Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken.

    This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.

    It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

    The result easily demonstrated, then as now, the massive achievement of the writer whom Carolyn Kizer called "one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living."

    . . . Ammons makes you laugh and forces you to think hard about the way humans relate to natural phenomena and to themselves. From such simple, short expression emerge complex, often confounding ideas. New readers of poetry as well as those with an active interest in lyric verse will love this volume.”—Booklist

    This well-chosen and comprehensive collection offers a compact and affordable alternative to larger and more expensive anthologies.

    Bringing together works only sparsely anthologized or long out of print, this book is a resource for understanding the range, depth, and originality of this pioneering writer whom the poet Anne Sexton named "Muriel, mother of everyone."

    . . " In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization.Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing."Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

    But despite the power of his poems about loss, Kunitz remains ardent in celebrating life. He fully lives up to his own advice to younger poets "to persevere, then explore. Be explorers all your life."

    Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe is a collection of poems centering on the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.

    Insightful and fun, this collection of poetry captures the essence of the African American experience for young people.

    Danks AwardHapax is ancient Greek for "once, once only, once and for all," and "onceness" pervades this second book of poems by American expatriate poet A. E. Stallings. Opening with the jolt of "Aftershocks," this book explores what does and does not survive its "gone moment"-childhood ("The Dollhouse"), ancient artifacts ("Implements from the Grave of the Poet"), a marriage's lost moments of happiness ("Lovejoy Street"). The poems also often compare the ancient world with the modern Greece where Stallings has lived for several years. Her musical lyrics cover a range of subjects from love and family to characters and themes derived from classical Greek sources ("Actaeon" and "Sisyphus"). Employing sonnets, couplets, blank verse, haiku, Sapphics, even a sequence of limericks, Stallings displays a seemingly effortless mastery of form. She makes these diverse forms seem new and relevant as modes for expressing intelligent thought as well as charged emotions and a sense of humor. The unique sensibility and linguistic freshness of her work has already marked her as an important, young poet coming into her own.

    In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.   Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

    In his second collection he engages love, mortality, and life in New York City after 9/11. The title piece, a prose-poem synopsis of an unwritten novel, turns all literary forms upon themselves with savvy and flair, while the elegy cycle “Twenty Poems for Noelle” is a compassionate song for a suffering friend.Noelle, somewhere in an apartmentsymphony number twolistens to you breathing.Broken glass in the street.What was once unglowing glows. . . The Pajamaist is an intimate book filled with sly wit and an ever-present, infectious openness to amazement. Zapruder’s poems are urbane and constantly, curiously searching.

    . . . It’s a place of reflection and contemplation, a temporary reprieve from the world’s chaos and a reach for a vision of paradise." —The Los Angeles Review of Books“. . .the poems [in Mezzanines] have doors that open and invite you inside. The rooms of the house may be odd, and the stairwells may lead in strange directions, but you, as the reader, remain beckoned. [Olzmann] hasn’t invited you in just to leave you. He’s got stories to tell, and they’re good.” —The Huffington Post BlogThere is no place Matthew Olzmann doesn’t visit in his poignant debut. From underwater to outer space, Mezzanines is a contained universe, constantly shifting through multiple perceptions of the surreal and the real. A lyrical conversation with mortality, Olzmann explores identity, faith, and our sense of place, with an acute awareness of our minute existence.From "NASA Video Transmission Picked Up By Baby Monitor":How many shadows are there left to name?Logophobia is the fear of words. Keraunothnetophobiais the fear of falling man-made satellites.Imagine this last one:you walk outside and look to heavenexpecting a sky lab plunging down on you—wireseverywhere, bolts loosening, metal body in flames.Instead, you see only blue, endless blue,the color of a baby’s new blanket, cloaking everything.Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.