With topics such as frustration with our social and natural world, these poems openly question the self and place and how private experiences like motherhood and sorrow necessitate a deeper engagement with public life and history.From "The Winter's Wife":I want wild roots to prosperan invention of blooms, each unknownto every wise gardener. If I could bea color. If I could be a questionof tender regard. I know crabgrassand thistle. I know one algorithm:it has nothing to do with repetitionor rhythm. It is the route from numberto number (less to more, moreto less), a map drawn by proof not faith. Unlike twilight, I do notconclude with darkness. I conclude.

    This book also contains two short stories, "the door" and "brief love". All of the works deal with lost love or almost loves.

    Wright interweaves familiar, coloquial speech with strikingly inventive language, leaving each poem a distinctive entity, yet interconnected by linked metaphors and images.

    These poems—set in a town that straddles Mexico and Arizona—are lyric adventures, crossing two and three boundaries as easily as one, between cultures, between languages, between senses. Drawing upon fable, parable, and family legend, Ríos utilizes the intense and supple imagination of childhood to find and preserve history beyond facts: plastic lemons turning into baseballs, a grandmother’s long hair reaching up to save her life, the painted faith jumpers leaping to the earth and crowd below. This is magical realism at its shimmering best. The smallest muscle in the human body is in the ear. It is also the only muscle that does not have blood vessels; It has fluid instead. The reason for this is clear: The ear is so sensitive that the body, if it heard its own pulse, Would be devastated by the amplification of its own sound. In this knowledge I sense a great metaphor, But I do not want to be hasty in trying to capture or describe it. Words are our weakest hold on the world. —from "Some Extensions of the Sovereignty of Science" "Ríos is onto something new in his poetry—in the way that the real poets of any time always are."—American Book Review Alberto Ríos teaches at Arizona State and is the author of eight books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir about growing up on the Mexican border. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work is included in over 175 national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music.

    I can sanitize my manuscript and give the reader a false sense of how war reduces the humanity of an individual. Not only that, but sanitizing the past distorts history and lulls a person into a nonchalant manner of behavior in determining courses of action. The end result is that I would defeat the purpose that compelled me to write my book in the first place. So what is the point? I hope that you understand what I am trying to achieve. As I put this book together over the years, I constantly questioned my ability and skill to compose my manuscript in a cohesive manner and even my right to do it, but here it is. I think the main problems were that I couldn't look at it objectively and that I tried to write it as an 18-19 year-old. I wanted to present the naiveté and immaturity, which had awesome power and control over life and death. At the same time, naiveté and immaturity could strangle you. The title, The Mailman Went UA, came from our little song and dance routine that we performed when we didn't receive any mail. It reflected the utter desolation of aloneness and heartbreak that extended beyond the lack of mail to who you were as a human being, and that impact is impossible to shake. The mail was our only touch with any degree of normalcy. It was more than a connection with the "World." It was the essential element in preserving our sanity. We were surrounded by death and destruction and became unfazed by them, but we were always hit hard when we didn't receive any mail.

    No nation can stand against his legions but even the Empire has its limits. The brooding forests across the Rhine hold warriors who will not submit and the Suevi are the mightiest of them. With only their hatred of each other in common, the Romans and the Germans cross the river to raid and slaughter but neither of them has the force to take the other’s territory and hold it. This does not prevent them trying. Otto of the Suevi, son of the Chieftain and war counsellor Badurad, lives freely among the woods and glades on the far side of the river, hoping to live the same life as his father and become a respected warrior in his turn but that is not to be. He visits a wise woman with his father and her shocking, prophetic vision of his future sets him on a different path than he could never have imagined. Fate is not to be defied so Otto accepts what she has told him as absolute truth and lets it guide him through blood and fire to his personal destiny far from his own people.

    Here are poems that bring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself.The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.

    These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.

    What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’—The New York Times‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village VoiceLisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

    Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

    The book presented a new and urgent poetry of dream-life, mystery and music, sexual obsession and the consolations of drink - all delivered with great formal skill and imaginative daring.'One of the finest first books of poems I've read for ages.' Paul Muldoon'If you are wondering whether great poems are still being written, you ought to read Don Paterson's.' Charles Simic'One of the most ferociously talented of all British poets.' Catherine Lockerbie

    Smith’s poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster.”—Marvin Bell“I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem.”—Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judgeFrom Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation’s premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade—a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned cele-bration of poetry’s liberating power.

    As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine. "We see that everything is in fact miracle fruit, including this book itself"-Andrew Hudgins.

    Selected by Margaret Atwood as a winner in the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, this unique collection was the first sounding of a deeply authentic voice. Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence. Many of the thirty-four poems in The Good Thief appeared in such prestigious journals and periodicals as The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Agni Review, and The Partisan Review.

    The poems are mercilessly recursive, placing pressure on the lyric as a mode of both the elegiac and the ecstatic. The result is an enforced silence, urgent with grief.