Vita Nova is a book that exists in the long moment of spring: a book of deaths and beginnings, resignation and hope; brutal, luminous, and far-seeing.Like late Yeats, Vita Nova dares large statement. By turns stern interlocutor and ardent novitiate, Glück compasses the essential human paradox. In Vita Nova, Louise Glück manages the apparently impossible: a terrifying act of perspective that brings into resolution the smallest human hope and the vast forces that thwart and shape it.

    With sharp wit and relentless questioning, Shapero crafts poems a reader can, if not believe in, then trust--to level with us, to surprise us, and to stay with us long after we put the book down. No Object is a fast ride you will not easily forget.

    Sin, bestselling author of the Whiskey, Words & a Shovel series, returns with a collection of poetry and prose meant to remind the wounded that they are, in fact, beautiful in a way society may never comprehend.A Beautiful Composition of Broken is inspired by some of the events expressed artistically by Samantha King in the bestseller Born to Love, Cursed to Feel. It serves as a poetic documentary of the lives of people who have been mistreated, misunderstood, and wrongfully labeled in a way that limits them in this world. The author’s most personal volume yet, A Beautiful Composition of Broken builds a conceptual bridge between r.h. Sin’s earliest work and his forthcoming series, Planting Gardens in Graves.

    White's The Salt Ecstasies—originally published in 1982, shortly after White's untimely death—has earned a reputation for its artful and explicit expression of love and desire. In this new edition, with an introduction by Mark Doty and previously unpublished works by White, his invaluable poetry is again available—clear, passionate, and hard-earned.The Salt Ecstasies is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

    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

    Cummings is without question one of the major poets of the 20th century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

    You haven't even learned it:ecstasy and suffering make the same face.--from "The Offering"May Day is both a distress call and a celebration of the arrival of spring. In this rich and unusually assured first collection, the poet Gretchen Marquette writes of the losses of a brother gone off to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a great love--losses that have left the world charged with absence and grief. But there is also the wonder of the natural world: the deer at the edge of the forest, the dog reliably coaxing the poet beyond herself and into the city park where by tradition every May Day is pageantry, a festival of surviving the long winter. "What does it mean to be in love?" one poem asks. "As it turns out, / the second best thing that can happen to you / is a broken heart."May Day introduces readers to a new poet of depth and power.

    The inaugural winner of the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.

    In his follow-up to the acclaimed The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib channels Ginuwine, Prince, and Carly Rae Jepsen to artfully reflect on intimacy, friendship, and becoming an adult. Vintage Sadness further cements Willis-Abdurraqib as one of the most important voices of our generation and proves that each life has its own tender soundtrack.

    Bringing together works only sparsely anthologized or long out of print, this book is a resource for understanding the range, depth, and originality of this pioneering writer whom the poet Anne Sexton named "Muriel, mother of everyone."

    Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment--the new postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005" will stand together with "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2000" as essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry.

    By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor for the most profound and private grief, the poems in Elegy confront, in stark terms and with a resilient voice, how memory haunts the living and brings the dead back to life. Within these intimate and personal poems is a persistently urgent, and deeply touching, examination of grief itself.

    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.

    She poses the eternal question: Can you heal once you’ve been marked by a monster, or will the sun always sting?

    These poems—set in a town that straddles Mexico and Arizona—are lyric adventures, crossing two and three boundaries as easily as one, between cultures, between languages, between senses. Drawing upon fable, parable, and family legend, Ríos utilizes the intense and supple imagination of childhood to find and preserve history beyond facts: plastic lemons turning into baseballs, a grandmother’s long hair reaching up to save her life, the painted faith jumpers leaping to the earth and crowd below. This is magical realism at its shimmering best. The smallest muscle in the human body is in the ear. It is also the only muscle that does not have blood vessels; It has fluid instead. The reason for this is clear: The ear is so sensitive that the body, if it heard its own pulse, Would be devastated by the amplification of its own sound. In this knowledge I sense a great metaphor, But I do not want to be hasty in trying to capture or describe it. Words are our weakest hold on the world. —from "Some Extensions of the Sovereignty of Science" "Ríos is onto something new in his poetry—in the way that the real poets of any time always are."—American Book Review Alberto Ríos teaches at Arizona State and is the author of eight books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir about growing up on the Mexican border. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work is included in over 175 national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music.