Bambrick began writing poems in order to document the forms of violence she witnessed towards the people and the environment of the Columbia River. While working there she found that reservoirs foster a uniquely complex community--from fish biologists to the owners of luxury summer homes--and became interested in the issues and tensions between the people of that place. The idea of power, literal and metaphorical, was present in every action and encounter with bosses and the people using the river. The presence of a young woman on the crew irritated her older, male co-workers who'd logged, built houses, and had to suffer various forms of class discrimination their entire lives. She found throughout this experience that their issues, while not the same, were inherently connected to the suffering of the lands they worked. Introduction by Sharon Olds.

    Her debut collection The Bones Below delicately carries the reader to a place of brutal, beautiful honesty. DeMulder's personal revelations complete a touching portrait of the young artist and her fearless exploration of the human experience, bare in its rawest and most tender forms.

    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.”

    it is the facade that many of us peruse our lives carrying, often neglecting our pain, our mental health, and most importantly, the way we are more prone to hurting others when we lack this self-awareness. (w)holehearted seeks to encompass as many stories as possible, touching on several topics, namely, spirituality, feminism, colorism, domestic violence, intersectionality, mental health and more. it aims to depict that anyone with the darkest past and pitfalls can still save themselves from drowning in the difficulties that not only plague our world, but also plague our hearts.

    The poems in Accepting the Disaster range from lyric miniatures like "The Crossroads," a six-line sketch of an accident scene, to "The Orange Bottle," an expansive narrative page-turner whose main character suffers a psychotic episode after quitting medication. Mehigan blends the naturalistic milieu of such great chroniclers of American life as Stephen Crane and Studs Terkel with the cinematic menace and wonder of Fritz Lang. Balanced by the music of his verse, this unusual combination brings an eerie resonance to the real lives and institutions it evokes. These poems capture with equal tact the sinister quiet of a deserted Main Street, the tragic grandiosity of Michael Jackson, the loneliness of a self-loathing professor, the din of a cement factory, and the saving grandeur of the natural world. This much-anticipated second collection is the work of a nearly unrivaled craftsman, whose first book was called by Poetry "a work of some poise and finish, by turns delicate and robust."

    Mary Ruefle is of their number. Her poems discover the full beauty and anguish of life that most of us dare not see, much less depict in luminous detail for the ages.

    PINK ELEPHANT is Rachel McKibbens' collection of beautifully crafted, emotionally searing poems depicting the fractured mythology of a family's tumultuous life. Picking up where Plath and Sexton have left off, McKibbens threatens the comfortable confines of confessional poetry with a take-no-prisoners surrealist and super-real edge. By creating a folklore out of brutality and violence (borne from misplaced or absent love) McKibbens ultimately locates both love and forgiveness, fearlessly placing them in their rightful home. McKibbens' PINK ELEPHANT is an audacious debut.

    Whether in stark, haiku-like descriptions of a cancer ward, surrealistic depictions of a social order coming apart, or fluent, defiant outpourings of praise, Wiman pushes his language and forms until they break open, revealing startling new truths within. The poems are joyful and sorrowful at the same time, abrasive and beautiful, densely physical and credibly mystical. They attest to the human hunger to feel existence, even at its most harrowing, and the power of art to make our most intense experiences not only apprehensible but transfiguring.

    This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

    These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.” —Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal

    With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

    “Mean free path” is the average distance a particle travels before colliding with another particle. The poems in Lerner’s third collection are full of layered collisions—repetitions, fragmentations, stutters, re-combinations—that track how language threatens to break up or change course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. And then there’s the larger collision of love, and while Lerner questions whether love poems are even possible, he composes a gorgeous, symphonic, and complicated one.You startled me. I thought you were sleepingIn the traditional sense. I like lookingAt anything under glass, especiallyGlass. You called me. Like overheardDreams. I’m writing this one as a womanComfortable with failure. I promise I will neverBut the predicate withered. If you areUncomfortable seeing this as portraitureClose your eyes. No, you startledBen Lerner is the author of three books of poetry and was named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book, Angle of Yaw. He holds degrees from Brown University, co-founded No: a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

    With this unusual volume, arranged in six carefully paced movements to suggest the journey from death to recovery, Gallagher charges language with its utmost responsibilities: here poetry aspires deeply and urgently beyond its cultural marginality to embrace the paradox of sharing unshareable pain and to assume again an Orphic voice and a communal necessity.

    With his other 'shorter' collections Black + Blues and Third World Poems, Middle Passages creates a kind of chisel which may well lead us into a projected third trilogy. Here is a political angle to Brathwaite's Caribbean & New World quest, with new notes of protest and lament. It marks a Sisyphean stage of Third World history in which things fall apart and everyone's achievements come tumbling back down upon their heads and into their hearts, like the great stone which King Sisyphus was condemned to keep heaving back up the same hill in hell - a postmodernist implosion already signalled by Baldwin, Patterson, Soyinka and Achebe and more negatively by V.S. Naipaul; but given a new dimension here by Brathwaite's rhythmical and 'video' affirmations. And so Middle Passages includes poems for those modern heroes who are the pegs by which the mountain must be climbed again: Maroon resistance, the poets Nicolas Guillen, the Cuban revolutionary, and Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill; the great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith); and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney and Nelson Mandela.

    The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.