. . . It’s a place of reflection and contemplation, a temporary reprieve from the world’s chaos and a reach for a vision of paradise." —The Los Angeles Review of Books“. . .the poems [in Mezzanines] have doors that open and invite you inside. The rooms of the house may be odd, and the stairwells may lead in strange directions, but you, as the reader, remain beckoned. [Olzmann] hasn’t invited you in just to leave you. He’s got stories to tell, and they’re good.” —The Huffington Post BlogThere is no place Matthew Olzmann doesn’t visit in his poignant debut. From underwater to outer space, Mezzanines is a contained universe, constantly shifting through multiple perceptions of the surreal and the real. A lyrical conversation with mortality, Olzmann explores identity, faith, and our sense of place, with an acute awareness of our minute existence.From "NASA Video Transmission Picked Up By Baby Monitor":How many shadows are there left to name?Logophobia is the fear of words. Keraunothnetophobiais the fear of falling man-made satellites.Imagine this last one:you walk outside and look to heavenexpecting a sky lab plunging down on you—wireseverywhere, bolts loosening, metal body in flames.Instead, you see only blue, endless blue,the color of a baby’s new blanket, cloaking everything.Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.

    Here are the early poems which first brought Denise Levertov's work to prominence -- from early uncollected poems, selections from The Double Image (London, 1946), and her three books Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958) and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960), which established her as one of the more lyrical and most influential poets of the New American poetry.

    Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. “Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me. Show him/how the bag does penance.” In such prayers she finds the strength to survive the home she has to leave and, once she does, the strength to face the fires she finds flaring the country over, from Los Angeles to Laramie. Apocalyptic Swing is a work of unbelievable force, a devastating and glorious testimony about America—its lore, disappointments, and promise.

    The title, Regarding Wave,reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through theIndo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'GoneBeyond Wisdom.'" Central to the work is a cycle of songs for Snyder'swife, Masa, and their first son, Kai. Probing even further than Snyder'sprevious collection of poems, The Back Country, this newvolume freshly explores "the most archaic values on earth… the fertilityof the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, theterrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance,the common work of the tribe…”

    It is an invitation to my thoughts

    Containing a collection of poems by the author that, not only investigates the lighter side of love, but also dares to delve deeper, taking the reader on a journey into the darker aspects of love, such as indecision, rejection, fear, betrayal, loss and finally death. Inspired by his own love story, and subsequent bereavement, the author writes emotionally, and from the heart, often resulting in poems that bring a tear to the eye. For information on more chapbooks in Dark Love Poetry series, please visit the authors website located at www.darrenheart.com

    Among the poems he left behind are a particularly unsettling four that feature the mysterious Robinson: both a prototypical member of the smart set—masking his desperation with urbane savoir-faire—and an alter ego for the troubled Kees himself.In ROBINSON ALONE, Kathleen Rooney performs a bold act of literary mediumship, conjuring Kees through his borrowed character to sketch his restless journey across locales and milieus—New York, San Francisco, the highways between—and to evoke his ambitions, his frustrations, and his skewed humor. The product of a decade-long engagement with Kees and his work, this novel in poems is not only a portrait of an under-appreciated genius and his era, but also a beam flashed into haunted boiler-rooms that still fire the American spirit, rooms where energy and optimism are burnt down to ash.

    tr Rosmarie Waldrop, second of 2-vol set

    The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog.

    Teare provides us with poems that insist on the simultaneous physical embodiment of tactile pleasure—that which is found in the textures of thought and language—as well as the action of syntax. Partly informed by an ecological imagination that leads him back to Emerson and Thoreau, Teare's method and fragmented style are nevertheless up to the moment. Remarkable in its range, Sight Map serves at once as a cross-country travelogue, a pilgrim's gnostic progress, an improvised field guide, and a postmodern "pillowbook," recording the erotic conflation of lover and beloved, deity and doubter.

    Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

    This program of Bukowski's raucous poetry, recorded live in 1980, takes as its theme the poet's intimate relationship with the urban underbelly.

    Lang Leav presents a completely new collection of poetry with a celestial theme in The Universe of Us.Planets, stars, and constellations feature prominently in this beautiful, original poetry collection from Lang Leav.  Inspired by the wonders of the universe, the best-selling poetess writes about love and loss, hope and hurt, being lost and found.  Lang's poetry encompasses the breadth of emotions we all experience and evokes universal feelings with her skillfully crafted words.

    Cummings's affirmation of life resolved into serenity as he described himself as someone "whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow." This collection of Cummings reading his own poetry embodies this in an unforgettable way.While perhaps best remembered for his use of such visual devices as typography and punctuation, the sheer sound of Cummings's work imparts a greater, deeper understanding of how its cadences reveal its profound meaning. This rich sampling of his poems and lectures is rendered in what the great Robert Graves called Cummings "own beautifully modulated voice."

    Known for her art journals, Fiphie conjures up a beautiful concept of combining art and poetry, gifting the reader a unique compilation of her works. In her debut, Fiphie touches on subjects such as love, heartbreak, loss, death, trauma, femininity, longing and wanderlust. She creates powerful images which let the reader immerse deeply into her world of thought.Please note that The Dust Has Grown Flowers is exclusively available on fiphie.com/shop/