Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

    THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelg�ngers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow.The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness.... Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around.--Publishers WeeklyZachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other.--James TateZachary Schomburg's THE MAN SUIT comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days.--Matthew RohrerIt is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, Ren� Char and Pablo Neruda come most vividly to mind in this regard. With THE MAN SUIT, Zachary Schomburg, quietly but with deep conviction, begins to join their company. His book is a blessing.--Donald Revell

    From his legendary bayonet charge down the slopes of Little Round Top hill during the Battle of Gettysburg, to the startling calling of Union troops to salute as the defeated Confederate Army surrendered to him at Appomattox, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain redefined the scale of greatness in this country. Wounded six times in battle, twice assumed to be a fatality, the volunteer officer from Maine continued to lead gallantly until the final shot was fired during the Civil War. Valor's Measure tells the death-defying tale of this Medal of Honor hero and captures his spirit as no autobiography can.

    Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos--and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure--yawns wide.Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left," writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky--when we were told to pay attention to our breath--we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon."

    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.

    His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet's father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

    . . . Berryman becomes Everyman attempting, falling shortof, and often achieving greatness." Young's selection, the first newselection of Berryman's poems in over 30 years, encompasses the formalaccomplishments of his early work, epitomized in the masterful Homage toMistress Bradstreet, the explosive and mesmerizing diction of Dream Songs,and his wrenching religious poems. Kevin Young's poetry and essays haveappeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review,and elsewhere, and have been featured on NPR's "All Things Considered."

    US(a.) is a collection of poems that embodies the spirit of a culture that questions sentiments and realities, embracing a cross-section of pop culture, hip-hop, and the greater world politic of the moment. Williams explores what social media may only hint at—times and realities have changed; there is a connect and a disconnect. We are wirelessly connected to a past and path to which we are chained. Saul Williams stops and frisks the moment, makes it empty its pockets, and chronicles what’s inside. Here is an extraordinary book that will find its place in the hands and minds of a new generation.

    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.

    As with his debut, The Final Voicemails brushes up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force of an artist in full command of his craft and the teeming affection of a human utterly in love with the world.The representation of the end of life resists simplicity here. It is physical decay, but it is also tedium. It is alchemy, "the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where, / with what." It is an antagonist--and it is a part of the self. Ritvo's poems ring with considered reflection on the enduring final question, while suggesting--in their vibrancy and their humor--that death is not merely an end.The Final Voicemails is an ecstatic, hopeful, painful--and completely breathtaking--second collection.

    In this poetical fantasy, Marie becomes the ultimate artist/poet, composing a codex-calligraphy, writings, paintings, collage-from materials left at the dump. She is a "culture of one." The story is told in long-lined, clear-edged poems deliberately stacked so the reader can keep plunging headlong into the events of the book. Culture of One offers further proof of how Notley "has freed herself from any single notion of what poetry should be so that she can go ahead and write what poetry can be" (The Boston Review).

    / In writing. / I signed my name. / It’s death’s move.” As he considers his mortality, the poet finds a new elation and clarity on the page, handing over for our examination the flawed yet kneeling-in-gratitude self he has become. F stands both for Franz, the poet-speaker who represents all of us on our baffling lifelong journeys, and for the alphabet, the utility and sometimes brutality of our symbols. (It may be, he jokes grimly, his “grade in life.”) From “Entries of the Cell,” the long central poem that details the loneliness of the single soul, to short narrative prose poems and traditional lyrics, Wright revels in the compensatory power of language, observing the daytime headlights following a hearse, or the wind, “blessing one by one the unlighted buds of the backbent peach tree’s unnoted return.” He is at his best in this beautiful and startling collection.

    Observing the crisis of human appetite through the lenses of psychology and science fiction, she's disquieted at a world "ruled by a bi-polar father-god, unconscious, suicidal."The personal meets the collective in these poems: insane rants transform into contemporary oracular speech; a child who once hoarded candy grows into an adult who consumes a planet. Mutation, social media, eco-collapse, a dream of a survivable End Times: no less than the future of the body is at stake, bodies corporeal and political, ecological and spiritual. Was that the soul, wishingwe would invent the bodyout of existence,so many of us nowenthralled by doom...Dana Levin has published three books of poetry, Wedding Day (Copper Canyon), Sky Burial (Copper Canyon), and her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, won the APR/Honickman Award. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence.

    Fiction. Native American Studies. In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: "Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time."

    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.””