Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna WarrenThis debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.Antique BookThe sky was crazed with swallows.We walked in the frozen grassof your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.Trees shook down their gaudy nests.The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.I was jealous of the river,how the light broke it, of the skeinof windows where we saw ourselves.Where we walked, the ice crackedlike an antique book, openingand closing. The leavesbeneath it were the marbled pages.Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

    Johannes Göransson's translation captures the seething instability of Berg's bizarre compound nouns and linguistic contortions.

    Dungy offers a survival guide for the modern heart as she takes on twenty-first-century questions of love, loss, and nature. From a myriad of lenses, these poems examine the human capability for perseverance in the wake of heartbreak; the loss of beloved heroes and landscapes; and our determination in the face of everyday struggles. Dungy explores the dual nature of our presence on the planet, juxtaposing the devastation caused by human habitation with our own vulnerability to the capricious whims of our environment. In doing so, she reveals with fury and tenderness the countless ways in which we both create and are victims of catastrophe.This searing collection delves into the most intimate transformations wrought by our ever-shifting personal, cultural, and physical terrains, each fraught with both disillusionment and hope. In the end, Dungy demonstrates how we are all intertwined, regardless of race or species, living and loving as best we are able in the shadows of both man-made and natural follies. Flight It is the day after the leaves, when buckeyes, like a thousand thousand pendulums, clock trees, and squirrels, fat in their winter fur, chuckle hours, chortle days.  It is the time for the parting of our ways.   You slid into the summer of my sleeping, crept into my lonely hours, ate the music of my dreams. You filled yourself with the treated sweet I offered, then shut your rolling eyes and stole my sleep.   Came morning and me awake.  Came morning. Awake, I walked twelve miles to the six-gun shop. On the way there I saw a bird-of-prayer all furled up by the river. I called to it.  It would not unfold.  On the way home I killed it.   It is the time of the waking cold, when buckeyes, like a thousand thousand metronomes, tock time, and you, fat on my summer sleep, titter toward me, walk away.  It is the time for the parting of our days.

    Her deeply personal poems echo everything from nursery rhymes to classics, revealing poetry buried in ordinary speech. Whether remonstrating with a former lover or evoking her young children, the poet who reveals herself here is appealingly vulnerable yet gutsy, by turns blunt and tender. With dexterity and wit she stretches language to the wildest boundaries of poetic possibility: hers is a voice intimate and assured, her observations of the world delivered in love notes addressed to us all."did I mention my first kiss was extractedby someone who never should have been thatlucky?" - From "Keep Some Stuff for Yourself"

    A reissuing of The Afterlife, poetry by Larry Levis.

    Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively school -- or refuse to -- the poems explore ways girls are trained in the broadest sense of the word.Gossips, the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In Early Lessons, the third section, children narrate as they also observe similarly solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.The Mannequin above Main Street MotorsWhen the only ladies' dress shop closed, she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable, one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her on a lark -- drunken impulse -- and for years kept her leaning in a corner, beside an attic window, rendered invisible. The dusk was also perpetual in the garage below, punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close over the engines. An oily grime coated the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits, even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel conceding to that place a greater, echoing sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained, back turned forever to the dark storagebehind her, gaze leveled just above anyone's who could have looked up to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing -- her expression still reluctant figure for it.

    Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.” (Lana Del Rey) Lana Del Rey brings her breathtaking poetry to life in an unprecedented audiobook. In this stunning spoken word performance, Lana Del Rey reads 14 poems from her debut book Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass accompanied by music from Grammy Award-winning musician Jack Antonoff. Lana’s debut book solidifies her further as “the essential writer of her times” (The Atlantic). This audiobook features Lana reading select poems from the book, including "LA Who Am I to Love You?", "The Land of 1,000 Fires", "Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving", "Never to Heaven", "Tessa DiPietro", "Happy", and several others. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator.

    Teare provides us with poems that insist on the simultaneous physical embodiment of tactile pleasure—that which is found in the textures of thought and language—as well as the action of syntax. Partly informed by an ecological imagination that leads him back to Emerson and Thoreau, Teare's method and fragmented style are nevertheless up to the moment. Remarkable in its range, Sight Map serves at once as a cross-country travelogue, a pilgrim's gnostic progress, an improvised field guide, and a postmodern "pillowbook," recording the erotic conflation of lover and beloved, deity and doubter.

    Of her most recent book, Raptus, Carolyn Forché has written that she is “a genuine poet, a born poet, and I am in awe of her achievement.” The poems in Klink’s new collection offer a closely keyed meditation on being alone—on a self fighting its way out of isolation, toward connection with other people and a vanishing world.

    Throughout, poetry is discovered to be among our most effective tools to examine the delirium of making contact."Hot":The sexiest thing a woman has ever doneto or with or for me—while wearing the loose breezeof a dress or standing inside its red zero on the floor—while bending over and pulling her shorts downon a racquetball court or to reach the watershutoff valve behind the fridge—as Satiewhispers against our thighs or hummingher brain's native tune as we touchthe smudged glass protecting extinct beetlesin a museum—with her lips swaddling my tongueor finger up my ass—is tell the truth—which makes my wife the hottest womanI've ever known—her mouth erotic every timeshe speaks—she is an animal when it comes to sexand love—comes to us—in that she doesn't primpin front of the mirror of what she thinks I wanther to say or be—the only real flesh—only nakedthat matters––how she looks at meBob Hicok's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the American Poetry Review. His books have been awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and named a "Notable Book of the Year" by Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator. He is currently teaching at Purdue University.

    Patient meditations on loss and the land where the people we love live and are also buried.

    Here are the early poems which first brought Denise Levertov's work to prominence -- from early uncollected poems, selections from The Double Image (London, 1946), and her three books Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958) and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960), which established her as one of the more lyrical and most influential poets of the New American poetry.

    There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

    . . 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

    Informed in part by Gnostic concepts of the separate soul in search of its divine origins ("spirit held by matter"). This dualistic vision is cast in contemporary terms and seeks resolution of these tensions through acceptance.