Even all by themselves, the titles of Patricia Lockwood's poems reveal the sort of surreal, enigmatic, rhetorically-elongated world her sensibility inhabits effortlessly: "When We Move Away From Here, You'll See A Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung," "The Cartoon's Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace," "The Front Half and the Back Half of a Horse in Conversation," "Children With Lamps Pouring Out of Their Foreheads," and the inimitable "Killed With an Apple Corer, She Asks What Does That Make Me."

    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.

    . . focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time.”—The Virginia Quarterly Review, “Editor’s Choice”"Mary Oliver calls him '...a Walt Whitman without an inch of Whitman's bunting or oratory.' In these pages, he is more nearly a modern-day Rumi. This is not primarily a poetry of image, but of ideas, perfectly distilled. Orr brings together the monumental themes of love and loss in small, spare, and exquisite koan-like poems."—ForeWord"...magnetic poems that open the world of lyrical verse to the larger questions of what is true and timeless." —The Bloomsbury ReviewGregory Orr continues his acclaimed project on the “beloved” with a lyrical sequence about the joys and hungers of being fully engaged in life. Through concise, perfectly formed poems, he wakes us to the ecstatic possibilities of recognizing and risking love. Mary Oliver has called this project “gorgeous,” and said that he "speaks of the events that have no larger or more important rival in our lives—of our love and our loving."If to say it onceAnd once only, then stillTo say: Yes.And say it complete,Say it as if the wordFilled the whole momentWith its absolute saying.Later for “but,” Later for “if.”NowOnly the single syllableThat is the beloved.That is the world.Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.

    But in the words of editor Honor Moore, what strikes the contemporary reader is not the sophistication of Lowell's feminist or antiwar stances, but the bald audacity of her eroticism. Her search for an imagist poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite, found its purest expression in sensual love poems that bristle with lyric intensity. This new selection explores Lowell's full formal range, including cadenced verse, polyphonic prose, narrative poetry, and adaptations from the Chinese, and gives a fresh sense of the passion and energy of her work.

    Over and over these poems leave us convinced that we’ve learned something very important and mysterious, yet we can’t say exactly what.

    Published posthumously in 1971, they add a startling counterpoint to Ariel, the volume that made her reputation. Readers will recognise some of her most celebrated poems – ‘Childless Woman’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Insomniac’ – while discovering those still overlooked, including her radio play Three Women. These two extraordinary volumes find their place alongside The Colossus and Ariel in the oeuvre of a singular talent.

    Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

    By turns seductive and self-deprecating, Women in Public navigates a world where the erotics of the body and mind do battle against the constructs that would demean and define them, using lyric, fragment, humor, and repetition to create a space flexible enough to hold the many contradictions of reality. Where expectations and desires can be piled too easily upon the body, Kahn digs in her heels, writing in attempt to liberate physical form from society's confines.Praise for Women in Public:"'Do you think that you are greater than a mom?' This is an intensely honest, honestly intense poetry. Humorous, carnal, accusatory, celebratory––Women in Public tells me to get lost so I do. When I find myself later, I'm re-reading Women in Public."––Rod Smith"In these exhilarating poems, Elaine Kahn shoots from the groin, championing a ferociousness that rages against asperity while playfully seducing the reader to misbehave. Hers is a realm where oceans beat against genitals, and Hannah Wilke warms the earth. I don’t want to let go of Women in Public for I want its boldness all to myself."––Dodie BellamyAbout the Author:Musician, poet, artist, Elaine Kahn was born in Evanston, Illinois and is currently based in Oakland, California. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BA from California College of the Arts. Kahn is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Voluptuous Dream During an Eclipse (2012), Customer (2010), and Radiant Bottle Caps (2008), and is a contributor to Art Papers. Her music project, Horsebladder, has toured widely throughout the U.S. and Canada. She is also co-founder of the feminist puppet troop P. Splash Collective and managing editor of the small press Flowers & Cream.

    Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

    Cross-Genre. Asian American Studies. In this new prose document, Bhanu Kapil follows a film crew to the Bengal jungle to re-encounter the true account of two girls found living with wolves in 1921. Taking as its source text the diary of the missionary who strove to rehabilitate these orphans--through language instruction and forcible correction of supinated limbs--HUMANIMAL functions as a healing mutation for three bodies and a companion poiesis for future physiologies. Through wolfgirls Kamala and Amala, there is a grafting: what scars down into the feral opens out also into the fierce, into a remembrance of Kapil's father. The humanimal text becomes one in which personal and postcolonial histories cross a wilderness to form supported metabiology. Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed.

