Clover fuses formal control, a solid grounding in poetic tradition (his allusions range from Shakespeare to Dickinson to John Cale), and sheer visionary exhilaration into a technical, moral, aesthetic, and imaginative lexicon that irradiates each page.The eerie cyberglow of Clover's lines illuminates a pageant of blurred and fragmented desolation: the Bomb, death camps, the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King, the whole numbing litany of modern horrors. Clover is a master of poetic shorthand, of the stark, unnerving image as immediate as yellow tape at a crime scene.Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with "God in abeyance" where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief. And here. in this utterly convincing vision of a world whose center has long since lost its hold, we see the life on whose brink we, at the end of the millennium, find ourselves poised.

    What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.”—John D’Agata“Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Jenny Boully has done it.”—Mary Jo BangA book with only beginnings and endings, all invented. Jenny Boully opens and closes more than fifty topics ranging from physics and astronomy to literary theory and love. A brilliant statement on interruption, impermanence, and imperfection.Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essay and [one love affair]*. Born in Thailand, she currently divides her time between Texas and Brooklyn.

    These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.

    Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new."Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.From Devils Lake Journal:“Keetje Kuipers’ Beautiful in the Mouth is at once lovely, frank, and haunting. The poems move easily between landscapes, inhabiting the American west, Paris, and New York City with equal ease and yet, they never exploit sympathies of locale for their power. Instead, they rely on nothing but the speaker’s own candor, who is able to speak through such disparate poems as “Bondage Play as Substitue for Prayer” alongside “Waltz of the Midnight Miscarriage,” “Reading Sappho in a Wine Bar,” and “Barn Elegy” with a good spattering of honest-to-goodness sonnets.”From ForeWord Reviews:“The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into thin air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, “a wave as well as a particle.””

    Anything can happen, and probably will, and it will affect me in small or large ways that I couldn't have imagined. The precision of their imagery keeps me reeling with delight."—James TateThin Kimono continues Michael Earl Craig's singular breed of brilliant absurdist poetry, utterly and masterfully slanting the realities of daily existence.Michael Earl Craig is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006) and Can You Relax in My House (Fence Books, 2002). He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a certified journeyman farrier.

    “All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun.” With figurative language that makes long, associative leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect themselves across poems, the collection builds and transforms its world through a locomotive echo—a regenerative force—that comes to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that will establish the already decorated young author as an important and vital new voice in American poetry.

    Her poems comprise some of the most inviting lyrics I've found in a living poet."—Bookslut"Phrase by phrase Nguyen's work can be conversational, playful, funny, angry, acutely self-aware, and loaded with sensory information."—Anselm Berrigan, from the introductionRed Juice represents a decade of poems written roughly between 1998 and 2008, previously only available in small-run handmade chapbooks, journals, and out-of-print books. This collection of early poems by Vietnamese American poet Hoa Nguyen showcases her feminist ecopoetics and unique style, all lyrical in the post-modern tradition.[BUDDHA'S EARS ARE DROOPY TOUCH HIS SHOULDERS]Buddha's ears are droopy touch his shouldersas scarves fly out of windows and I shriekat the lotus of enlightenmentTravel to Free Street past Wacoto the hole in the Earthwearing waterI'm aiming my mouthfor apple pieBorn in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC, area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint. She is the author of eight poetry books and chapbooks and lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she teaches poetics at Ryerson University and curates a reading series.

    Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.

    The two other acrobats were thieves. --from "Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It"The Darkening Trapeze collects the last poems by Larry Levis, written during the extraordinary blaze of his final years when his poetry expanded into the ambitious operatic masterpieces he is known for. Edited and with an afterword by David St. John and published twenty years after Levis's death, this collection contains major unpublished works, including final elegies, brief lyrics, and a coda believed to be the last poem Levis wrote, a heart-wrenching poem about his son. The Darkening Trapeze is an astonishing collection by a poet many consider to be among the greatest of late-twentieth-century American poetry.

