compelling, powerful search for meaning, truth and falsehood. But, as ever in Roberts’ work – notably the Whitbread Award-winning Corpus – this search is rooted in the tangible world, leavened by wit, contradiction, tenderness and sensuality.This is Roberts’ most expansive writing yet: mystical, philosophical, earthy and elegiac. Drysalter sings of the world’s unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.

    Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.

    Written as a catharsis in the months following the loss of her father in late 2016, Jessica has taken pen to page to say things he and others will never read, either because they can't, or just won't. Containing entirely new works, this is a can't miss release.

    Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking. Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood. A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.

    Brown wants is a nice cup of tea and a peaceful evening with his cat on his knee. He’s too old for love and adventure. Or so he thinks. This morning when Harold Brown woke up, it seemed like a normal day. Why would a 50-year old man feel anything about a circus coming to the quiet town of Limberlost? But BonBon Circus has brought a Bengal tiger, and Harold’s never seen a tiger before. When he decides to disrupt his routine to visit the circus, it sets in motion a few other changes, all leading up to one thrilling day. Will Mr. Brown’s life ever be the same again?

    . . . Ammons makes you laugh and forces you to think hard about the way humans relate to natural phenomena and to themselves. From such simple, short expression emerge complex, often confounding ideas. New readers of poetry as well as those with an active interest in lyric verse will love this volume.”—Booklist

    S. Eliot Prize'Rich in form and reverent references, Us transports the reader from the hills of Pakistan to the schoolgrounds of Stratford-upon-Avon, from George Herbert to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.' (Maria Crawford, Financial Times, BOOKS OF THE YEAR)'Highlights of the year include the Heaney-esque lyricism of British-Indian poet Zaffar Kunial's accomplished debut Us.' (Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year)'Zaffar Kunial possesses that rare quality of negative capability which Keats first identified in Shakespeare (a guiding spirit in this, Kunial’s first collection); the poems hold us among mysteries and doubts, without pronouncing or attempting to resolve. Their beauty lies in their indecisiveness – their quiet refusal to settle matters or hold to a single view.' (Rebecca Watts, Times Literary Supplement)'His first full book, which has come together slowly, patiently, over several years... He can do clear-eyed and tender inside a single poem, without any hint of glibness. Fun fact: he used to earn his living writing verse for Hallmark cards.'(The 20 best poetry books of 2018, The Spinoff, New Zealand)'Everyone in this book is honoured as complicated and contrary, while the writing of them is always subtle and deep, generous and empathetic.' (Tim Dee, Caught by the River)'Zaffar Kunial has been called “a guide for modern times”. His first collection Us travels from Pakistan to Stratford-upon-Avon to Orkney, as he explores his own cultural heritage through language. Kunial is interested in how two disparate elements can come together to create something new. He is more formal than many modern poets; he takes tradition seriously. His writing is subtle, thoughtful and precise, his view of the world utterly individual.' (FOLD magazine)'Zaffar Kunial is a poet whose work thrills me, who makes you return to the origins of things, places, language and people again and again. He's a poet who takes traditions seriously but makes of them something entirely new - a must.' (Jackie Kay)'Us by Zaffar Kunial abounds with poems which are witty, playful and heart-breaking by turns. Drawn to the place where things don't quite meet, which he describes as "a kind of abysmal underneathness/or usness/under the heights of language", his is a wondrous poetic of loopholes, portals and translations, and of the magic in-between.' (Sinead Morrissey, Chair of the T. S. Eliot Prize judges)'There's something about the precise, thoughtful, unhurried way in which he interrogates language that marks him out as a unique talent. A real find.' (Roger Cox, Scotsman)

    

    The book features raw, blunt, and in your face poems depicting the darker side of relationships. Readers will find themes such as lies, cheating, and heartache abundant in much of this collection. Midnight Milkshakes, being the second volume of Ray's Ice Cream And Suicide, is great for returning readers to the series. The book focuses on much of the same style and mood that is common in his writings.

    The poet has faith in economy and trusts in images to transfer knowledge that speech cannot. In Curses and Wishes the short, simple lines add up to a thoughtful book possessed with lyrical melancholy, a harmony of sadness and joy that sings: May happiness be a wheel, a lit throne, spinning / in the vast pinprick of darkness. By the close of this ambitious work the poet has inspired readers to see the multifaceted effects of our human connections.

    A yellow-striped, green measuring worm opens Anterooms, a collection filled with poems that are classic Wilbur, that play with myth and form and examine the human condition through reflections on nature and love. Anterooms also features masterly translations from Mallarmé’s “The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe,” a previously unpublished Verlaine poem, two poems by Joseph Brodsky, and thirty-seven of Symphosius’s clever Latin riddles. Whether he is considering a snow shovel and domestic life or playfully considering that “Inside homeowner is the word meow,” Wilbur’s new collection is sure to delight everyone from longtime devotees to casual poetry readers. Exploring the interplay between the everyday and the mythic, the sobering and the lighthearted, Anterooms is nothing less than an event in poetic history and a remarkable addition to a master’s oeuvre.

    It’s a book with the flow of poetry but the ebb of short stories – rightfully called “Shoetry”. This creation takes you to the roots of humanity - stripping back the veneers of life, society and interaction to see people and their ways in an entirely new light.