Behind this language one senses a powerful, inventive woman who is not afraid to tackle any subject, including rape, genocide, and love, always sustained by an optimistic voice, assuring us that in the end justice will triumph and love will persevere.LOVE,you be the reason whywe swagger & jive,lift the guitar, & pick up the axe.when it is i tilt my hat to the side,wearing colors & perfumes, it's cause, love,you did it to me. oh,you do sure turn my tongue to fiddle,& make the salt taste sweet. man,i don't need a rooster, or peacock even,to help me spend my time, nope,just you, love, right & solid asa line.

    Man versus monster; conflict versus conversation; age versus youth; humanity versus its environment; utopia versus what we're living through now. This is a combative and moving book and an answer to anyone who's ever accused poetry of receding into irrelevance.

    . .--from "The Window"Lynda Hull's Collected Poems brings together her three collections--long unavailable--with a new introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, and allows, for the first time, the full scale of her achievement to be seen. Edited with Hull's husband, David Wojahn, this book contains all the poems Hull published in her lifetime, before her untimely death in 1994.Collected Poems is the first book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. Each volume--chosen by series editor Mark Doty--is introduced by a poet who brings to the work a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series brings all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry into the hands of a new generation of readers.

    Awake chronicles Laux's coming to terms with a childhood darkened by violence and sexual abuse--a struggle at once to embrace and to forgive the past.

    In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation—and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

    George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost modernists. A member of the Objectivist group that flourished in the 1930s (which also included William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky), he was hailed by Ezra Pound as "a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's book." Oppen's New Collected Poems (which replaces New Direction's earlier, smaller Collected Poems of 1975) is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction to the poet's life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as references in the poems.

    These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.

    In these poems, Smith opens the reader to a world of desire, longing, and deep mourning that picks up where his brothers Hopkins and Whitman left off. Startling in their formal range and virtuosity, these poems interrogate the ways the body not only inhabits but actually becomes public and private space: …tonight, I am no one’s pet, maybe an animal, wounded & hungry for revenge or sympathy but what’s the difference? Danez Smith lays down the gauntlet for all of us to speak our deepest truths with more elegance, more ferocity, and almost more beauty than a reader can bear.—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Apocalyptic Swing, Poetry Editor for The LA Review of BooksDanez Smith is the crown prince of innovation and ferocity, a stunningly original voice that chooses not to recognize or respect those vexing artistic boundaries. Here is forte unleashed, an elicit glimpse of poetry's yet-to-be-turned page, a reason to stomp and romp in your church shoes. Hallelujah is an understatement.—Patricia Smith, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah and Blood Dazzler

    Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.

    You never mourned loudly, in the streets. You never stopped (couldn’t stop) to wonder if drowning parts ofyourself was a mistake. You never kissed them goodbye.Why didn’t you kiss them goodbye?Was it too hard?Were you ashamed?Of them, or of you?Don’t tell me to be quiet.You need to hear this. Christina Hart, bestselling author of Empty Hotel Rooms Meant for Us, Letting Go Is an Acquired Taste, and There Is Beauty In the Bleeding releases her new poetry chapbook, written in second person POV, which focuses on love, loss, and hope.

    Beautifully designed with several pieces to a page, Bloom offers a unique twist on age-old topics: love, grief, and learning from them.

    She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile.In settings from New York to San Francisco, from Scotland to Seoul, her poems question "what threads hold / our lives together" in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man's-land between every "you" and "I," her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past and hope for the future. Drawing upon a wide range of voices, styles, and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world.

    Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award. In the aftermath of her father's death, the speaker of Rusty Morrison's exquisitely formed poems takes a step-by-step accounting of her transformation as she reconciles herself to loss. This book-length sequence is the silvery underside of elegy, a lyric of living acceptance paced with the linen texture of right silences. Rusty Morrison's THE TRUE KEEPS CALM BIDING ITS STORY brilliantly restores the energy of telegraphic communication, launching line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning. Her careful handling of form allows knowing to remain both openly discrete and discretely open. This is a joyous read and a remarkable book--Peter Gizzi.

    Howe is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists. The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."

    Like a literal road atlas, the poems carry lines and themes from one to the next. Like Atlas holding up the world, they hold patterns of all kinds aloft with an attention that transforms. The poems also are an atlas of the known world, capturing the way events repeat across time and place, as in one poem that links the image of her sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a woman just "made over" on that day's episode of Oprah. Vandenberg's poems use family artifacts, memory, and imagination to plot the intersections of love, death, history, art, and desire. In the first section, "Trade Routes," about connections, each poem moves back one generation to investigate the ways events reverberate across time. The second section, "The Red Fields of Lisse (A Love Story)," focuses on a former partner, a hemophiliac with AIDS, and tulips. The third section, "Catalog of Want," contains poems about desire in various guises. The last section, "A Place Ten Years Away," reexamines the themes of the first three sections.