"Zubair Ahmed’s first poetry collection City of Rivers captures the reader’s heart from its first line to its last. These poems are reminders of poetry’s power to leave us breathless after immersing us in truths, both wonderful and painful." - ZYZZYVA"...his poems are brief and beautiful, with final lines (“The light source is somewhere beyond / The years of my life.”) that should be scratched onto padlocks locked to the Pont des Arts over the Seine.... City of Rivers is a treasure you would do well to read." - Artvoice"While I imagine one of the reasons readers might find themselves interested in City of Rivers will be due to Ahmed’s relatively young age, such readers will invariably find themselves more interested in exploring the range of his vision and the confidence he seems to have hammered into every one of his sharp, stoic lines.... Ahmed possesses a profound understanding of the nature all poets, young and old, share—he recognizes that the words are a dream, that they haunt the body, and their constant buzzing, their inability to give us solace, keep us moving." - The Rumpus"Honestly, I’ve not yet read a contemporary poet of his equal." - Chico News Review"...a startling first collection of poems..." - Shelf-Awareness"This unusually compact and consistent debut from an unusually young poet might get noticed first for that poet’s unusual migratory life... Such work looks back productively to the American Deep Image style of the 1960s, to James Wright and the young Robert Bly." - Publisher's Weekly"Any poet would hope for the kind of praise that glows from the back cover of Zubair Ahmed’s debut poetry collection, City of Rivers. “Bracingly original…ushered into being by a prodigious new voice in America poetry.” Add to that the fact that Ahmed is only twenty-five, that his first book was published by McSweeney’s, and you have a rising star certainly worth keeping an eye on. Because—high as the book jacket praise might be—Ahmed lives up to it." - Late Night LibraryWe used to play soccer in the monsoon rains.Through my windows, I can see acres of fields,Lying in the ruins of the wind.The poems in City of Rivers—the first full-length collection from 23-year-old wunderkind Zubair Ahmed—are clear and cool as a glass of water. Grounded in his childhood in Bangladesh, Ahmed’s spare, evocative poems cast a knowing eye on the wider world, telling us what it’s like to be displaced and replaced, relocated and dislocated. His poems are suffused with a graceful, mysterious pathos—and also with joy, humor, and longing—with the full range of human emotions. City of Rivers is a remarkable and precocious debut.

    It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, Sestets is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and "there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives" (Miami Herald). Soaring and earthy, lyrical and direct, Charles Wright is an American treasure, and his search for a truth that transcends change and death settles finally on the beauties of nature and language: "Time is a graceless enemy, but purls as it comes and goes."

    Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review)"Love Poem"A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours.from "Gathering the Bones Together"A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming…"Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."—The New York Times Book ReviewGregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry.Also Available by Gregory Orr:Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence TP $12.00, 1-55659-151-9 • CUSA

    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.

    With sharp wit and relentless questioning, Shapero crafts poems a reader can, if not believe in, then trust--to level with us, to surprise us, and to stay with us long after we put the book down. No Object is a fast ride you will not easily forget.

     Juiced on the ecstasy of self-belief: I have to live. A burgeoning erotics of psychic boldness: I have to live. In which sensitivity is recognized as wealth: I have to live. Trumpeting the forensic authority of the heart: I have to live. This is original ancient poetry. It fashions a universe from its mouth.

    Here is a volume of poetry approaching Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History as a stark meditation on Blanchot's sense of writing as the "desired, undesired torment which endures everything." Levine engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events. Enola Gay's "mission" can seem spiritual, imaginative, and militaristic as the speaker in these poems surveys marshes and fields and a land on the edge of disintegration. Levine sifts the psychological residue that accumulates in the wake of unspeakable acts and so negotiates that terrain between the banality of language and the need to stand witness and to speak. Levine's stunning second book, with its grave cultural implications and its surveillance of a distinctly postmodern malaise, offers multiple readings. Here are compact poems with uncanny power, rhythm, and a strange, formal beauty echoing and renewing the legacy of Wallace Stevens for a new era.

    It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother’s hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what we’re up against."In her poems, love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in. Politics demands feeling rather than denuding it."  —Los Angeles Review of Books"Geography, economics, ecology, hydrology, local and international history; repetition, flat limited diction, lengthy chant; intersections of incompatible discourses, such as a field biologist’s checklist plus memoir, medical record plus ode, incantation plus site report: Spahr draws on these resources and procedures to make poems that feel like bizarre, careful essays, and essays that feel like sad, extended poems."  —The Nation"...a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority."  —Publisher’s WeeklyExcerpt: It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution. About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Perhaps about Non-Revolution’s body. I am sure I am not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies, Non-Revolution’s is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked. Still something about Non-Revolution’s smell and body had gotten into me.

    Moving between dramatic and interior monologue, and moving through intersecting histories, the ambiguities of inwardness and the eros of wakeful existence, these poems search for relationships with self, others, the world and God that are authentic—however quirky or strange."This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald JusticeIn Tennessee I Found a FireflyFlashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clungto the dark of it: the legs of the spiderheld the tucked wings close,held the abdomen still in the midst of callingwith thrusts of phosphorescent light—When I am tired of being human, I try to rememberthe two stuck together like burrs. I try to place themcentral in my mind where everything else mustsurround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.There is courtship, and there is hunger. I supposethere are grips from which even angels cannot fly.Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.When I am tired of only touching,I have my mouth to try to tell youwhat, in your arms, is not erased"This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald Justice

    Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking. Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood. A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.

    Direct, humorous and disquieting, Satellite further develops the unique sensibility of an important young poet.

    With her marriage shattered, Erin Belieu sifts the wreckage for the black box, the record of disaster. Propelled by a blistering and clarifying rage, she composed at fever pitch and produced riveting, unforgettable poems, such as the ten-part sequence “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral”:I root through your remains,looking for the black box. Nothing leftbut glossy chunks, a pimp’s platinumtooth clanking inside the urn. I play youover and over, my beloved conspiracy,my personal Zapruder film—look. . .When Belieu was invited by the Poetry Foundation to keep a public journal on their new website, readers responded to the Black Box poems, calling them “dark, twisted, disturbed, and disturbing” and Belieu a “frightening genius.” All true.

    We should expect great things from her." --The Globe and MailHome of Sudden Service is a sad and scary book of punk rock villanelles and sonnets about delinquency.Set in Anyvalley, North America, Home of Sudden Service centres around the experiences of young people growing up in the suburbs. The contrast of elegant poetic forms with the colloquial, often harsh language of suburban teens makes for a compelling and engaging achievement.Bachinsky creates a gothic landscape that will be familiar to anyone who's visited the suburbs. Here, young Brownies dance, learn to sew and get badges in a series of eerie rituals, and smalltown girls settle down early. Murder, lust, teen pregnancy and a young man's disappearance are all discussed with a matter-of-fact, dispassionate voice.But this world is not without humour and hope. Home of Sudden Service concludes with "Drive," a series of fifteen sonnets about the poet's trip across Canada with her sister -- and out of the setting of their youth.

    . . " In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization.Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing."Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

    The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise LevertovSupplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.