The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society. This collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. The poems that emerge from this life long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

    With sharp wit and relentless questioning, Shapero crafts poems a reader can, if not believe in, then trust--to level with us, to surprise us, and to stay with us long after we put the book down. No Object is a fast ride you will not easily forget.

    Guest editor Robert Bly, an award-winning poet and translator -- famous, too, for his leadership role in the men's movement and his bestselling book, Iron John -- has made selections that present American poetry in all its dazzling originality, richness, and variety. The year's poems are striking in their vibrancy; they all display that essential energy that Bly calls "heat," whether the heat of friendship, the heat of form, or the heat that results when a poet "brings the soul up close to the thing" he or she is contemplating. With comments from the poets illuminating their work, The Best American Poetry 1999 reflects the most exciting and memorable poetry being written at the end of the millennium.

    . .--from "The Window"Lynda Hull's Collected Poems brings together her three collections--long unavailable--with a new introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, and allows, for the first time, the full scale of her achievement to be seen. Edited with Hull's husband, David Wojahn, this book contains all the poems Hull published in her lifetime, before her untimely death in 1994.Collected Poems is the first book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. Each volume--chosen by series editor Mark Doty--is introduced by a poet who brings to the work a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series brings all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry into the hands of a new generation of readers.

    Wily, witty and weird, often haunting, sometimes heartbreaking, [Frey's] poems…dive deep, for all their individual brevity.

    52 laws of love by Himanshu Goel (author of A Rational Boy in Love) is a journey of love in 52 poems through all its aspects, from the honeymoon, to the sacrifices, to the bitter end and forever after.

    They are truly delightful and robustly original—a poetic joy."—Tony HoaglandSelected by Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series, these poems engage the structures of family and intimacy, exposing the viscera of the everyday, all its frailties and familiarity rendered absurd and remade through language.Outside there's a world where every love-scenebegins with a man in a doorway;he walks over to the woman and says "Open your mouth."Hannah Gamble has received fellowships from Rice University, The University of Houston, and The Edward F. Albee Foundation. She teaches literature and writing at Prairie State College and is the poet-in-residence at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.

    To A Girl I Haven't Met takes you on a journey through poetry and prose that reminds us all what it takes to keep believing in true love.

    His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno."From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against—political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy’s working class—both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities—whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death—but for just the opposite." —Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of BooksPier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna. In addition to the films for which he is world famous, he wrote novels, poetry, and social and cultural criticism, and was an accomplished painter. He was murdered in 1975 at Ostia, near Rome.

    It explores love, personal growth, creativity, spirituality, vulnerability, and motherhood in the art medium of words, all the while creating a rich portrait of a deeply empathetic, talented, and whimsical artist. Esoteric, mysterious, and unfailingly beautiful, The Apricot Memoirs is an invitation to dig deep, embrace the uncomfortable, and free your creativity, unbound.