Snyder reveals the roots of community in the family and explores the transmission of cultural values and knowledge. "In making the handle of an axe by cutting wood with an axe the model is indeed near at hand." In exploring this axiom of Lu Ji’s, Gary Snyder continues:I am an axeAnd my son a handle, soonTo be shaping again, modelAnd tool, craft of culture,How we go on.This is a collection of discovery, of insight, and of vision. These poems see the roots of community in the family, and the roots of culture and government in the community.Formally, the 71 poems in Axe Handles range from lyrics to riddles to narratives. The collection is divided into three parts, called "Loops," "Little Songs for Gaia," and "Nets," each containing poems of disciplined clarity. Gary Snyder knows well the great power of silence in a poem, silence that allows the mind space enough to discover the magic of song.

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

    . . . Need is everywhere—in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave."—Adrian MatejkaPhillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences."Epithalamium":A kiss. Train ride home from a late dinner,City Hall and document signing. Wasn't coldbut we cuddled in an empty car, legal.Last month a couple of guys left a gay barand were beaten with poles on the wayto their car. No one called them faggotso no hate crime's documented. A beat downis what some pray for, a pulse left to count.We knew we weren't protected. We knewour rings were party favors, gold to stealthe shine from. We couldn't protect us,knew the law wouldn't know how. Still, hisbeard across my brow, the burn of his cologne.When the train stopped, the people came on.Phillip B. Williams has authored two chapbooks: Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc.) and Burn (YesYes Books). A Cave Canem graduate, he received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Poetry, the Southern Review, West Branch , and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing as a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of Vinyl Poetry.

    Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now--these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life--all life--of which mankind is only a part.

    The collection's eponymous poem, Harlem Shadows, portrays the struggle of sex workers in 1920s Harlem. In If We Must Die, McKay calls for justice and retribution for Black people in the face of racist abuse.Juxtaposing the cruel noise of New York City with the serene beauties of Jamaica, McKay urges us to reckon with the oppression that plagues a long-suffering race, which he argues has no home in a white man's world. Poems of Blackness, queerness, desire, performance, and love are infused with a radical message of resistance in this sonorous cry for universal human rights. Simultaneously a love letter to the spirit of New York City and a list of grievances with its harsh cruelty, Harlem Shadows is a stunning collection that remains all too relevant one hundred years after its original publication.

    Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”

    is the debut collection of prose and poetry by Malawian writer, Upile Chisala. This book explores the self, joy, blackness, gender, matters of the heart, the experience of Diaspora, spirituality and most of all, how we survive. soft magic. is a shared healing journey.

    Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.

    . . a contemporary genius with the language itself . . . There is simply no contemporary poet like him.” —David Baker, The Kenyon Review Albert Goldbarth has created an unmistakable signature style—learned, copious, hilarious, and heartbreaking—which has so far spanned an award-winning career of thirty-five years. The Kitchen Sink brings together forty new poems with a rich selection of earlier poetry, ranging from the brief, flickering lyric to the long, narrative sequence. In both forms, Goldbarth exerts a wild showmanship and an ever-widening scope to illustrate the complex character and interconnectedness of humanity, history, and art. The Kitchen Sink is the definitive book by one of America’s most original and entertaining poets.

    Edited by one of our most respected contemporary poets, Robert Creeley, who provides an informative introduction, George Oppen's Selected Poems includes Oppen's only known essay, "A Mind's Own Place," as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments" which Oppen wrote on envelopes and scraps of paper and posted to his wall, edited by Stephen Cope. Also incorporated is a helpful chronology and bibliography of his writings by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, celebrated editor of Oppen's letters. On his death, Hugh Kenner wrote, "George Oppen, gentlest of men...prized what took time, found the grain of materials, exacted accuracy." Oppen's Selected Poems is the perfect text for teaching and a remarkable window into a world of lasting light and clarity.

    it contains black & white photographs paired with poetry pieces; giving it a photo diary feels.

    Trumpets should be blown, garlands made ... loquacious, playful, wildly comic ... poignant. His greatness is as certain as that of the poets he invokes' Daily Telegraph 'Whatever the densities of Hill's expression, or the powerful impacted forces in his syntax and rhythms, this poetry achieves a strength, memorability and precision beyond the abilities of any other poet writing in English' Peter McDonald, TLS

    The poems weave between personal narrative and pop-cultural criticism, examining and confronting modern media, consumption, feminism, and Blackness. This collection explores femininity and race in the contemporary American political climate, folding in references from jazz standards, visual art, personal family history, and Hip Hop. The voice of this book is a multifarious one: writing and rewriting bodies, stories, and histories of the past, as well as uttering and bearing witness to the truth of the present, and actively probing toward a new self, an actualized self. This is a book at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence.

    This book of all-new poems from the beloved author of Words From A Wanderer and Love In My Language is a quotable companion on the road to healing.

    A new volume of poems by the award-winning author of October Palace.