    Beginning with "Riot Act," a monologue about the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992, Ai explored racial and sexual politics through the voices of diverse characters.

    In an array of poetic forms from the rhyming lyric to the philosophical meditation to the prose essay, 3 Sections confronts perplexing divisions of contemporary life—a wayward history, an indeterminate future, and a present condition of wanting to outthink time. This is an extraordinary book, witty and vivacious, by one of America’s best poets.

    Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring: a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope; brutal, luminous, and far-seeing.Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Glück compasses the essential human paradox. In Vita Nova, Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that thwart and shape it.

    Angle of Yaw investigates the fate of public space, public speech, and how the technologies of viewing—aerial photography in particular—feed our culture an image of itself. And it’s a spectacular view.The man observes the action on the field with the tiny television he brought to the stadium. He is topless, painted gold, bewigged. His exaggerated foam index finger indicates the giant screen upon which his own image is now displayed, a model of fanaticism. He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV. He suddenly stands with arms upraised and initiates the wave that will consume him.Haunted by our current “war on terror,” much of the book was written while Lerner was living in Madrid (at the time of the Atocha bombings and their political aftermath), as the author steeped himself in the history of Franco and fascism. Regardless of when or where it was written, Angle of Yaw will further establish Ben Lerner as one of our most intriguing and least predictable poets.

    Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective consciousness of fictionalized boomtowns in order to explore the myth of prosperity. The first sequence, called "Ballad of Our Jim," draws inspiration from the Old West and follows a band of outlaw fortune seekers who travel to a California mining town during the 1800s. In the second sequence, "Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!" a fictional industrialized boomtown draws its inspiration from present-day Shenzhen, China. The third and last section, "The World Cloud," is set in the far future and tracks how individual consciousness breaks up when everything—books, our private memories—becomes immediately accessible data. One of our most startlingly original poets, Hong draws together individual voices at odds with the world, voices that sing their wonder and terror.

    African American Studies. TWERK unveils an identity shaped by popular media and history, code switching and cultural inclusivity. The poems, songs, and myths in this long-awaited first book are as rooted in lyric as in innovation, in Black music as in macaronic satire. TWERK evokes paradox, humor, and vulnerability, and it offers myriad avenues fueled by language, idiom, and vernacular. From a poet unafraid to take risks, this book asks only that we imagine America as it has always existed, an Americana beyond the English language."Here it is: a dope jam of dictions; a remixed, multicultural, polyphonic dance of vocabularies; a language of high stakes, hi-jinx, and hybridity. TWERK is subversive, vulnerable, and volatile. TwERK twists tongues. TwERK tweaks speech. Reading these amazing poems mostly makes me say, Wow! Open your ears to take this music in, open your mouth to say it out loud. And: Wow!"--Terrance Hayes"Tweaking parallel languages, rebooting and putting them to (hard, hard) work, TWERK's non-stop shimmy-shimmy embarks on an anime-iigjag idio-lingual-lectical booty-roll and doesn't come down until the break of dawn. La Reina de Harlem responds to Lorca's Big-Apple-opolis heteroglossia with her own inimitable animations, incantations and ululations, twisting tongues so mellifluously that you don't even realize you've been dancing on Saturn with Sun Ra for hours and still could have begged for more. Welcome LaTasha Diggs: this is her many-splendored night out!"--Maria Damon"From this time forward, TWERK, can refer to a collection of cultural coordinates of a radically transformed Americas. TWERK--is rare poetics, a vine enmeshed onyx slab of gypsum glyphs inscribed. Cut, swirly, and nervy, N. Diggs's fractal-linguistic urban chronicles deftly snip away at the lingering fears of a fugitive English's frisky explorations. In her first major work, N. Diggs doesn't so much 'find' culture as she conjures up the new emerging happy peoples herein. Five thousand updates--download now!"--Rodrigo Toscano