Michael Dickman's first full-length collection of poems demonstrates each brilliantly....These are lithe, seemingly effortless poems, poems whose strange affective power remains even after several readings. Again and again the language seems to disappear, leaving the reader with woven flashes of image, situation, emotion....These are durable poems from one of the most accomplished and original poets to emerge in years."—The Believer"With vacant space and verbal economy, his work suggests volumes." —Poets & Writers The poems in Michael Dickman’s energized debut document the bright desires and all-too-common sufferings of modern times: the churn of domestic violence, spiritual longing, drug abuse, and the impossible expectations fathers have for their sons. In a poem that references heroin and “scary parents,” Dickman reminds us that “Still there is a lot to pray to on earth.” Dickman is a poet to watch.You can go blind, waitingUnbelievable quietexcept for their soundingsMoving the sea aroundUnbelievable quiet inside you, as they changethe face of waterThe only other time I felt this still was watching Leif shoot up when we were twelveSunlight all over his facebreakingthe surface of somethingI couldn’t seeYou can wait yourwhole lifeMichael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and began writing poems “after accidentally reading a Neruda ode.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and The American Poetry Review.

    River Hymns is the lyrical journey of a young black man’s spiritual reckoning with his family history.

    West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities--to their portrayal in the media--and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http: //sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

    The book is in two sections, the first a focused collection of wildly inventive lyrics that take as launch pad such far flung subjects as allergenesis, the contents and significance of swamps, a revised notion of marriage, and ancestors—both actual and dreamed. The eponymous second section is a cogent series, or long poem, based on a persona named "the eater," who, along with the poems themselves, storms voraciously through tablefuls of Chinese delicacies (each poem in the series takes its titles from an actual Chinese dish), as well as through doubts and confident proclamations from regions of an exploratory self. Hymn for the Black Terrific has Falstaffian panache; it is a book of pure astonishment.Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and the co-editor of Transom, an independent on-line poetry journal. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. Petrosino teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

    In his second collection he engages love, mortality, and life in New York City after 9/11. The title piece, a prose-poem synopsis of an unwritten novel, turns all literary forms upon themselves with savvy and flair, while the elegy cycle “Twenty Poems for Noelle” is a compassionate song for a suffering friend.Noelle, somewhere in an apartmentsymphony number twolistens to you breathing.Broken glass in the street.What was once unglowing glows. . . The Pajamaist is an intimate book filled with sly wit and an ever-present, infectious openness to amazement. Zapruder’s poems are urbane and constantly, curiously searching.

    Carol Ann Duffy's 'Rapture' is about the loss and rediscovery of love in all its aspects - erotic, intellectual, emotional.

    Weaving between whispered science and circus, Campbell turns a cracked mirror on society and asks who gets to control the twisted tales hiding in the wings. Jen Campbell received an Eric Gregory Award in 2016, is Vlogger in Residence for the Poetry Book Society, and was a judge of the Forward Prize in 2018. She talks about books, fairy tales and disfigurement at youtube.com/jenvcampbell. She lives in London.

    and Beatrice, first introduced in The Babies. Unbeknownst to them they have come into being under the laws of Tsim Tsum, a Kabbalistic claim that a being cannot become, or come into existence, unless the creator of that being departs from that being. Along their journey they encounter many beguiling characters including The Healer, The Collector, Walter B.'s Extraordinary Cousin, and the Oldest Animal. These figures bewilder and dislodge what is at the heart of the immigrant experience: survival, testimony, and belonging.

    Hicok gives readers unexpected conjunctions and oddly offbeat thoughts, most darkly whimsical, and has us embrace them wholeheartedly. If he can survive the scary carnival that is this world, we can, too. Highly recommended for a wide range of readers.”— Library Journal, starred review“Bob Hicok is one of my favorite poets. Partly, it’s the movement of his lines, which are both conversational and utterly unexpected, almost as if he (or we) are joining a conversation that extends beyond the framework of the poem…And then there’s his unrelenting vision, a sense of the world as both utterly real and utterly elusive, and heartbreaking because we have to die. Death is at the center of Hicok’s writing—not in a maudlin, self-pitying way, but rather as a vivid presence, infusing everything, even the deepest moments of connection, with a steely sense of loss.”—David Ulin, reviewing Elegy Owed in the Los Angeles Times“This gorgeous collection [Elegy Owed] spans the landscape of loss with unexpected leaps and ripples, as if someone has skipped stones across a lake. …Wordplay, subtle humor and unexpected moments of hope give these lush poems depth and dimension. Hicok’s work is memorable because of the new vistas it creates.” —The Washington Post"Words have weight in Hicok’s poems. They feel nailed in place, and the meter hits like the sure pounding of a hammer. Yet as heft, muscle, and precision draw you forward, Hicok evokes not solidity but, rather, shifting ground, flux, metamorphosis, and, most arrestingly, most unnervingly, death. In his seventh collection, Hicok builds startling images out of the everyday and the surreal, the comic and the sorrowful. Avoiding abstraction and pretension, he cleaves to earth, skin, breath." –Donna Seaman, Booklist“Hicok’s poems [in Elegy Owed] are like boomerangs; they jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter.” —Publishers Weekly"Seamlessly, miraculously, [Hicok's] judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."—The New York Times Book ReviewWhen asked in an interview “What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?” he answered, “Bob Hicok.” Elegy Owed, Hicok’s eighth book, is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and “you can never step into the same not going home again twice.” His poems are the messenger at the door, the unwanted telegram—telling a joke, imparting a depth of longing, returning us finally to a different kind of normality where “the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call.” There is grief in these poems, though it is a grief large enough for odd awakenings and the unexpected, a grief enlarged by music, color, and joy as well as sober wisdom.“Hicok is funny as hell, in Blake’s sense of the infernal: irreverent, anarchic, undeceived. His bracing ill humor is a vehicle for outrage, longing, tenderness, and a shy cynicism that is the necessary counterbalance to a tenacious sense of hope. He is one of our premier anatomists of contemporary American life, and a wildly refreshing, necessary poet.” —Mark DotyBob Hicok is one of the most active poets writing today, and his poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker and Poetry. His honors include the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and a "Notable Book of the Year" from Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

    When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya's girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky's long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.Finalist for the T. S. Eliot PrizeFinalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

    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.

    In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. With grief, anger, and, ultimately, understanding, Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, confining definitions of identity, and the deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s. Wonderland reminds us that, while these neighborhoods are filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, they are also places of innocence and love.

    Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

    Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesIn Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice—inquisitive, lyrical, and wry—turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.

    could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." —Time Out New York"The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."—Magill Book ReviewsA girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they’ve been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world.This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and “the joy of self-forgetting,” the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other.Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.