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.

    As a poet who has achieved success in the realms of both grassroots popularity and national critical attention, Kocot is poised to claim her place as America’s boldest new poetic voice.

    Written in forms that range from haiku to prose, and in a voice that veers from incanta­tory to deadpan, these seven poetic sequences offer diverse reflections on language and poetry, time and consciousness, civilization and art—to say nothing of bureaucrats, surfboards, and blue margaritas. Taken collectively, Seven Notebooks composes a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator, from spring in Chicago to summer at the Jersey Shore to winter in Miami Beach. Not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle, this utterly unique book reclaims territory long abandoned by American poetry, a characteristic ambition of Campbell McGrath, one of the most honored, accessible, and humanistically engaged writers of our time.

    I am not impatient—My skin will wait to greet its old complexions.I'll lie here till the world swims back again. —from "Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh"Thomas James's Letters to a Stranger—originally published in 1973, shortly before James's suicide—has become one of the underground classics of contemporary poetry. In this new edition, with an introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido and four of James's poems never before published in book form, this fraught and moving masterpiece is at last available.Letters to a Stranger is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Mark Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

    Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's bibliography: that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue--and timely--new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.

    Poems discuss a journey across the ocean, a veterans' cemetery, money, an abandoned collection of dolls, and a man who escapes from his prison cell to commit a murder.

    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.

    Emerging out oa a life in shich, the poet's words, "each day was the only day", Menasches work has a mysterious simplicity, a religious intensity, and a lingering emotional force.

    Wright is one of America’s leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, “C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.”Rising, Falling, Hovering is a work of profound social, political, and cultural consequence, a collection that uses experimental forms to climb within the unrest teeming around the world and inside the individual. “We are running on Aztec time,” she writes, “fifth and final cycle.”In short lyrics and long sequences, Wright’s language is ever-sharpened with political ferocity as she overlays voices from the United States, Oaxaca, Baghdad, and the borderlands between nations, to reveal the human struggle for connection and justice during times of upheaval and grief.If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or5 cents for 50 chiles can Wal-Mex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on to US.Will they open a Supercenter in Falluja once it is pacified. Once the corpsesin the garden have decomposed. Once the wild dogs have finished off the bones.Does the war never end. Is this the war of all against all.Who will build the great wall between us, the illegals, the vigilantes, theevangelicals. . .C.D. Wright, author of twelve collections of poetry and prose, is a professor of English at Brown University and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. She lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

    A shockingly assured first collection from young poet Jesse Ball, its elegant lines and penetrating voice present a poetic symphony instead of a simple succession of individual, barely-linked poems. Craftsmanship defines this collection; it is full of perfect line-breaks, tenderly selected words, and inventive pairings. Just as impressive is the breadth and ingenuity of its recurring themes, which crescendo as Ball leads us through his fantastic world, quietly opening doors.In five separate sections we meet beekeepers and parsons, a young woman named Anna in a thin, linen dress and an old scribe transferring the eponymous March Book. We witness a Willy Loman-esque worker who "ran out in the noon street / shirt sleeves rolled, and hurried after / that which might have passed" only to be told that there's nothing between him and "the suddenness of age." While these images achingly inform us of our delicate place in the physical world, others remind us why we still yearn to awake in it every day and "make pillows with the down / of stolen geese," "build / rooms in terms of the hours of the day." Like a patient Virgil, insistent and confident, Ball escorts us through his mind, and we're lucky to follow.

    In his second collection he engages love, mortality, and life in New York City after 9/11. The title piece, a prose-poem synopsis of an unwritten novel, turns all literary forms upon themselves with savvy and flair, while the elegy cycle “Twenty Poems for Noelle” is a compassionate song for a suffering friend.Noelle, somewhere in an apartmentsymphony number twolistens to you breathing.Broken glass in the street.What was once unglowing glows. . . The Pajamaist is an intimate book filled with sly wit and an ever-present, infectious openness to amazement. Zapruder’s poems are urbane and constantly, curiously searching.

    In the singular landscape of Matthew Rohrer's first book of poems, the weather, the food, even the household appliances come to life. "A few pages into this book," says the Minneapolis City Pages, "and you'll start glancing sideways at the terrain, which . . . looks suddenly vital." These quirky poems entertain and delicately point to truth. Rohrer illuminates a land of skewed realities where the impossible seems familiar, the sacher torte is afraid to be eaten, and it's always dusk in the forest.

    During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.

    Edited by Lee Ann Brown. SONNETS, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground- breaking works of writing consciousness.

    What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.