Gray. These are the words that arrive when you are made up of nothing but skin, bones, and too much love.

    

    Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

    This book contains the poem “Grace”, which the Poetry Society of America chose for their Poetry in Motion series to entertain public transit passengers in major metropolitan areas.

    for hurting. for healing. for souls becoming. for anyone who loves too deeply and loves too much. for anyone who doesn't love themselves enough. this is for you.

    I needed a Viking. I needed someone who wasn't afraid of my strengths or of my needs. I chose wrong in the past...Beloved contemporary poet Alfa is back with a brand-new collection of more than 180 heartfelt poems on the theme of woman warriors and the masculine heroes they long for. In gorgeous, compelling, and intimate prose, I Needed a Viking takes us on an emotional journey of a woman searching for strength in the midst of a storm.

    Everytime, he looked at me, it broke my heart a little bit more.Everytime he went away, I wrote.When he came back, I lived again.And in the end it fell apart.

    Direct, humorous and disquieting, Satellite further develops the unique sensibility of an important young poet.

    Rogue & Kat Savage.

    Here is a volume of poetry approaching Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History as a stark meditation on Blanchot's sense of writing as the "desired, undesired torment which endures everything." Levine engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events. Enola Gay's "mission" can seem spiritual, imaginative, and militaristic as the speaker in these poems surveys marshes and fields and a land on the edge of disintegration. Levine sifts the psychological residue that accumulates in the wake of unspeakable acts and so negotiates that terrain between the banality of language and the need to stand witness and to speak. Levine's stunning second book, with its grave cultural implications and its surveillance of a distinctly postmodern malaise, offers multiple readings. Here are compact poems with uncanny power, rhythm, and a strange, formal beauty echoing and renewing the legacy of Wallace Stevens for a new era.

    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.

    Best of all, he's packed us in his suitcase. He represents an ever-changing population of those raised elsewhere who find themselves beckoned by the history, mystique, and magic-makers of New York City. These poems inhabit their own contradictions, and exquisitely navigate the many complicated sides of what it means to be alive. About The Author: Jon Sands has been a professional teaching and performing artist since 2007. He's a recipient of the 2009 NYC-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam. He is the Director of Poetry and Arts Education Programming at the Positive Health Project, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. His work has appeared in decomP magazine, The Millions, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre, The November 3rd Club, and others. He lives in New York City, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know.

    With this unusual volume, arranged in six carefully paced movements to suggest the journey from death to recovery, Gallagher charges language with its utmost responsibilities: here poetry aspires deeply and urgently beyond its cultural marginality to embrace the paradox of sharing unshareable pain and to assume again an Orphic voice and a communal necessity.

    She was a teacher, and it was morning on the first day of school. In this haunting new collection of poems, Taylor Mali, once a teacher himself, explores her life and their love as well as the shape and texture of his own guilt and resilience.

    It is with a mixture of grief and joy that Hirsch examines what he calls the minor triumphs, the major failures of his life so far, in lines that reveal a startling frankness in the man composing them, a fearlessness in confronting his own internal divisions: I lived between my heart and my head, / like a married couple who can't get along, he writes in Self-portrait. These poems constitute a profound, sometimes painful self-examination, by the end of which the poet marvels at the sense of expectancy and transformation he feels. His fifteen-year-old son walking on Broadway is a fledgling about to sail out over the treetops; he has a new love, passionately described in I Wish I Could Paint You; he is ready to live, he tells us, solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free. More personal than any of his previous collections, Special Orders is Edward Hirsch's most significant book to date. The highway signs pointed to our happiness; the greasy spoons and gleaming truck stops were the stations of our pilgrimage. Wasn't that us staggering past the riverboats, eating homemade fudge at the county fair and devouring each other's body? They come back to me now, delicious love, the times my sad heart knew a little sweetness. from The Sweetness