Poems and selfies by Steve Roggenbuck

    Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls ‘love without a story’.

    D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

    Animals populate its pages—owl, groundhog, fox, each with its own inimitable survival skills—and the poet who so meticulously observes their behaviors has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of skills herself: she too has survived. The power of these extraordinary poems lies in their recognition that all our experience is ultimately useless—that human beings are at every moment beginners, facing the earth as if for the first time. "Don’t you think I’m doing better," asks the first poem. "You got sick you got well you got sick," says the last.Eschewing punctuation, forgoing every symmetry, the poems hurl themselves forward, driven by an urgent need to speak. Headwaters is a book of wisdom that refuses to be wise, a book of fresh beginnings by an American poet writing at the height of her powers.

    Channeling "the primal vision of Hart Crane" (Harold Bloom), Adam Fitzgerald helped welcome the modernist aethetic into the twenty-first century. Part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide, Fitzgerald's chimerical poems confront "a surging ocean of sound and language" (Maureen McLane). In these forty-eight poems, he conducts a madcap symphony of language, memory, and fantasy with the "exhilarating assurance of nonstop invention" (Timothy Donnelly).

    Nobody comes out looking good. The slippery self, surveilled yet ready with her mask, performs a peep show—booth opens wide, yet somehow the dancer isn't there. She's in character. She's "cut off the head to let the humors hose through.

    Includes "The Spell of the Yukon," "The Heart of the Sourdough," "While the Bannock Bakes," and "The Squaw Man."

    Twirty-Something: A Young Woman's Guide to Giant Underwear is a hilarious new Kindle Single from Award-Winning and Amazon Best-Selling author and humorist Ingrid Reinke.On the cold January day when Ingrid Reinke turned 30, she looked back upon the last decade of her life in deep thought before finally shaking her head and mumbling to herself the following insight: "Wow, what a shit show."So, she sat down, braless and alone, and penned a collection of laugh-out-loud essays about the ridiculous, shocking and occasionally horrifying things that happen to us as we ungracefully age from 20 to 30, try, semi-successfully, to leave our clueless years behind and become mature, responsible grown-up women.From weird hairs to boob sweat, OCD to weddings, Twirty-Something swings between a no-holds-barred conversation and a cautionary tale about aging and all the crap that comes along with it.Sometime instruction manual, sometime commiseration partner, get ready for Reinke's honest and occasionally potty-mouthed accounts of this tumultuous decade.So hike up your yoga pants, plop another ice cube in your Pinot Grigio and get ready to laugh at the author, young women in general, and most of all at yourself.

    She would marry a man called Tod or Brad and she would have two perfect children. But instead she married a Jeff and he’s just confessed to having an affair.Spurred on by supportive friends and her unpredictable sister Max, she finds the job she was born for: Wife for Hire. Sam manages everything from domestic help to renovations to social events for many satisfied customers.However when Hal Buchanan is added to her client list but claims not to need her services, Sam realises that while she can organise many things in life, she is not so businesslike when her emotions are involved.

    

    

    A great woman poet in second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity." – Allen Ginsberg"With di Prima's selected poems, Pieces of a Song . . . we have a chance to examine the powerful gifts this deeply imaginative poet has to offer us . . . ." —Jack Foley, Poetry Previews (website)"A prolific writer generally associated with the Beat Generation, di Prima deserves wider recognition." —Library Journal"She is not about to be regarded merely as a literary figurehead, but as an ongoing contributor to the arts—a presence whose voice continues to positively impact those who listen, as it has for the last half-century." —Verbicide MagazineFeminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry, The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association’s Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation, and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.

    Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch-"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"-and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."

    Who's the queen of kundalini bloopers, Emily Dickinson's attitude problem (that bitch) and California dreams? It's Melissa Broder, who will charm your pants off and show you a little tough love in this vivid, witty first collection of poems. Each poem is artisan-crafted in controlled couplets, weighty triplets, tight syllabics and assonance that will take the top of your head off. But you won't have the time to absorb the academic monkeyshine--so absorbed you'll be on the flip side of Bat Mitzvah stress-syndrome, Aunt Sheila's in Taos, vampires in absentia, and brand names, brand names, brand names. From junkie fetishism to a housewife with a special "thing" for laundry, Broder does dark with magnetic charisma and enchanting humor.

    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."