Cole's most recent poems have a daring sensitivity and imagistic beauty unlike anything on the American scene today. Whether they are exploring pleasure or pain, humor or sorrow, triumph or fear, they reach for an almost shocking intensity. Cole's fourth book, Middle Earth, awakened his audience to him as a poet now writing the poems of his career. Pierce the Skin brings together sixty-six poems from the past twenty-five years, including work from Cole's early, closely observed, virtuosic books, long out of print, as well as his important more recent books, The Visible Man (1998), Middle Earth (2003), and Blackbird and Wolf (2007). The result is a collection reconsecrating Cole's central themes: the desire for connection, the contingencies of selfhood and human love, the dissolution of the body, the sublime renewal found in nature, and the distance of language from experience. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," Cole says, striving in Pierce the Skin to break the barrier even between word and skin. Maureen N. McLane wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Cole is a poet of "self-overcoming, lusting, loathing and beautiful force." This book will have a permanent place with other essential poems of our moment.

    In Taboo he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still/at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.

    Set in an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world that is disturbing because it is uncannily familiar, National Anthem chronicles the aftermath of the failure of imperial vision. Allowing Rome and America to bleed into one another, Prufer masterfully weaves the threads of history into an anthem that is as intimate as it is far-reaching.

    In this collection, you will find images and poems that relate to life, love, loss, gain, realisation and the final thing called Moksha. The poems may sound philosophical, intellectual and emotional from time to time. You will also find a surprise at the end of this wonderful poetry collection if you read everything carefully. And, like the previous poetry collection by Alok Mishra, this book will also not take more than 15 minutes from your daily routine. However, you may want to read the book at least twice or maybe thrice to understand what do the poems mean. Alok has devised a style of his own to communicate his thoughts to the readers of Indian English poetry. A 4-3-6 style has perfectly settled with this collection having 14 wonderful poems. Here are some reviews for Moving for Moksha:The collection of poems takes us on a journey to ponder the truth and fallacies of life that come our way. The poems are mostly mystic in nature, having more than what it seems to be... you will certainly love it if you have a taste for English poetry.by: Amit Mishra (founder of The Indian Authors & Indian Book Lovers)...beauty, truth, eternity.... a very close observation of life, these poems sneak into nothing but the philosophy of life that people confront during life-span.by: Ravi Kumar, Research Scholar with expertise in Indian English Literature, a writer for many online literary platformsThe poems reflect disillusion, rejection, realisation and answer to the final call – Moksha, as called in Indian philosophy. The innovative form with a 4-3-6 pattern looks very apt for the emotional and intellectual and also cryptic nature of the poems in this collection.The Last Critic

    In his quest for the means to liberate his boat, he takes any work he can get.

    Nobody comes out looking good. The slippery self, surveilled yet ready with her mask, performs a peep show—booth opens wide, yet somehow the dancer isn't there. She's in character. She's "cut off the head to let the humors hose through.

    She has since become one of our most respected authors of verse.Schnackenberg's first three books, collected in Supernatural Love, show the thrilling evolution of a unique voice in today's letters. From an early mastery in which precision and heartbreak are inseparable, her poetry accelerates book by book through the searching, dense, and metaphysical imagery--as well as the cascading syntax--which have become her signature. Whether we are witnessing her classic portrait of Darwin in his last year or discovering the vertiginous brillance of her elegy for the Byzantine monuments of Ravenna, we find in Schnackenberg gemlike poems offered as visionary documents, unmistakable in their glittering range and passion--and never the same twice.

    The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.

    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.

    They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now.”—Joy Harjo, prize citationfrom “The Piano Speaks”     For an hour I forgot my fat self,     my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.     For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.     For an hour I was a salamander     shimmying through the kelp in search of shore,     and under his fingers the notes slid loose     from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs     that took root in the mud.

    Where we don't, we read, we ask, we learn and then, we solve! What happens when there are no answers though? When nobody in the world knows! When we see the need to invent Gods even if we can't discover Him. Through a string of poems, the author narrates such an experience with his non-verbal and autistic daughter, Enya. What started as a week of babysitting for him soon became a seeking to change her into 'normal'. But, that seeking ended up transforming the seeker!The narrative in the form of poetry touches upon the revelation that comes out of desperation of not finding an answer at all and therefore, the thoughts getting tired of themselves and the mind taking a back seat. In that silence, the author says, things become clear and all aspects of life show their inter-relation! The intellect gives way to the intelligence, the body and mind as 'me' gives way to the world as 'me'! The mind map once seen, one starts to see the true nature of the 'me' and that perspective and clarity make everything clear and possible in life...

    I referred them to Doctor Who's Tardis.'Frank Skinner wants you to read more poetry. Wait, wait - don't stop reading. Whether you're a frequent poetry reader or haven't read any since sixth form, Frank's infectious passion for language, rhythm and metre will win you over and provide you with the basic tools you need to tackle any poem.In this short, easy-to-digest and delightful book, Frank guides us through the twists and turns of 'Pad, pad' by Stevie Smith, a short, seemingly simple poem that contains multitudes of meaning and a deceptive depth of emotion. Revel in the mastery of Stevie Smith's choice of words, consider the eternal mystery of the speaker of the poem and be moved by rhyming couplets like you never have before.Give it a go. You never know, you might even enjoy it.

    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 pushed the bounds of imagination as she explored desire, loss and physical sensation. Her posthumously published book, ShallCross features seven poem sequences that show her tremendous range in style and approach. As she considers, among other topics, some dark intuitions about human nature, she also nudges readers to question who is telling the story and where one’s thought can lead."—The Washington Post"Wright gets better with each book, expanding the reach of her art; it seems it could take in anything."—Publishers Weekly"Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."—New York Times Book Review"C.D. Wright is entirely her own poet, a true original."—The Gettysburg ReviewIn a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet.From "Obscurity and Elegance":Whether or not the park was safeshe was going in. A study concluded, for a parkto be successful there had to be women.The man next to the monument must have brokenaway from her. Perhaps yearsbefore. That the bond had been carnal is obvious.He said he was just out clearing his head…C.D. Wright (1949-2016) taught at Brown University for decades and published over a dozen works of poetry and prose, including One With Others, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a National Book Award; One Big Self: An Investigation; and Rising Falling Hovering. Among her many honors are the Griffin International Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.

    The result is part carnival, part nightmare. A television pundit's rhetoric segues into an unusual succulent with writhing maroon tongues. When the world suddenly becomes legible, is that revelation or psychosis? In this book, the voice of the Lord and/or the voice of the security state can come from anyplace. The problem of identity becomes acute. The poems in Just Saying may be imagined as chimeras, creatures that appear when old distinctions break down and elements generally kept separate combine in new ways. Here Armantrout both worries (as a dog worries a bone) and celebrates the groundless fecundity of being and of language.