This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

    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.

    Imperfect Thirst includes beautiful love poems and approaches elemental subjects with a remarkable balance of good nature and holy dread: recollections of childhood, snapshots of impassive cruelty, reflections on art and nature. This energetic collection will prove once again why Galway Kinnell is one of America's masters of the art.

    The three long poems in Eye Against Eye convey the wrought particulars of intimate human relations, perceptions of the landscape, and the historical moment, tense with political exigencies. Mayan ruins invoke the collapsing Twin Towers, love between parents and child blister with tension, and a bicycle thief shatters the narcotic illusion of a private accord. Also contained is Late Summer Entry, a series of poetic commentaries on Sally Mann's landscape photographs. Eye Against Eye, Forrest Gander's third book with New Directions, cries out an ethical concern for the ways we see each other and the world, the potential to share a vision that acknowledges our commonality. As always with Gander's poetry, suspensions and repetitions drive toward a complex emotional experience, evoking the multifaceted, multi-vocal surge of our present.

    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.

    Linda Pastan writes, "the art that mattered / was the life led fully / stanza by swollen stanza." That life is portrayed here, from memories of the poet's earliest childhood and the ambiguities of marriage and love to the surprises that come with age, always with a consciousness of what is happening in the larger world.

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

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

    But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active 25-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style.Interrogations at Noon displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.

    As a poet who has achieved success in the realms of both grassroots popularity and national critical attention, Kocot is poised to claim her place as America’s boldest new poetic voice.

    When Robert Creeley died in March 2005, he was working on what was to be his final book of poetry. In addition to more than thirty new poems, many touching on the twin themes of memory and presence, this moving collection includes the text of the last paper Creeley gave—an essay exploring the late verse of Walt Whitman. Together, the essay and the poems are a retrospective on aging and the resilience of memory that includes tender elegies to old friends, the settling of old scores, and reflective poems on mortality and its influence on his craft. On Earth reminds us what has made Robert Creeley one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

    At once melancholic and jubilant, Jackson considers the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination. From “The Absurd Man at Fourteen”He punched her again, a woman called the house,some yelling then us out the door leavingthe kitchen phone cord swinging.

    Fables, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. The Pedestrians brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations.That Great DiasporaI'll never leave New York & when I doI too will be unbodied—what? youimagine I might transmogrify? I'm fromnowhere which means here & so wade outinto the briny dream of elsewheres likea released dybbyk but can't standthe soulessness now everyone who evermade sense to me has died & everyone I lovegrows from my body like limbs on a rootless treeRachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife, The Last Clear Narrative, Eating in the Underworld, and Annunciation.

    Her deeply personal poems echo everything from nursery rhymes to classics, revealing poetry buried in ordinary speech. Whether remonstrating with a former lover or evoking her young children, the poet who reveals herself here is appealingly vulnerable yet gutsy, by turns blunt and tender. With dexterity and wit she stretches language to the wildest boundaries of poetic possibility: hers is a voice intimate and assured, her observations of the world delivered in love notes addressed to us all."did I mention my first kiss was extractedby someone who never should have been thatlucky?" - From "Keep Some Stuff for Yourself"

    Haunted by their childhoods of material and emotional poverty, Jimmy and Rita float through days in urban San Francisco.