A Treatise on Stars


Mei-mei Berssenbrugge - 2020
    These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

The Undressing: Poems


Li-Young Lee - 2018
    Short of achieving that end, these mysterious, unassuming poems investigate the human violence and dispossession increasingly prevalent around the world, as well as the horrors the poet grew up with as a child of refugees. Lee draws from disparate sources, including the Old Testament, the Dao De Jing, and the music of the Wu Tang Clan. While the ostensive subjects of these layered, impassioned poems are wide-ranging, their driving engine is a burning need to understand our collective human mission.

Known and Strange Things: Essays


Teju Cole - 2016
    The collection will include pre-published essays that have gone viral, like “The White Industrial Savior Complex,” first published in The Atlantic.

Space, in Chains


Laura Kasischke - 2011
    Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space, In Chains create a visceral strangeness true to its own music.So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the veryair around us bound by chains. There wasstagnant water in which lightningwas reflected, like desperationin a dying eye. Like science. Likea dull rock plummeting through space, tossingoff flowers and veils, like a bride. Andalso the subway.Speed under ground.And the way each body in the room appeared to bea jar of wasps and flies that day—but, enchanted,like frightened children's laughter.

Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past


Carol Ann Duffy - 2007
    With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they've inspired, Answering Back promises to be a truly unique and insightful anthology.

Ain't Never Not Been Black


Javon Johnson - 2020
    Engaging with themes of masculinity, racism, love, and joy, Johnson is at once critical and creative. His spoken word performance transfers effortlessly to the page, with poems that will encompass you. This is a book about blackness and survival, and how in American these are inseparable. In a world of individualism, who can you hold close? In a world of danger, what makes you feel safe? From a poem written in the form of a syllabus, to another about the time his grandmother literally saved his life, Johnson's creative expression is constantly enacting the feminist mantra, "the personal is political."

The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop


Kevin Coval - 2015
    This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation.It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters.The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

Baby Geisha


Trinie Dalton - 2012
    The result is a kind of everyday fantastic. Dalton nails the Walserian trick of evincing a sincerity nearly indistinguishable from irony. The effect is a poised instability, more uncanny than the magic the stories sometimes describe."-Bookforum"Dalton handles her narratives with a deft skill and a keen, distinct, confident voice that never eases up, never ceases to surprise, leaving readers happy to experience her intriguing world up close. Just the way we like it."-Brooklyn Rail"[The stories] feel like brilliant sexual fairy tales on drugs. Dalton writes of self-discovery and sex with a knowing humility and humor."-Interview Magazine"'Pura Vida,' about an emotionally unavailable journalist on assignment to cover a sloth clinic in Costa Rica, is a standout, its final moment between woman and sloth arriving with breathtaking lightness, like the first flower of spring. Other memorable outings include trips to the Missouri Ozarks ("Wet Look"), the Alps ("Shrub of Emotion"), and the Painted Desert ("Baby Geisha"), with men and women on the verge of, but never quite reaching, psycho-sexual breakthroughs."-Los Angeles Magazine Critic's Pick"[Baby Geisha] pokes fun, it's satirical, there's an underlying delicious irony to it, and the telling parts are the ones where Dalton coins names, cuts down trees with her paragraphs, gives us just a touch of the absurd... Dalton's skill as a writer, and above all her expertise in choosing words that play into a darker cultural picture--an offsetting of America's natural high!--are not to be missed here."-FanzineBaby Geisha is a collection of thirteen sexually-charged stories that roam from the Coney Island Ferris wheel to the Greek Isles.True to Trinie Dalton's form, the stories in Baby Geisha are distinctly imagined while also representing a more grounded approach in the author's style. There's the Joan Didion-obsessed starving journalist of "Pura Vida," struggling to maintain a relationship with her performance artist sisters (or anyone, for that matter), on assignment in Costa Rica to write an article on sloth-hugging. "Millennium Chill" is about a woman who discovers that her body heat is mysteriously linked to that of an elderly beggar.Baby Geisha serves to support Dalton's reputation as a remarkable stylist and a very original artist.

Selected Poems 1988-2013


Seamus Heaney - 2014
    This volume encapsulates the finest work from Seeing Things (1991) with its lines of loss and revelation; The Spirit Level (1996) where we experience "the poem as ploughshare that turns time / Up and over."; the landmark translation of Beowulf (1999); Electric Light (2001), a book of origins and oracles; and his final collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), which limn the interconnectedness of being, our lifelines to our inherited past.

Advice from the Lights


Stephen Burt - 2017
    It's part nostalgia, part confusion, and part an ongoing wondering: How do any of us achieve adulthood? And why would we want to, if we had the choice? This collection is woven from and interrupted by extraordinary sequences, including Stephanie poems about Stephen's female self; poems on particular years of the poet's early life, each with its own memories, desires, insecurities, and pop songs; and versions of poems by the Greek poet Callimachus, whose present-day incarnation worries (who doesn't?) about mortality, the favor of the gods, and the career of Taylor Swift. The collection also includes poems on politics, location, and parenthood. Taken all together, this is Stephen Burt's most personal and most accomplished collection, an essential work that asks who we are, how we become ourselves, and why we make art.

Viral Poems


Lily Myers - 2013
    This anthology of poems and essays is a forceful argument for the continuing cultural relevance of poetry.

The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems


Agha Shahid Ali - 2009
    This volume, his shining legacy, moves from playful early poems to themes of mourning and loss, culminating in the ghazals of Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The title poem appears in print for the first time.from “The Veiled Suite”I wait for him to look straight into my eyesThis is our only chance for magnificence.If he, carefully, upon this hour of ice,will let us almost completely crystallize,tell me, who but I could chill his dreaming night.Where he turns, what will not appear but my eyes?Wherever he looks, the sky is only eyes.Whatever news he has, it is of the sea.

Not Here


Hieu Minh Nguyen - 2018
    Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

If You See Me, Don't Say Hi


Neel Patel - 2018
    His characters, almost all of who are first-generation Indian Americans, subvert our expectations that they will sit quietly by. We meet two brothers caught in an elaborate web of envy and loathing; a young gay man who becomes involved with an older man whose secret he could never guess; three women who almost gleefully throw off the pleasant agreeability society asks of them; and, in the final pair of linked stories, a young couple struggling against the devastating force of community gossip. If You See Me, Don't Say Hi examines the collisions of old world and new world, small town and big city, traditional beliefs (like arranged marriage) and modern rituals (like Facebook stalking). The men and women in these stories are full of passion, regret, envy, anger, and yearning. They fall in love with the wrong people and betray one another and deal with the accumulation of years of subtle racism. They are utterly compelling. Ranging across the country, Patel’s stories -- empathetic, provocative, twisting, and wryly funny -- introduce a bold new literary voice, one that feels more timely than ever.

Jonny Appleseed


Joshua Whitehead - 2018
    Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez," and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages--and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.