Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.

    here’s a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.”—Publishers Weekly“One is simply content to be in the presence of a writer this vital, this large-spirited.”—The New York Times Book ReviewAlthough best known for his acclaimed fiction, Jim Harrison’s poetry has earned him recognition as an “untrammeled renegade genius.” Saving Daylight, his tenth collection of poetry–and first in a decade–is grounded in thickets and rivers, birds and bears, and the solace of dogs in a crazed political world. Whether contemplating the ephemerality of 90,000,000,000 galaxies or the immediate grace of a waitress, Harrison relishes the art and mysteries of being alive. “I’m enrolled in a school without visible teachers,” he writes in the title poem, “the divine mumbling just out of ear shot.”From “The Little Appearances of God”When god visits us he sleeps without a clock in empty bird nests. He likes the view. Not too high. Not too low. He winks a friendly wink at a nearby possum who sniffs the air unable to detect the scent of this not quite visible stranger...Jim Harrison is the author of two dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva. His work has been translated into 20 languages and produced as four feature-length films. Mr. Harrison divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.

    . . Munoz writes elegantly and sympathetically . . . [his stories] have a softly glowing, melancholy beauty." —The New York Times Book Review Manuel Munoz's dazzling collection is set in a Mexican-American neighborhood in central California—a place where misunderstandings and secrets shape people's lives. From a set of triplets with three distinct fates to a father who places his hope—and life savings—in the hands of a faith healer, the characters in these stories cross paths in unexpected ways. As they do, they reveal a community that is both embracing and unforgiving, and they discover a truth about the nature of home: you always live with its history. Munoz is an explosive new talent who joins the ranks of such acclaimed authors as Junot Diaz and Daniel Alarcon.

    One hundred voices. One hundred different points of view. Here is a cross-section of American poetry as it is right now—full of grit and love, sparkling with humor, searing the heart, smashing through boundaries on every page. Please Excuse This Poem features one hundred acclaimed younger poets from truly diverse backgrounds and points of view, whose work has appeared everywhere from The New Yorker to Twitter, tackling a startling range of subjects in a startling range of poetic forms. Dealing with the aftermath of war; unpacking the meaning of “the rape joke”; sharing the tender moments at the start of a love affair: these poems tell the world as they see it.Editors Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick have crafted a book that is a must-read for those wanting to know the future of poetry. With an introduction from award-winning poet, editor, and translator Carolyn Forché, Please Excuse This Poem has the power to change the way you look at the world. It is The Best American Nonrequired Reading—in poetry form.

    Wright interweaves familiar, coloquial speech with strikingly inventive language, leaving each poem a distinctive entity, yet interconnected by linked metaphors and images.

    Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

    The poems in this book are polyphonic: they juxtapose the discourses of science and religion, Hollywood and the occasional psychotic stranger. The title poem, which appears in Best American Poetry 2002, leads off with a "sphinx" asking "Does a road / run its whole length / at once? / Does a creature / curve to meet / itself?" Armantrout's work, with its careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored short lines, is always struggling with the problem of consciousness, its blindspots and double-binds. The poems whirl like shifting and scattered pieces of the present moment. They attempt to "make sense" of our lives while acknowledging the depth of our self-deception and deception.

    These are the engines, like poetry, that propel both our comprehension and misunderstanding. "If you're lucky," Harvey writes, "after a number of / revolutions, you'll / feel something catch."

    These poems range from personal memory to cultural history to human personae: John Coltrane, Frida Kahlo, Nelson Mandela, and "The Venus Hottentot," a nineteenth-century African woman who was made into a carnival sideshow exhibit.In language as vibrant within traditional forms as it is within improvisational lyrics, the poems in The Venus Hottentot demonstrate why Alexander is among our most dazzling and important contemporary poets and cultural critics."Alexander creates intellectual magic in poem after poem."--The New York Times Book Review

    This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments, but as it weaves itself into an even more impressive whole, my hat came off. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake.” —Maggie Nelson“A Bestiary is a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness. It seems completely contemporary (by which I mean that it is unlike anything I’ve read and that it makes me want to change my own writerly procedures). With head¬long, reckless, improvisatory gestures, Lily Hoang prompts us to rethink what literature today can dare to aspire to. Her intellectually magnanimous book’s position on the threshold between recognizable ‘literature’ and some other vanguard form of performance/utterance made me feel happy and stimulated and dizzy (in a rapturous way) while I was reading it.” —Wayne Koestenbaum“The most perfect use of fragmentation, myth, language, fairytale, and terrible beauty that I have ever seen in my life. I’m swooning. My faith in what writing can be has been restored.” —Lidia YuknavitchLily Hoang is the author of four books, including Changing, recipient of a PEN Open Books Award. She has two novels forthcoming: Old Cat Lady and The Book of Martha and she co-edited the anthology The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she is Associate Department Head. She serves as Prose Editor at Puerto del Sol and Non-Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat.

