The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.

    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

    Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation. Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems. The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul: Zero built a nest in my navel. Incurable Longing. Blood too— From violent actions It's a nest belonging to one But zero uses it And its pleasure is its own—from The Quietist

    What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’—The New York Times‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village VoiceLisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

    In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable “Stag’s Leap,” “When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up.  Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” Olds’s propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music—sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.

    But Poe is also the author of some of the most haunting poetry ever written--poems of love, death and loneliness that have lost none of their power to enthrall in this unique Signet Classic edition.

    JohnWhen Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives.”  Each of his books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books: Wrecking Crew (1972), Afterlife (1976), The Dollmaker’s Ghost (1981), Winter Stars (1985) and The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991). “It is not an exaggeration to say that the death of Larry Levis in 1996—of a heart attack at 49—sent a shock wave through the ranks of American poetry. Not only was Levis a good friend to many poets (not simply of his own generation but of many poets older and younger as well), his poetry had become a kind of touchstone for many of us, a source of special inspiration and awe. With Larry Levis’ death came the sense that an American original had been lost. . . . It is not at all paradoxical that he saw both the most intimate expressions of poetry and the grandest gestures of art, of language, as constituting individual acts of courage. One can only hope that, like such courage, Larry Levis’s remarkable poems will continue to live far into our literature.”—from the Afterword, by David St. John

    Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe is a collection of poems centering on the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.

    Nye writes of local life in her inner-city Texas neighborhood, about rural schools and urban communities she’s visited in this country, as well as the daily rituals of Jews and Palestinians who live in the war-torn Middle East. The Day I missed the day on which it was said others should not have certain weapons, but we could. Not only could, but should, and do. I missed that day. Was I sleeping? I might have been digging in the yard, doing something small and slow as usual. Or maybe I wasn’t born yet. What about all the other people who aren’t born? Who will tell them?Balancing direct language with a suggestive “aslantness,” Nye probes the fragile connection between language and meaning. She never shies from the challenge of trying to name the mysterious logic of childhood or speak truth to power in the face of the horrors of war. She understands our lives are marked by tragedy, inequity, and misunderstanding, and that our best chance of surviving our losses and shortcomings is to maintain a heightened awareness of the sacred in all things.Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, editor, anthologist, is a recipient of writing fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations. Nye’s work has been featured on PBS poetry specials including NOW with Bill Moyers, The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and The United States of Poetry. She has traveled abroad as a visiting writer on three Arts America tours sponsored by the United States Information Agency. In 2001 she received a presidential appointment to the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

    Beauty/Beauty is a book with tenderness running through its veins, exploring salvation, reparation, and the fullness of being alive; the difficulty of defining what love is, the heartbreak, the faraway friends, the overwhelming abundance of things in museums. It is alive with memories, with old loves hanging around in the corners of dark rooms, ghost mouths hidden inside the mouth you are kissing, and eulogies to dearly departed pets. Each poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in and explored; a stegosaurus is adored, a million silver spiders play dead, a list of flowers is not really a list of flowers, adorable dogs want to be friends, the flightless grow wings, and the stars turn green.

    Well known for writing out the heartache and melancholia, this title explores the softer side of Savage, one not many are privileged to. She pours over the pages with a full love, one returned. You'll find no sadness or unrequited feelings in here. This is the real, heartfelt musings of a woman in love.

    In his second collection he engages love, mortality, and life in New York City after 9/11. The title piece, a prose-poem synopsis of an unwritten novel, turns all literary forms upon themselves with savvy and flair, while the elegy cycle “Twenty Poems for Noelle” is a compassionate song for a suffering friend.Noelle, somewhere in an apartmentsymphony number twolistens to you breathing.Broken glass in the street.What was once unglowing glows. . . The Pajamaist is an intimate book filled with sly wit and an ever-present, infectious openness to amazement. Zapruder’s poems are urbane and constantly, curiously searching.

    Her bracing sixth book of poems, published concurrently with her debut story collection, takes an unflinching, though not unsmiling, look at mortality. Perillo has a penchant for dark humor, for jokes that stick."—Publishers Weekly, starred review"Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions."—Booklist"Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo. She writes accessible, often funny poems that border on the profane."—Time Out New York"Lucia Perillo's much lauded writing has been consistently fine—with its deep, fearless intelligence; its dark and delicious wit; its skillful lyricism; and its refreshingly cool but no less embracing humanity." —Open Books: A Poem EmporiumThe poetry of Lucia Perillo is fierce, tragicomic, and contrarian, with subjects ranging from coyotes and Scotch broom to local elections and family history. Formally braided, Perillo gathers strands of the mythic and mundane, of media and daily life, as she faces the treachery of illness and draws readers into poems rich in image and story.When you spend many hours alone in a roomyou have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortalbut that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught usdo not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bita thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,who walked four days into the jungleand stayed for the kindness of the tribe—who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Bobbitt award from the Library of Congress. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

    An investigation into incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with all existence, by one of the preeminent poets of her generation

    He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.