It's a poetry book, from the perspective of a journal entry in the National Archives. The National Archives live in a building in Seattle behind barbed wire, directly next door to the Center for Spiritual Living. This is no accident. Gentleman Practice is a disarming de-haunting of accidents. There are no stunt doubles performing the honesty in this book. Head raised and victorious, he has crafted a translation of the human spirit on a small, practical patch, with a very fine tooth indeed. And, while many poetry books read like a thick epic series of sections, Gentleman Practice will no doubt rest in your hands like a well-oiled novel.

    Lana’s music and lyrics evoke images of a saturated Kodachrome photograph, so it would stand to reason that she’d now add “poet” to her artist’s kit. Even without music, her words work their way around you, pulling you into a world that’s not unlike a David Lynch movie.[from barnesandnoble.com]

    At her most moving and meditative, impressive and musical, Denise Levertov addresses in her poetry collection, Evening Train, the nature of faith and love, the imperiled beauty of the natural world, and the horrors of the Gulf War.

    Replacing the slim volume which introduced Stevie Smith to American readers, New Selected Poems is chronologically arranged and contains 165 poems along with many of the author's doodles.

    By turns sassy and serious, the poems can seem to sprint in two directions at once, managing to make the reader laugh at the same time they are struck by the emotional strength of the work. "Charming, inviting, beguiling and delightful poems in the language of someone who seems alive speaking refreshing riddles to herself." SHEILA HETI"Uptalk is a book of transcribed whale songs. Some scientists gave a whale a microphone and she took it home and stayed up all night under the covers talking to herself about faces and word-parts. I am delighted that Kimmy took it upon herself to transcribe this unique document of marine biology, and my heart goes out to the brilliant, charming whale author, wherever she may be." SARA WOODS

    Linda Pastan writes, "the art that mattered / was the life led fully / stanza by swollen stanza." That life is portrayed here, from memories of the poet's earliest childhood and the ambiguities of marriage and love to the surprises that come with age, always with a consciousness of what is happening in the larger world.

    This rich selection - made by the author - exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited - the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children - but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits. A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.

    The Last American Valentine is a unique anthology of non-sappy love poetry and flash fiction. Poet Laureates, rock musicians, actors, famed prose writers and a few talented American barfly's have been handpicked, hunted down and crammed together with an artist the world has never met.

    Every woman should know the feelings of being loved and radiating those feelings back to her mate. This is a beautiful expression of heartfelt emotion using short, gratifying sentiments. If there is a lover in you, you will not get enough of "Her."

    Focusing on inspiration, Doby's poetry invites its reader to "Come as you are. Your tribe has arrived.  Your breath can rest here."both softand fiercecan coexist and still be powerful

    And like his best work to date, these poems create new experiences with language owed to Jackson’s willingness to once again seek a rhythmic sound that expresses the unique realities of the twenty-first century with humor and understanding. Whether set in Nairobi, Madrid, or Greece, the poems are sensuously evocative and unapologetically with-it, in their effort to build community across borders of language and style.From Urban Renewal, “The Dadaab Suite”:I have come to Dadaab like an actoron a press release, unprepared for the drained facesof famine-fleeing refugees, my craft’s glamourdimmed by hundreds of infant graves, childrenwhose lolling heads’ final drop landed on their mothers’backs like soft stones. What beauty can I spell inthis swelter of dust?

    The poems are fresh, skilful, passionate. Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. Her awards include first prize in the 1983 National Poetry Competition; three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards; Eric Gregory, Somerset Maugham and Dylan Thomas Awards in Britain and a 1995 Lannan Literary Award in the USA. In 1993 she received the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award for her acclaimed fourth collection Mean Time. On May 1, 2009 she was named the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

    No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

    Now Jaguar of Sweet Laughter presents the work of a poet with the precise and wondering eye of a gifted naturalist.Ackermans's Olympian vision records and transforms landscapes from Amazonia to Antarctica, while her imaginative empathy penetrates the otherness of hummingbirds, deer, and trilobites. But even as they draw readers into the wild heart of nature, Ackerman's poems are indelible reminders of what it is to be a human being -- the "jaguar of sweet laughter" that, according to Mayan mythology, astonished the world because it was the first animal to speak.