This striking new book continues Adnan’s meditative observation and inquiry into the experiences of her remarkable life.

    As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, "Dangers here. Perils there. It'll go how it goes." The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy's knack for noticing what's so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.

    

    They’re humorous, odd, and full of all the unreasonable truth of love. This book is the real thing.” —Publishers Weekly Weise’s collection “examines the daily life and consciousness of a speaker with a disability willing to confront all taboos associated with sex, intimacy, identity, gender, and love.” - Coldfront MagazineThe Los Angeles Times described Jillian Weise's debut poetry collection as "a fearless dissection of the taboo and the hidden." In this second collection she forwards her bold, sexy poetics by chronicling an affair with a man she names "Big Logos." These poems throw into question sex, the law, identity, sentiment, and power, shifting between lyric and narrative, hyper-realism and magical realism, fact and fiction.I've Been Waiting All NightI reckon you were asleep with your girlbefore the phone rang. Make something up.I've been waiting all night to tell youabout the couple in post-War France,the woman fresh in her graveand the man who didn't like his mistress dead,no sir, and so exhumed her, to the dismayof his wife, who had him arrestedfor the stink he made.She was reburied, returned to the dead.After jail, he dug her up to fuck again.Attached suction cups and crafteda wig from a broom. You can go now.I'm more in the mood than you're used to.Jillian Weise—an above-the-knee amputee with a computerized prosthetic—identifies as a cyborg and has discussed the identity in essays for the New York Times and Drunken Boat. Her books include The Amputee's Guide to Sex (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and The Colony (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2010). She is an assistant professor at Clemson University, a contributing editor at the South Carolina Review, and co-director of the Annual Clemson Literary Festival.

    In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once." — Grace Schulman, The Nation "Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." — C. K. Williams

    LGBT Studies. In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay "Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves," Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite's fusion of gender identities: "Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: 'i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body'... This is [Waite's] genius...to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence--to get around English's pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and...."

    Driven by obsession—in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos—Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling.—from the introduction by Carol Muske-Dukes“Simone’s poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling.”—Anne Waldman“Lush, sprouting, sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Muench’s poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty.”—James Tate

    The Best American Poetry is not just another anthology; it serves as a guide to who’s who and what’s happening in American poetry and is an eagerly awaited publishing event each year. With Trethewey’s insightful touch and genius for plumbing the depths of history and personal experience to shape striking verse, The Best American Poetry 2017 is another brilliant addition to the series.

    Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels.... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate."

    At once a personal document as it is an occult text, Milk investigates overused paradigms of what it means to be a creator and encapsulates its horrors and joys—setting fire to the enigma that drives the vital force that enables poems, love, and life to happen.

    Asian American Studies. "In YOU ARE NOT DEAD Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I'm happy to have read this book."--James Tate"There's a wild and wondrous poet plundering-through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts toward things we couldn't have known before she turned us toward them. YOU ARE NOT DEAD is precisely how this book can get you to feel and that is an almost otherworldly power. The poet who imagines and builds these poems is irresistible."--Dara Wier"That fluctuating space between the temporary and the infinite is an erogenous zone made all the more enticing when articulated so eloquently. 'We have a lifespan and O how we live it out.' Wendy Xu's poems posit for us a future, a presence, a body resistant to the ravages of time. Mortality is a far planet. Here in Xu's work, we are passionately, and gratefully, alive."--D. A. Powell

    With hair teased to Jesus, mile-long false eyelashes, and a white Cadillac Eldorado with atomic-red leather seats, Fanny is not your typical granny rocking in a chair. Instead, think of a character that looks a lot like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but darkened with a shadow of Flannery O’Connor. A cross-genre collection that reads like a novel, this book is both a collection of oral history and a lyrical and moving biography that wrestles with the complexities of the South, including poverty, racism, and domestic violence.

    Lara Glenum was raised in the gothic South, studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Virgina, and now teaches at the University of Georgia. In this entirely unheimlich debut, she enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model. Glenum recovers the political intensity and daring of the Surrealist project. The extraordinary precision of these poems is so stunning, we can't help but feel blinded by their visions: sock-monkeys, dollhouses, and a circus made of meat vibrate between the playful and the brutal so deftly, each line is a perfect shard of some fantastic planet, gloriously and sadly like our own. As in Blake's apocalyptic images, the sky rolls itself up like a scroll--brilliant in its colors and infinite in its scope. Glorious!--D.A. Powell.

    Ada Limon's first full-length poetry book--startling and funny--Limon is a poet to keep your eye on.

    Mary Ruefle is of their number. Her poems discover the full beauty and anguish of life that most of us dare not see, much less depict in luminous detail for the ages.