    Equal parts grim and buoyant, here is an intimate portrait of trauma, family, addiction, and body. What About the Rest of Your Life exposes the harrowing terrain where there is no boundary between love and abuse. Unapologetically raw, Yim reinvents the recovery narrative through an immigrant's lens.PRAISE FOR WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF YOUR LIFE:“So achingly beautiful I want to sing. I want to set things on fire. I want to put this book in your hands and say, ‘Here. You have to read this. Right goddamn now.’” -Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life“Never before has a book made me fall in love so quickly. What About the Rest of Your Life signals a courageous, crucial, and authentic new voice in literature." -Jenny Boully, Book of Beginnings and Endings"Sung Yim has absorbed and chronicled the new unsettled America in a memoir that vibrates with grief as it attempts to uncover the nexus of masked identities in the Midwest. Theirs is the voice of a generation who is left with the pieces of a disassembled culture. What About the Rest of Your Life is a sustained movement of life, its rawness, gaping holes, and found joys."-Re'Lynn Hansen, author of To Some Women I Have Known“Read this book built from dopamine and the hollows of its absence, this book I’m obsessed with. It will gut you and it will refill you." -Elissa Washuta, My Body Is a Book of Rules“This book is fucking brilliant.” -Glenn Taylor, A Hanging at Cinder Bottom“The kind of book that gets you somewhere new, somewhere more honest and shot through with the hard emotion of living. A striking debut.” -T Fleischmann, Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay"Sung Yim has written an enthralling memoir. It's powerful, vulnerable, and deeply pleasurable. It's a harrowing house fire of a book. Everything that Sung Yim burns up with their excellent prose becomes sanctified, gutted, and glorious."-David Stuart MacLean, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

    In these poems you will find sex and survival turned inside out, offering fresh perspective on what it means to be counted among the wounded. Where we expect to find liability, we find muscle. Where we expect to find numbness, we find thirst. Bring Down the Chandeliers is an exploration of trauma, body and faith. It is also an inquiry into forgiveness. As such these poems are not just for sexual assault survivors; they are for anyone who has struggled to forgive oneself and/or one's trespassers. They are for anyone making a life in the midst of aftermath. Tara Hardy is, as Dorothy Allison claims, "The real deal. Passionate, brave, gifted, insightful, dead-on in language and craft.� Find yourself strangely hopeful amid her explorations of addiction and justice. Consider your own compass as she navigates body, as she confronts sex as the site of what was both stolen and returned. Find a surprising bit of yourself in a story may not be yours, but in which you're invited to grapple with your own vulnerabilities and strengths. Walk away with a more intricate understanding of your own humanity.

    By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents.Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Displaced and The Refugees, Sigh, Gone explores one man’s bewildering experiences of abuse, racism, and tragedy and reveals redemption and connection in books and punk rock. Against the hairspray-and-synthesizer backdrop of the ‘80s, he finds solace and kinship in the wisdom of classic literature, and in the subculture of punk rock, he finds affirmation and echoes of his disaffection. In his journey for self-discovery Tran ultimately finds refuge and inspiration in the art that shapes—and ultimately saves—him.

    Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backwards in time to 1 BC, where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art’s strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating—a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang’s sly and elegant commentary on poetry’s enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.

    The exquisitely rendered poems in this, her fourth collection, reach back to an early affinity for proverbs and riddles and the proto-poetry found in those forms. Taking on epic subjects—time and memory, metamorphosis and indeterminacy, the complicated nature of beauty, wordless states of being—each poem explores a bright, crisp, singular moment of awareness or shock or revelation.  Purpura reminds us that short poems, never merely brief nor fragmentary, can transcend their size, like small dogs, espresso, a drop of mercury.From the Trade Paperback edition.