A high school student leaves his parents' home to live on his own with friends and with the help of government aid. The narrator becomes your best friend on the first page.

    Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) Mother's Sewing Box, For My Father Looking for My Uncle, and The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria. Finally, the poet's words again: . . . you get / just what you want and (just before that), Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires.--Marvin Bell

    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."

    Divided into three sections—"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")—Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou").In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

    Prose. "CUNT-UPS is an explosion of textual sexuality that resists principles of formal ordering, is polyvalent in its voice and range, and as perverse in its sentence construction as its content. Its 'setting' is the mediated exchange itself, the fractured articulation of 'a female body who has sex writing about sex.' While the title might imply a gendered site of production, it also suggests a sexual/textual violence that is more than a mere 'disorganization of the senses' but a dismemberment of the gendered body as well. The text becomes a (feminist) desiring machine, its writing a prosthetic device mediating the traces of physicality, imagination, abjection, and pleasure."Throw on the switch, plug into the mediating machine, the flesh-object writes back, becomes subject, suspect, the gaze cut-up and fed back into vibrating loops of unobtainable desire."--David Buuck

    Lara Glenum was raised in the gothic South, studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Virgina, and now teaches at the University of Georgia. In this entirely unheimlich debut, she enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model. Glenum recovers the political intensity and daring of the Surrealist project. The extraordinary precision of these poems is so stunning, we can't help but feel blinded by their visions: sock-monkeys, dollhouses, and a circus made of meat vibrate between the playful and the brutal so deftly, each line is a perfect shard of some fantastic planet, gloriously and sadly like our own. As in Blake's apocalyptic images, the sky rolls itself up like a scroll--brilliant in its colors and infinite in its scope. Glorious!--D.A. Powell.

    THEORIES OF FALLING is the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Judge Marie Howe said of THEORIES OF FALLING, "I kept coming back to these poems--the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn't want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground." "Sandra Beasley slices her way down the page with precision and punch. Her haunting 'Allergy Girl' series will set off such an itch, I doubt you'll ever fully recover...This poet leaves us to smolder and ache in small kingdoms where 'even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.'"--Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

    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.

    He is a chronicler and mentor of young poets, was a leader of the antiwar movement, founded the men's movement, and wrote the bestselling book Iron John, which brought the men's movement to the attention of the world. Throughout these activities, Bly has continued to deepen his own poetry, a vigorous voice in a period of more academic wordsmiths. Here he presents his favorite poems of the last decades-timeless classics from Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. A complete section of marvelous new poems rounds out this collection, which offers a chance to reread, in a fresh setting, a lifetime of work dedicated to fresh perspectives.

    . . . By turns clowning, worshipful, heartbroken, and Faulknerian, these lyrics transport the reader to a familiar place made utterly strange.”—Srikanth Reddy Kiki Petrosino earned graduate degrees from both the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poem, “You Have Made a Career of Not Listening,” was featured in the anthology Best New Poets 2006. She lives in Iowa City.

    After her death in March 2012, Rich left behind a manuscript of mature work that speaks for her concern with a poetics of relation along with a passionate attention to craft.In addition to her selections from twelve volumes of published work, Later Poems: Selected and New contains ten powerful new poems. Among these, From Strata is a kind of archaeology of the present day; Itinerary searches for an indefinite future in a menaced landscape; For the Young Anarchists offers a trope of skilled labor for political action; and the haunting voice of the Teethsucking Bird reminds us of what we have been told to forget.These and other poems look back into history and forward into the future while engaging with contemporary moments. Rich s singular command of language continues to the end.

    The much-anticipated full-length poetry collection by the critically acclaimed author of Black Cloud, Witch Hunt delves into the terror and beauty that occurs when love, madness, and addiction collide.

    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.

    . . the effect is shattering and transcendent.”—Modern Times Bookstore newsletterIn lyric, diamond-cut prose, Selah Saterstrom revisits the mythic, dead-end Southern town of Beau Repose. This time, the story follows a strung-out American teenager influenced by heavy metal, inspired by Ginger Rogers, hell-bent on self-destruction, and more intelligent than anyone around her realizes. She is forced into rehab and private school, and her life, at least on the surface, changes course, eventually leading to theology studies in Scotland. But as the feverish St. Vitus’s dance of her adolescence morphs into slow-motion inertia abroad, an illness brings her home again—to face the legacy of pain she left behind and to find a way to become the lead in a dance of her own creation.An heir to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, Saterstrom soars above the traditional boundaries of the American novel with “exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language” (Raleigh News & Observer) that makes her novels “impossible to put down.” Spare, raw, and transcendent, Saterstrom’s unflinching examination of modern-day Dixie and contemporary adolescence lights up the dark corners of the American experience.Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Pink Institution, a debut novel praised across the country for “letting gusts of fresh, tart air blow into the old halls of Southern Gothic” (The Believer). A Mississippi native, she is currently on the faculty of the University of Denver's Creative Writing Program. Visit her website at www.selahsaterstrom.com.

    The linked poems in Klink's third collection, Raptus, search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.