With Radial Symmetry, she has created a transcendent body of poems that flourish in the liminal spaces that separate scientific inquiry from empathic knowledge, astute observation from sublime witness. Larson's inventive lyrics lead the reader through vertiginous landscapes—geographical, phenomenological, psychological—while always remaining attendant to the speaker's own fragile, creaturely self. An experienced research scientist and field ecologist, Larson dazzles with these sensuous and sophisticated poems, grappling with the powers of poetic imagination as well as the frightful realization of the human capacity for ecological destruction. The result is a profoundly moving collection: eloquent in its lament and celebration.Metamorphosis [excerpt]We dredge the stream with soup strainers and separate dragonfly and damselfly nymphs- their eyes like inky bulbs, jaws snapping at the light as if the world was full of tiny traps, each hairpin mechanism tripped for transformation. Such a ricochet of appetites insisting life, life, life against the watery dark, the tuberous reeds.

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    If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's poetic sequence. Taking as a starting point W. B. Yeats's remark that the only fit topics for a serious mood are "sex and the dead," Muldoon finds unexpected ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to come to terms with the early twenty-first century. It's no accident that the centerpiece of Maggot is an outlandish meditation on a failed poem that draws on the vocabulary of entomological forensics. The last series of linked lyrics, meanwhile, takes as its subject the urge to memorialize the scenes of fatal automobile accidents. The extravagant linkage of rot and the erotic is at the heart of not only the title sequence but also many of the round songs that characterize Maggot, and has led Angela Leighton, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, to see these new poems as giving readers "a thrilling, wild, fairground ride, with few let-ups for the squeamish."

    Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have “authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement,” says series judge W.S. Merwin.From Seven ChimerasThe way Booth makes a love story: same as a regular story, except under one rock is a trapdoor that leads to a room full of belly buttons;  each must be pushed, one is a landmine. The way Booth makes hope: thirty-seven acres, Black Damon, Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire in the Great Field and let it become unquenchable. The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade: shoot the weasel in the neck and toss it to the buzzards. The way Booth thinks of salvation: God holding a broken abacus, colored beads falling away.

    Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me is Mark Leidner's first full-length collection of poems. A collection of poems that might make you feel like a flower, like a black hole, like punishment meted out at night by a giant tractor, like you have to get on fire, then slowly walk around your old neighborhood, like the town was real, like she thinks swoon is a funnier word than mulligan, and he thinks swoon is a funny word too, but no way in hell is it funnier than mulligan, like he's searching for the Holy Grail and she has little Holy Grail-shaped pupils, like an effusion of steam, like what's cool changes, like hemisphere paint, like a blue flower, like the house you have lived above forever.

    The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can.     This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels”Let me beas streamlined as my knife when I say this.As cold as my three-pronged fork thatcools the meat even as it steadies it.A pettiness in me was honedin this cutlers’ town, later bombed,in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born therealongside my wedding pattern, could hearthe constant sharpening of kniveslike some children hear the corn in their hometownstalking to them through the wind.The horizon is just the score they breathe throughlike a box of chickensbreathing through a slit.

    Deeply researched and even more deeply felt, Perennial inhabits landscapes of emerging adulthood and explosive cruelty―the hills of Pittsburgh and the sere grass of Colorado; the spines of books in a high school library that has become a killing ground; the tenderness of children as they grow up and grow hard, becoming acquainted with dread, grief, and loss.

    Responding to the post-industrial landscape of rural life, Jenny George braids together regional plains poetry and the darkly fantastic imagery of medieval painting. Alluding to Goya’s grotesque bestiary, The Dream of Reason is similarly preoccupied with creatures of all kinds: tiny husks of insects, bats crawling across porches like goblins, purring moths, and pigs, in many forms. George names these creatures and documents the traumas of farm life, the role of the handlers involved, and the empathy and horror that comes with it. The collection lingers, transfixed by its strange imaginings, searching for sense in the dark.

    Besides George Meredith and his wife Mary Ellen, Swinburne and his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton are among those who also find a place in the three poem-sequences that comprise the book: "Arisbe," "The Leisure of the Theory Class," and "Rückenfigur." Howe's historical linkings, resonant with the sorrows of love and loss and the tragedies of war, create a compelling canvas of associations. "It's the blanks and gaps," she says, "that to me actually represent what poetry is-the connections between seemingly unconnected things-as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not."

    Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos--and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure--yawns wide.Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left," writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky--when we were told to pay attention to our breath--we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon."

    As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."—Library JournalIn her eleventh collection, National Book Award–winning poet Jean Valentine characteristically weds a moral imperative to imaginative and linguistic leaps and bounds. Whether writing elegies, meditations on aging, or an extended homage to ancient remains, Valentine searches out ideas and explores the unexplainable. As Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine's work, "This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way."From "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them":At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold anddamp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking ifthey had any heaters. They had one heater. You areill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream.*Can you breathe all right?Break the glass shoutbreak the glass force the roombreak the thread Openthe music behind the glass . . .Jean Valentine is the state poet of New York. She has earned many honors, including the National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

    Say Uncle, Ryan's fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books. Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of Dana Gioia, take the shape of an idea clarifying itself. A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know.... Poetry as statement and aphorism is rarely heartbreaking, but reading these poems I find myself continually ambushed by a fundamental sorrow, one that hides behind a surface that interweaves sound and sense in immaculately interesting ways. -- Jane Hirshfield, Common Boundary; The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness. -- Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle.

    Ten new poems introduce Prodigal, followed by fifty poems, culled from Gregerson's five collections, that range broadly in subject from class in America to our world's ravaged environment to the wonders of parenthood to the intersection of science and art to the passion of the Roman gods, and beyond. This selection reinforces Gregerson’s standing as “one of poetry’s mavens . . . whose poetics seek truth through the precise apprehension of the beautiful while never denying the importance of rationality” (Chicago Tribune). A brilliant stylist, known for her formal experiments as well as her perfected lines, Gregerson is a poet of great vision. Here, the growth of her art and the breadth of her interests offer a snapshot of a major poet's intellect in the midst of her career.

    Clover fuses formal control, a solid grounding in poetic tradition (his allusions range from Shakespeare to Dickinson to John Cale), and sheer visionary exhilaration into a technical, moral, aesthetic, and imaginative lexicon that irradiates each page.The eerie cyberglow of Clover's lines illuminates a pageant of blurred and fragmented desolation: the Bomb, death camps, the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King, the whole numbing litany of modern horrors. Clover is a master of poetic shorthand, of the stark, unnerving image as immediate as yellow tape at a crime scene.Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with "God in abeyance" where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief. And here. in this utterly convincing vision of a world whose center has long since lost its hold, we see the life on whose brink we, at the end of the millennium, find ourselves poised.

    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"