The wit and wisdom of the West, as documented by Dalton Wilcox, poet laureate of the West.

    In his poetry, Rilke addresses the problems of death, God, and "destructive time," and attempts to overcome and transform these problems into an indestructive inner world.

    Sex. Detox. Art. Recovery. Prostitution. Music. Street life. Poetry. Toxic love. And, those are just on the surface. The layers and complexities of Addictarium will shock and enthrall you... When wild-child, and south Florida escapee, Danielle Martino finds herself curled in a ball on the cold tile floors of her filthy rank bathroom in the tiny studio she rents with her fiancé and partner-in-crime, she knows it's time to quit abusing heroin. Severely impaired from shooting a bad batch of black tar heroin, and already partially blind from the infection that the muddy poison has caused, she is forced to hitch a greyhound bus to New York City, and to abandon her care-free, American-bohemian, drug infested life-style.Hailed by many as a beautiful, unique, honest, raw and poetic account of recovery, Addictarium takes readers on a compelling journey through the life and eyes of the narrator; a creative, nomadic, deep--but, incidentally broken--young woman, and underlines the contributing factors to what it's really like to suffer from addiction. With magnificent candor--and sometimes emotionally crippling descriptions--we witness Danielle's fight towards recovery from more than just heroin, as Addictarium brings the readers on a fascinating and harrowing, brutal tale of a young women's recovery from total and mass self-destruction. --Addictarium highlights in the starkest of lights, why it is so difficult for addicts to receive the recovery they seek, when they finally do decide to put the drug down.

    His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.

    Hers is a vision like no other. In “To My Big Nose,” she muses: “hard to imagine what the world would have looked like / if not seen through your pink shadow. / You who are built from random parts / like a mythical creature–a gryphon or sphinx–.”Fearless, focused, ironic, irreverent, truly and deeply felt, the poems in Luck Is Luck draw upon the circumstances of being a woman, the harsh realities of nature, the comfort of familiar things, and universally recognizable anxieties about faith and grief, love and desire. In “Languedoc,” she writes, “Long ago / I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons / but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument / that looks like a gourd with strings attached / (the problem is always the strings attached).”Perillo’s versions of nature are always unflinching: “Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree, / a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill. / The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree’s black thorns / and the sun had stripped them of their feathers. / . . . well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless. / With a chunk of sky in each eye socket. / And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl.”Down-to-earth, full of playful twists of language, and woven from grand themes in an accessible, appealing way, these poems pierce the heart and delight the mind. Not one word is wasted.

    He is a forceful, cogent, incisive phrase-maker."—Bill Knott"The yearning in these poems is awash in dense, spiritual sexuality buffeted by time and the mishandling of promises and breakable bonds."—apt The Truth Is We Are Perfect contains fifty-four lyrics exploring the loss of oneself through the loss of an other, and how we seek to recreate ourselves in that absence. Stucky journeys into nothingness and, consequently, into awareness. His meditative sensibilities and minimalist style create ritualized poems acting as spells—transcribed to be read aloud and performed in the service of realizing that which we seek to become: "Because I love a burning thing / I made my heart a field of fire."Janaka Stucky is the publisher of Black Ocean as well as the annual poetry journal Handsome. He is the author of two chapbooks: Your Name Is The Only Freedom, and The World Will Deny It For You. His poems have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Fence and North American Review, and his articles have been published by the Huffington Post and the Poetry Foundation. He is a two-time National Haiku Champion and in 2010 he was voted "Boston's Best Poet" in the Boston Phoenix.

    The topics may vary widely, from love to mental illness to the most recent "Florida Man" headline, but it's all in the same handwriting. Welcome to The Immortal Soul Salvage Yard.

    They illuminate the gritty idiosyncrasies of immigrant life in urban barrios spanning Los Angeles to Chicago to Harlem. Rodríguez lends powerful voices to those struggling to keep the gas on, to find work, and to keep love.  Populated by a vibrant cast of characters, ranging from the drugged, to the eccentric, to the heartbroken, Rodríguez’s poems protest capitalism, violence, and exploitation while reveling in the potential of compassion.

    This collection highlights some of the very best verse that came out of a country and century defined by war and liberation. Let Paul Auster guide you through some of the best poetry that 20th century France has to offer."Indispensable . . . a book that everyone interested in modern poetry should have close to hand, a source of renewable delights and discoveries, a book that will long claim our attention . . . To my knowledge, no current anthology is as full and as deftly edited."--Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review"One of the freshest and most exciting books of poetry to appear in a long while . . . Paul Auster has provided the best possible point of entry into this century's most influential body of poetry."--Geoffrey O'Brien, The Village Voice

    His fear of commitment doesn’t allow him to settle in one place until he loses everything.Whether it’s lost love, finding yourself or seeking companionship in lonely places ― this is for you.Delivered with witty metaphors, Malanda allows for his readers to embark on a journey with him. Every page is a layer of truth as he fights to understand himself and his counterparts redefining what it is to be a man in a ‘stoic-male’ society.

    Ondaatje is said to care more about the relationship between art and nature than any other poet since the Romantics.

    Old Europe still lives in Bosselaar's rich language: Entre chien et loup, as it's known in Flanders--the time at dusk when a wolf can be mistaken for a dog.Lyrical poetry that sings of farmers, families and nunneries in Belgium and Flanders.

    Cassiopeia. A sister. A Marco Polo. A somnambulist. A documentary on the voyages of Columbus. A cartographer. Star charts. Young intellectuals in black robes. Jean-Michel Basquiat. More birds and still more birds. A mathematician. All these things appear in The To Sound’s beautifully warped cosmology. This is a stunning book that builds its own world, a world of ambiguous relations and loaded words; a lyrical world that explores the unstated connections between things. . . ."

    We follow the progression of Daniel Boone's life, a life led in war and in the wilderness, and see the birth of a new nation. We track the bountiful animals and the great, undisturbed rivers. We stand beside Boone as he buries his brother, then his wife, and finds comfort in his friendship with a slave named Derry. Praised for his originality, Maurice Manning is an exciting new voice in American poetry. The darkest place I've ever beendid not require a name. It seemedto be a gathering place for the lintof the world. The bottom of a hollowbeneath two ridges, sunk like a stone.The water was surely old, the dregsof some ancient sea, but purifiedby time, like a man made better by his years, his old hurts absorbed intohis soul, his losses like a springin his breast. -from "Born Again"

    With acute irony tempered by a generous curiousity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty.