Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

    

    Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

    Men with picked voices chant the names of cities in a huge gallery: promises that pull through descending stairways to a deep rumbling.

    Of her most recent book, Raptus, Carolyn Forché has written that she is “a genuine poet, a born poet, and I am in awe of her achievement.” The poems in Klink’s new collection offer a closely keyed meditation on being alone—on a self fighting its way out of isolation, toward connection with other people and a vanishing world.

    That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perceptions, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical.

    Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's bibliography: that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue--and timely--new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.

    Reflecting a new editorial approach, this volume demonstrates the breadth of Ted Berrigan's poetic accomplishments by presenting his most celebrated, interesting, and important work. This major second-wave New York School poet is often identified with his early poems, especially "The Sonnets, " but this selection encompasses his full poetic output, including the later sequences "Easter Monday" and "A Certain Slant of Sunlight, " as well as many of his uncollected poems. The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan provides a new perspective for those already familiar with his remarkable wit and invention, and introduces new readers to what John Ashbery called the "crazy energy" of this iconoclastic, funny, brilliant, and highly innovative writer.Praise for" The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan: ""This is a great, great book for all seasons of the mind and heart."--Robert Creeley"Thanks to this invaluable "Collected Poems, " one can hear, as never before, Ted Berrigan dreaming his dream."--"The Nation"""The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan "is not only one of the most strikingly attractive books recently published, but is also a major work of 20th-century poetry. . . . It is a book that will darken with the grease of my hands. There is no better way to praise it than by saying, 'If you enjoy poetry, you should have it.'" --"Bloomsbury Review ""It's a must-have, a poetic knockout."--"Time Out New York"

    Poems consider women's roles in society, childhood, home, nature, language, communications, the past, and mortality.

    Her little sister, Angela, was brutally murdered and Savage has been searching for the strength to write her grief down ever since. Finally, just shy of six years later, and one year after justice finally rained down upon the man to blame, Savage found the courage to try. This collection is an 18-poem narrative of the very real and raw emotions felt by the author over the years since the tragedy. Here, she pays homage to her baby sister and bleeds her own pain onto paper for anyone who might need help finding their own strength.

    She is working as a software engineer in an investment bank in USA. She has money ($$$$), she can afford sex outside marriage. She also has opinion on everything. She is dating various marriage prospects, will she get her dream guy?

    He collects ordinary oddities and links them together in a conversational stream of consciousness, thus disguising profundity in the everyday (or finding it there?) and only occasionally relying on the sort of portentous phrases to which so much poetry is indebted. Yet there is shape to this apparent arbitrariness, and in reading Ashbery's newest collection, Your Name Here, distinct themes do begin to coalesce and assert themselves.Many of the poems share, for instance, an unmistakably elegiac tone. In a poem like "Strange Occupations," the word "remember" appears four times in the first eight lines. The book is very much the searching-backward gaze of an older man -- Ashbery is in his 70s -- who clings to memories of people and places but is haunted by missed opportunities and unforeseen consequences. Ashbery sifts through the attic of his life, but he intertwines its contents with the colorful stuff of dreams and fictions, and he directs his remembrances to others; the book is full of constant references to "you," invocations of friends, addresses to the absent. One of the book's recurring images is that of a spool -- conjuring up the skein of days, the thread of a life unwinding in memories. Writing becomes a transcript of the aging process, a literal book of days; it preserves a sense of self before time's lens, defying the idea of "life as a sandbar...that the tide is frantically trying to erase." But the danger lies in representation replacing action: "My life at my back now, my discourse/like weeds far out on a lake" wrings its hands at the passive nostalgia of later years. In "telling my adventures to anyone who will listen" (from a poem called "Cinema V�rit�"), the poet's life is reduced to art, not transformed by it. pLooking back at his mistakes, the poet wants to know, "In what way do things get to be wrong?" and he thinks "how heavenly it would have been/if it had all happened later or differently." But an awareness of the gulf between freedom and necessity, expectation and reality, also deepens with age, Ashbery seems to say. One never forgets death, the ultimate end, but getting there can take so many routes, and therein lies the urgency of living: "One can wait on the curb for the rest/of one's life, for all anyone cares, or one can cross/when the light changes to green..." "Escape is never possible" if life is reduced to a labyrinth -- but "there is still time for surprises," for the shock of novelty, adventure, chance. "We know, they say, and keep going," one of the book's final poems declares, supplying the only possible answer for the future to iYour Name Here/i's wistful questioning of the past.p--iJonathan Cook/i

    Technically brilliant, using strict, classical prosody, yet entirely modern in sensibility, Virginia Adair's poetry will play a central role in the ongoing American poetry renaissance.

    At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: “I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry.” That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and, most recently, the savage, inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.

    Besides George Meredith and his wife Mary Ellen, Swinburne and his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton are among those who also find a place in the three poem-sequences that comprise the book: "Arisbe," "The Leisure of the Theory Class," and "Rückenfigur." Howe's historical linkings, resonant with the sorrows of love and loss and the tragedies of war, create a compelling canvas of associations. "It's the blanks and gaps," she says, "that to me actually represent what poetry is-the connections between seemingly unconnected things-as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not."