From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure--now, with Star Dust, finally complete.Throughout his work, Bidart has been uniquely alert to the dramatic possibilities of violence; in this, and in his sense of theater, he resembles the great Jacobean dramatists. It is no accident that Webster's plays echo in "The Third Hour of the Night," the brilliant long poem that dominates the second half of Star Dust. Bidart locates in Benvenuto Cellini the speaker truest to his own vision. Who better to speak of the drive to create, not as reverie or pleasure or afterthought, but as task and burden, thwarted by the world? In its scale, sonorities, extraordinary leaps, and juxtapositions, "The Third Hour of the Night" makes an astonishing counterbalance to the intense, spare lyrics that precede it. In this profound and unforgettable new book, the dream beyond desire (which now seems to represent human destiny) is rooted in the drive to create, a drive tormented at every stage by failure, as the temporal being fights for its survival by making an eternal life. Bidart is a poet of passionate originality, and Star Dust shows that the forms of this originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth. Star Dust is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

    This book chews with its open mouth full of the juiciest words, the most indigestible images. This book undoes me. . . . francine j. harris brilliantly ransacks the poet's toolkit, assembling art from buckets of disaster and shreds of hope. Nothing she lays her mind's eye on escapes. You, too, will be captured by her work."—Evie ShockleyLyrically raw and dangerously unapologetic, play dead challenges us to look at our cultivated selves as products of circumstance and attempts to piece together patterns amidst dissociative chaos. harris unearths a ruptured world dictated by violence—a place of deadly what ifs, where survival hangs by a thread. Getting by is carrying bruises and walking around with "half a skull."From "low visibility":I have light in my mouth. I hunger you. You wantwhat comes in drag. a black squirrel in a black tar lane,fresh from exhaust, hot and July's unearthed steam.You want to watch it run over. to study the sog. You want the stink of gristle buried in a muggy weather.I want the faulty mirage. a life of grass.we want the same thing. We want their deathsto break up the sun.francine j. harris is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow whose first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she is also Cave Canem fellow who has lived in several cities before returning to Michigan. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and currently teaches writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

    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.

    He begins with a group of light but haunting fables, populated by figures like the King, a tiny creature in ermine who has lost his desire to rule, and by the poet’s own alter ego, who recounts the fetching mystery of the title poem: “I sat on the porch having a smoke / when out of the blue a man and a camel / happened by.” The poet has Arctic adventures and encounters with the bearded figure of Death; in his controlled tone, he creates his bold visions and shows us, like a magician, how they vanish in a blink. Gradually, his fancies give way to powerful scenes of loss, as in “The Mirror,” where the face of a beautiful woman stares past him into a place I could only imagine . . . as if just then I were steppingfrom the depths of the mirror into that white room, breathless and eager,only to discover too latethat she is not there.Man and Camel concludes with a small masterpiece of meditations crafted around the Seven Last Words of Christ. Here, this secular poet finds resonance in the bedrock of Christ’s language, the actual words that have governed so many generations of thought and belief. As always with Mark Strand, the discovery of meaning in the sound of language itself is an act of faith that enlightens us and carries us beyond the bounds of the rational.

    a grave, attentive holding of a light” by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs’s experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems deal with Mammoth Cave’s four- thousand-year human history and the thrills of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond. Often the poems search for oblique angles into personal experience, and the caves and the landscape they create form a personal geology.

    . . A violently skewed portrait of the female poet and her Muse, a hyped-up version of Stevens and his interior paramour, locked in a soliloquy 'in which being there together is enough' . . . Something in Brock-Broido likes stealth, toxicity, wildness, neon--'perfect mean lines' . . . The poems lead off the page." --Helen Vendler, The New Yorker"These poems are out of Stevens in the abundance, glitter, and seductiveness of their language, out of Browning in the authority of their inhabiting, and out of Plath in the ferocity and passion of their holding on--to feeling, to life, and to us . . . An astonishing first book." --Cynthia Macdonald"Brock-Broido's brilliant nervosity and taste for the fantastic impel her to explore the obscure corners of the psyche and the fringes of ordinary human experience . . . The poems in A Hunger are original, strange, often unsettling, and mostly beautiful." --Stanley Kunitz

    The resulting pairs cover such subjects as "Scruples/Saints," "Hypocrisy/Precision," and "Anger/Generosity." The wisdom and startling turns we've come to expect from Dunn are everywhere in the ninety miniatures (forty-five pairs) that comprise this volume.

    To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transform, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively we enter inside of that which we devour.--Nick FlynnThis is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It's the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It's not too late. We can start over from right here and right now.--Marie HoweIn every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading RENDER how deeply I was handing everything over.--Nikky Finney

    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.

    The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life--not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

    Lyrically complex and startling—yet forthright and unflinching— these poems address rape, abortion, sex work, and other subjects frequently omitted from male-dominated literary traditions, without forsaking the pleasures of being embodied, or the value of personal freedom, of moonlight, and of hope. Throughout, the topography and mythology of California, as well as the uses and failures of language itself, are players in what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, and a trauma survivor in contemporary America.

    Now Jaguar of Sweet Laughter presents the work of a poet with the precise and wondering eye of a gifted naturalist.Ackermans's Olympian vision records and transforms landscapes from Amazonia to Antarctica, while her imaginative empathy penetrates the otherness of hummingbirds, deer, and trilobites. But even as they draw readers into the wild heart of nature, Ackerman's poems are indelible reminders of what it is to be a human being -- the "jaguar of sweet laughter" that, according to Mayan mythology, astonished the world because it was the first animal to speak.

    Channeling "the primal vision of Hart Crane" (Harold Bloom), Adam Fitzgerald helped welcome the modernist aethetic into the twenty-first century. Part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide, Fitzgerald's chimerical poems confront "a surging ocean of sound and language" (Maureen McLane). In these forty-eight poems, he conducts a madcap symphony of language, memory, and fantasy with the "exhilarating assurance of nonstop invention" (Timothy Donnelly).

    Having studied motherhood "as if for an exam," reality proved "wilder and deeper and funnier" than anything she'd anticipated.Tender Hooks is Fennelly's spirited exploration of parenting, with all its contradictions and complexities.

    In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.