    Celebrated poet McHugh and renowned editor Lehman present the 20th edition of the popular and comprehensive Best American Poetry series.

    Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry gathers the five final volumes of his life's work in a bilingual edition, translated and with commentary by the award-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris. This collection displays a mature writer at the height of his talents, following what Celan himself called the "turn" (Wende) of his work away from the lush, surreal metaphors of his earlier verse. Given "the sinister events in its memory," Celan believed that the language of poetry had to become "more sober, more factual . . . ‘grayer.'" Abandoning the more sumptuous music of the first books, he pared down his compositions to increase the accuracy of the language that now "does not transfigure or render ‘poetical'; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible." In his need for an inhabitable post-Holocaust world, Celan saw that "reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won." Breathturn into Timestead reveals a poet undergoing a profound artistic reinvention. The work is that of a witness and a visionary.

    In homage to a new generation of tough young feminists, Marge Piercy presents a gathering of poems that reveal the poet as an early 'Grrrl.' Comprising over ninety poems selected from four books now out of print; poems previously published in literary magazines but never before collected and very early poems never published, this volume presents the bold and passionate political verse for which Piercy is well known alongside poems celebrating the sensual pleasures of gardening and cooking and sex; funny poems about New Year's Eve and warring boom boxes; vulnerable poems in which a young working class woman from the Midwest takes stock of herself and the limits of her world. For longtime fans and those new to Piercy's early work, this volume is an indispensable addition to the oeuvre of one of America's best-known and best-selling poets.Marge Piercy is the author of fifteen novels and fifteen books of poetry, most recently The Art of Blessing the Day (Knopf, 1999) a selection of Piercy's Jewish-themed poems. What Are Big Girls Made Of?(Knopf, 1997) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and selected as one of their Most Notable Books of the Year by the American Library Association. In October, 1999, she will be a featured poet on the Bill Moyers' PBS-TV poetry specials "Fooling with Words" and "The Sounds of Poetry" and her newest novel, Three Women will be published by William Morrow.TABLE OF CONTENTSPreface, .xiFrom THE TWELVE SPOKED WHEEL FLASHINGThe meaningful exchange, 4 Five thousand miles, 5 The summer invasion, and the fall, 6 Nothing you can have, 9 Archipelago, 12 The first salad of March, 15 Exodus, 16 Ask me for anything else, 18 What is permitted, 20 A gift of light, 22 Short season, 27 Ghosts, 29 The new novel, 31 Women of letters, 32From LIVING IN THE OPENThe token woman, 37 The clearest joy, 39 Make me feel it, 40 Sage and rue, 42 River road, High Toss, 44 Paradise Hollow, 45

    The semi-autobiographical book is divided into two parts and takes place between two countries; Part I, “is a cloud a living thing?”, takes place during the Author’s tumultueuse teen years with tropical Florida as a backdrop. Part II, “Inside my Shell”, explores themes of transformation as the Author creates a new life in Paris, France. ​The poems in this collection explore the surreal rollercoaster of youth, the performance of identity, being an outsider and the tension between romantic idealism and the dystopic world in which the author finds herself. Her approach to her work as a visual artist is mirrored in her poetry style, which is accompanied by all original illustrations by the Author.

    . . brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.”—Charles SimicFans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.From “The Dart and the Drill”:I do not believe that when my brother pierced my skull with a succession of darts thrown from across our paneled rec room on the night of November 18th in my sixth year on earth, he was trying to transcend the notions of time and space as contained and protected by the human skull. But who can fathom the complexities of the human brain? Ten years later—this would have been in 1967—the New York Times reported a twenty-four year old man, who held an honor degree in law, died in the process of using a dentist’s drill on his own skull, positioned an inch above his right ear, in an attempt to prove that time and space could be conquered . . .Mary Ruefle’s poems and prose have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Next American Essay. Her many awards include NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a frequent visiting professor at the University of Iowa, and she lives and teaches in Vermont.