She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.

    In an assembly of masterful lyrics and monologues, he conjures a series of fables and charms that serve both to expose us to the unsettling forces within the world and simultaneously offer some protection against them. Whether outwardly elemental in their address, or more personal in their direction, these poems - to the rain and the sea, to his young sons or beloved friends - never shy from their inquiry into truth and lie, embracing everything in scope from the rangy narrative to the tiny renku. Rain, which includes the winner of this year's Forward Prize for the Best Individual Poem and an extended elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy, is Don Paterson's most intimate and manifest collection to date.

    . . . Poetry busts guts." —Frank StanfordThe poetry publishing event of the season, this six-hundred-plus page book highlights the arc of Frank Stanford's all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career.Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Frank Stanford's oeuvre has never fully been unified. The mystery and legend surrounding his life—and his suicide before the age of thirty—has made it nearly impossible to fully and accurately celebrate his body of work. Until now.This welcome and necessary volume includes hundreds of previously unpublished poems, a short story, an interview, and is richly illustrated with draft poems, photographs, and odd ephemera.As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost."When It's After DarkI stealall the light bulbsand hide them like eggsin a basketgoing to some outlawI put on the best I can findI cover them with a swatchof somethingthat swells like a bitethat bleeds greencloth that smellsof a feed storebut looksto of been wornI go over to nasty willy's bridgeand throw them into the creekthere in the shade I listenfor themto make nests to escapeagony and burst

    JohnWhen Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives.”  Each of his books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books: Wrecking Crew (1972), Afterlife (1976), The Dollmaker’s Ghost (1981), Winter Stars (1985) and The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991). “It is not an exaggeration to say that the death of Larry Levis in 1996—of a heart attack at 49—sent a shock wave through the ranks of American poetry. Not only was Levis a good friend to many poets (not simply of his own generation but of many poets older and younger as well), his poetry had become a kind of touchstone for many of us, a source of special inspiration and awe. With Larry Levis’ death came the sense that an American original had been lost. . . . It is not at all paradoxical that he saw both the most intimate expressions of poetry and the grandest gestures of art, of language, as constituting individual acts of courage. One can only hope that, like such courage, Larry Levis’s remarkable poems will continue to live far into our literature.”—from the Afterword, by David St. John

    Rogue’s debut poetry collection tells the tale of a once-in-a-lifetime love unreturned. These heartwrenching and soul-crushing poems are confessional while also being relatable. This collection will make you feel seen in all your heartbreak.“I will write stories about how we lost each other, because that’s the part I will never get over. That’s the part I know best.”The Exquisite Pain of the Unrequited was previously published as La Douleur Exquise, which translates to the exquisite pain.

    Three long poems interspersed with prose pieces, Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point the Labadists, a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland, in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. In Souls, Howe is lured by archives and libraries, with their ghosts, cranks, manuscripts and scraps of material. One thread winding through Souls is silken: from the epigraphs of Edwards ("the silkworm is a remarkable type of Christ...") and of Stevens ("the poet makes silk dresses out of worms") to the mulberry tree (food of the silkworms) and the fragment of a wedding dress that ends the book. Souls of the Labadie Tract presents Howe with her signature hybrids of poetry and prose, of evocation and refraction:     There it is there it is—you     want the great wicked city     Oh I wouldn't I wouldn't     It's not only that you're not     It's what wills and will not.

    Even more, his culture and learning, worn so lightly as almost to pass unnoticed, link his verse to other and larger traditions, as in this reflection on Baudelaire - clearly intended as an artistic credo of sorts ... - Open Letters Monthly

    Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.

    Her bracing sixth book of poems, published concurrently with her debut story collection, takes an unflinching, though not unsmiling, look at mortality. Perillo has a penchant for dark humor, for jokes that stick."—Publishers Weekly, starred review"Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions."—Booklist"Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo. She writes accessible, often funny poems that border on the profane."—Time Out New York"Lucia Perillo's much lauded writing has been consistently fine—with its deep, fearless intelligence; its dark and delicious wit; its skillful lyricism; and its refreshingly cool but no less embracing humanity." —Open Books: A Poem EmporiumThe poetry of Lucia Perillo is fierce, tragicomic, and contrarian, with subjects ranging from coyotes and Scotch broom to local elections and family history. Formally braided, Perillo gathers strands of the mythic and mundane, of media and daily life, as she faces the treachery of illness and draws readers into poems rich in image and story.When you spend many hours alone in a roomyou have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortalbut that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught usdo not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bita thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,who walked four days into the jungleand stayed for the kindness of the tribe—who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Bobbitt award from the Library of Congress. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

    A democracy. A savage liberty. And yet another anthem and yet another heavenand yet another party wants you. Wants you wants you wants you.—from "Groovallegiance"In one poem, Thomas Sayers Ellis prognosticates, "Pretty soon, the Age of the Talk Show / Will slip on a peel left in the avant- gutter." The result is The Maverick Room, the testing ground of determination and serendipity, where call-and-response becomes Steinian echo becomes Post-Soul percussive pleasure becomes a bootlegged recording hustled out of a D.C. go-go club.

    The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

    They are also about (and for) those few embattled souls who remain painfully committed to beauty and to love even while facing the firing squad. “Quick, direct, witty, pungent” (DeWitt Beall, Chicago Daily News).

    McLane’s stunning third poetry collection, This Blue. Here are songs for and of a new century, poems both archaic and wholly now. In the middle of life, stationed in our common “Terran Life,” the poet conjures urban pigeons, Adirondack mountains, Genoa, Andalucía, Belfast, Parma; here is a world sounded out, broken, possibly shareable, newly named: “Take it up Old Adam— / everyday the world exists / to be named.” This Blue is a searching and a singing—intricate, sexy, smart.

    These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

    This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard.