The book is in two sections, the first a focused collection of wildly inventive lyrics that take as launch pad such far flung subjects as allergenesis, the contents and significance of swamps, a revised notion of marriage, and ancestors—both actual and dreamed. The eponymous second section is a cogent series, or long poem, based on a persona named "the eater," who, along with the poems themselves, storms voraciously through tablefuls of Chinese delicacies (each poem in the series takes its titles from an actual Chinese dish), as well as through doubts and confident proclamations from regions of an exploratory self. Hymn for the Black Terrific has Falstaffian panache; it is a book of pure astonishment.Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and the co-editor of Transom, an independent on-line poetry journal. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. Petrosino teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

    Here, though, the poet's electric narratives and portraits extend beyond the working class streets of urban New Jersey. Modeling poems on the kundiman, a song of unrequited love sung by Filipinos for their country in times of oppression, he professes his conflicted feelings for America, while celebrating and lamenting his various heritageswhether by chatting up St. Patrick, riffing on race relations, or channeling Lapu Lapu in a rejoinder to Magellan. Passionate, provocative, and irrepressible throughout, My American Kundiman further establishes Rosal as a poet to be reckoned with.

    Heartbreaking and humorous, Atlantis is a journey about picking up the pieces from the ruins of a life they said would be good for you.

    Awarded a coveted Churchill Fellowship, her work expresses the intricacies of love and loss. Beautifully illustrated and thoughtfully conceived, Love and Misadventure will take you on a rollercoaster ride through an ill-fated love affair- from the initial butterflies to the soaring heights- through to the devastating plunge. Lang Leav has an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers. Her talent for translating complex emotions with astonishing simplicity has won her a cult following of devoted fans from all over the world.

    It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world--the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined--with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation and hope. AMERICAN LINDEN is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which--by means of language--move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world. Matthew Zapruder is a dangerous poet; his poems implicate us in demonstrations of lift-off and escape velocity while also proving the calamity of gravity--Dean Young.

    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.

    0-935906-00-2$5.00 / Javan Press

    His whimsical and often erotic writing has already captured the hearts and minds of literally thousands of readers from around the world. He paints vivid pictures with intricate words and explores the compelling themes of love, loss, relationships and sex. All beautifully captured in poetry, prose, quotes and little short stories.

    By turns sassy and serious, the poems can seem to sprint in two directions at once, managing to make the reader laugh at the same time they are struck by the emotional strength of the work. "Charming, inviting, beguiling and delightful poems in the language of someone who seems alive speaking refreshing riddles to herself." SHEILA HETI"Uptalk is a book of transcribed whale songs. Some scientists gave a whale a microphone and she took it home and stayed up all night under the covers talking to herself about faces and word-parts. I am delighted that Kimmy took it upon herself to transcribe this unique document of marine biology, and my heart goes out to the brilliant, charming whale author, wherever she may be." SARA WOODS

    In A Ted Hughes Bestiary, Alice Oswald’s selection is arranged chronologically, with an eye to different books and styles, but equally to those poems that embody animals rather than just describe them. Some poems are here because, although not strictly speaking animal, they become so in the process of writing; and in keeping with the bestiary tradition there are plenty of imaginary animals—all concentratedly going about their business.In Poetry in the Making, Hughes said that he thought of his poems as animals, meaning that he wanted them to have “a vivid life of their own.” Distilled and self-defining, A Ted Hughes Bestiary is subtly responsive to a central aspect of Hughes’s achievement, while offering room to overlooked poems, and “to those that have the wildest tunes.”

    “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning. Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility. Ben Lerner, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of No: a journal of the arts. He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

    . .In her second collection of poetry, Dorothea Lasky cries out beyond prophecy and confession, through to an even more powerful empathy. On the verge of becoming pure substance and sensation, Black Life is emotion recollected not in tranquility, but in radically affirming intensity.I leave and I am a black life . . .And I want toBe what you made me to beDorothea Lasky is the author of three collections of poetry. Educated at the University of Massachusetts, Washington University, and Harvard University, she currently teaches at Columbia University.

    First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text. As the author explains, "To etch is 'to cut away, ' and each page, as in Blake's concept of a book, is a single picture." With God and Satan crossed out, RADI OS reduces Milton's Baroque poem to elemental forces. In this retelling of the Fall, song precipitates from chaos, sight from fire: "in the shape / as of / above the / rose / through / rose / rising / the radiant sun.

    Visual Poetry. Long-cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies and text books, and more recently celebrated on the internet, Aram Saroyan's groundbreaking concrete and minimalist poems of the 1960s are gathered together here in a single, much-needed volume. COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS includes the entire contents of Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968), Pages (Random House, 1969), The Rest (Telegraph, 1971), as well as Saroyan's contribution, "Electric Poems," to the anthology All Stars (Goliard-Grossman, 1972), and a sequence, "Short Poems," which hasn't appeared previously. With ties to the work of such writers and artists as e.e. cummings, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Donald Judd, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Steve Reich, COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS confirms Aram Saroyan's place among the most daring and engaging figures in modern poetry.

    He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. In his first collection, Muscular Music, he took the reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. His second collection, Hip Logic, continued these explorations of popular culture, fatherhood, cultural heritage, and loss. Wind in a Box, Hayes’s resonant new collection, continues his interest in how traditions (of poetry and culture alike) can be simultaneously upended and embraced. The struggle for freedom (the wind) within containment (the box) is the unifying motif as Hayes explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality. This new book displays not only what the Los Angeles Times calls the range of a "bold virtuoso," but also the imaginative fervor of a poet in love with poetry.