Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.

    This work is light, deft, dangerous. There are perfect poems here, such as “The End”, which enacts a simple, startling twist on the hoary injunction to “Walk towards the light.” See, everything you know is wrong. You really have to read this book. -Rae AmrantroutI've always found Kendal Frey's poems fascinating to the point of transfix—they make compelling reading: I've never started one I didn't finish, something I can say of very few other poets' work. Her first full-length collection surely places her among the most brilliant of today's young poets. The Grief Performance commands and rewards the mind's richest attendance.--Bill KnottEmily Kendal Frey’s The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.--Dorothea LaskyEmily Kendal Frey's poems are made of words that can fake out death, trick abandonment into a bed, turn love into hands. They are rich with sound, brave with secrets, funny (tragic), and open ( ). She will twist up your heart into your next heart. Settle in. There are three dead people in her.--Zachary Schomburg

    John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”

    In this stunningly inventive collection—a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry—Ali excavates the devastation wrought upon his childhood home, Kashmir, and reveals a more personal devastation: his mother's death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir.

    As such she is deeply fascinated-and intimately familiar—with the toll exacted from young women whose lives are offered in sacrifice as starlets. The stories of these actresses, both famous and obscure-tragic stories of suicide, murder, obscurity, and other forms of death—inspired this empathic and emotionally charged collection of new poetic work. Featuring subjects from Marilyn Monroe and Frances Farmer to Dana Plato and Brittany Murphy—and paired with original artwork commissioned for the book by luminaries including David Lynch, Adrian Tome, Marilyn Manson, and Marcel Dzama—Dark Sparkler is a surprising and provocative collection from a young artist of wide-ranging talent, culminating in an extended, confessional epilogue of astonishing candor and poetic command. Actresses featured in Dark Sparkler include:Marilyn MonroeBrittany MurphyDana PlatoJayne MansfieldJean HarlowDominique DunneSharon TateHeather O’RourkeBridgette AndersenShannon Michelle WilseyJudith BarsiPeg EntwistleCarole LandisAnissa JonesSusan PetersBarbara La MarrLucy GordonSirkka SariLi ToblerThelma ToddSamantha SmithLupe ValezTaruni SachdevRebecca Shaeffer

    our darkest times are where we grow the most, so in this book, i share mine, and together, we learn how to heal.

    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.

    Her poems are lit with magic and stark with truth: whether they speak from the imagined dwelling of her “Abandonarium,” or from habitats where animals are farmed and harmed “humanely,” or even from the surreal confines of death row, they find a voice like no other—dazzling, intimate, startling, heartbreaking. Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broido’s verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a comic irony: “We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.” She dares the unexplained: “The wings were left ajar / At the altar where I’ve knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough / As sugar raw, and sweet.” Each poem is a rebellious chain of words: “Be good, they said, and so too I was / Good until I was not.” Strange narratives, interior and exterior, make a world that is foreign and yet our own; like Dickinson, Brock-Broido constructs a spider-sibling, commanding the “silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.” And why create the web? Because: “If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.”

    . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this."--Boston Evening Globe

    This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?

    In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her.

    My emotions have bled out on each and every page with the ink of my pen. Your eyes will discover my soul. Your fingers casually flipping through my mind. I hope you find each delicate word as captivating as the stars. And I hope a piece of you feels the things I felt when creating this art. - 2:00 am This modern poetry book is an exploration of love, heartache, relationships, loss, finding one's self, and learning to love the life you've been given. 2am Thoughts is a poetry book similar to some titles such as milk and honey by Rupi Kaur and Buried Light by Beau Taplin.

    This is a raw and honest personal account of mental illness offered to those looking to consider, to understand or to feel, in some small way, known. Ache is a unique journey that holds strange beauty in its truth.

    She writes about giving up too much of yourself to someone else, not fitting in, endlessly Googling “how to be happy,” and ultimately figuring out who you are.This hardcover collection features completely new material plus some fan favorites from Caroline's account. Filled with haunting, spare pieces of original art, Light Filters In will thrill existing fans and newcomers alike.it’s okay if some thingsare always out of reach.if you could carry all the starsin the palm of your hand,they wouldn’t behalf as breathtaking

    In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”