A new volume of poems by the award-winning author of October Palace.

    R. Ammons at his strongest and most eloquent in the lyric mode. The book is an achievement fully comparable to his Uplands and Briefings. Among the poems likely to assume a permanent place in the Ammonsian (and American) canon are the majestic title lyric and 'Swells,' 'Easter Morning,' 'Keepsake,' 'Givings,' and 'Persistences.' Again Ammons has confirmed his vital continuities with the central Whitmanian tradition of our poetry, and his crucial place in that panoply."

    The poems in The Book of Endings try to make sense of, or at least come to some kind of reckoning with absence--the death of the author's mother, the absence of the beloved, the absence of an accountable god, cicadas, the dead stars arriving, the dead moon aglow in the night sky.

    Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

    The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. What Is Amazing delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.

    (It was John Findura in Verse Magazine.) She's also been compared to comedian Sarah Silverman, artist Jeff Koons, a 10-year-old who can't keep her mouth shut, and cartoonist R. Crumb. None of these equations is quite right, however. Jennifer L. Knox's work is unmistakably her own: darkly hilarious, surprisingly empathetic, utterly original. DRUNK BY NOON is the eagerly awaited sequel to Knox's first book, A GRINGO LIKE ME, which is also available from Bloof in a new edition. Jennifer L. Knox is a three-time contributor to the Best American Poetry Series and her poems have also appeared in Great American Prose Poems and Great American Erotic Poems. For more information, see www.jenniferlknox.com.

    In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.

    This book of elegies takes us from the luminous world of childhood to the fluorescent glare of operating rooms and recovery wards, and into the twilight lives of those who must go on. In one poem Phillips watches his sons play “Mercy” just as he did with his brother: hands laced, the stronger pushing the other back until he grunts for mercy, “a game we played // so many times / I finally taught my sons, // not knowing what it was, / until too late, I’d done.” Phillips documents the unsung joys of midlife, the betrayals of the human body, and his realization that as the crowd of ghosts grows, we take our places, next in line. The result is a twenty-first-century memento mori, fashioned not just from loss but also from praise, and a fierce love for the world in all its ruined splendor.

    The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life--not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

    An introduction by Norma Millay, written expressly for this volume, focuses on examples of the poet's variations in sonnet structure. Here is the voice of Millay, whose prophetic vision, devotion to freedom, and intellectual daring combine with her mastery of the sonnet form to speak eloquently for the human spirit.

    In fifty poems, each consisting solely of four connected quatrains, Ashbery apparently plays by the rules while simultaneously violating every single one. Over and over again, the familiar, almost sonnet-like sixteen-line form creates an outline of a poem within which, one would expect, poetry is meant to arrive--as a station waits for a train. And yet, as with many of the world's greatest poems, the act of creating poetry also relies on the reading and the reader--in other words, as this collection's signature poem "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" puts it, "the poem is / you." In "Shadow Train," Ashbery demonstrates how language influences our experience of reality, creating it and sustaining it while also remaining mysterious and ineffable: constantly arriving, but impossible to catch.

    He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.

    . .--from "The Window"Lynda Hull's Collected Poems brings together her three collections--long unavailable--with a new introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, and allows, for the first time, the full scale of her achievement to be seen. Edited with Hull's husband, David Wojahn, this book contains all the poems Hull published in her lifetime, before her untimely death in 1994.Collected Poems is the first book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. Each volume--chosen by series editor Mark Doty--is introduced by a poet who brings to the work a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series brings all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry into the hands of a new generation of readers.

    Good for poetry. Good for poetry lovers. Good for the rest of us, too.”— Nikki Giovanni Exploring themes of pregnancy, motherhood, ancestry, and life in the borderline slums of Washington, DC, the richly felt and adroit poetry of Erika Meitner’s Ideal Cities moves, mesmerizes, and delights. The work of an important emerging voice in contemporary American poetry—a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by Paul Guest—Ideal Cities gloriously perpetuates NPS’s long-standing tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets.

    Smith’s poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster.”—Marvin Bell“I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem.”—Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judgeFrom Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation’s premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade—a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned cele-bration of poetry’s liberating power.