African American Studies. Gladman wields an idiosyncratic skill with description and characters that has drawn praise and attention from her contemporaries. JUICE describes a world where seemingly minor obsessions and details (like the narrator's almost random preference for juice) can structure and develop an entire story, down to its tone and style. As her narrator puts it: So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive.

    People living happy lives, some not-so-happy lives, people in love, hopeless romantics, people dealing with heartbreak, the ones who believe life is better with a bit of whimsy, this book, hopefully, has a little something that resonates with everybody, lets the reader find the silver lining when needed and discover the joie de vivre even when times are hard.

    Included in this volume is the work from Eavan Boland's five early volumes of poetry: New Territory, The War Horse, In Her Own Image, Night Feed, and The Journey.The poems from Boland's first book, New Territory, show her to be, at twenty-two, a master of formal verse reflecting Irish history and myth. This collection charts the ways in which Boland's work breaks from poetic tradition, honors it, and reinvents it. Poems like "Anorexic," "Mastectomy," and "Witching" have an intensity reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In later poems, her subjects become more personal, sequencing Boland's life as a woman, poet, and mother. Boland writes, "I grew to understand the Irish poetic tradition only when I went into exile with it," becoming, in effect, "a displaced person / in a pastoral chaos."This collection demonstrates how Boland's mature voice developed from the poetics of inner exile into a subtle, flexible idiom uniquely her own.

    Wright interweaves familiar, coloquial speech with strikingly inventive language, leaving each poem a distinctive entity, yet interconnected by linked metaphors and images.

    Here are poems that bring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself.The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.

    Over and over these poems leave us convinced that we’ve learned something very important and mysterious, yet we can’t say exactly what.

    Her voice came back, whispering at first, then screaming. Ceremony for the Choking Ghost contains the sound of that voice returning, bringing poems about grief and its effect on the body, the body politic, memory and, of course, poems about love. From the intensely personal, "How My Family Grieved," to the political, "What Lot's Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn't a Pillar of Salt)," Finneyfrock engages the reader with the chiseled images of a precise storyteller.

    Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer’s poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and served on depression ware, and where bawdy instructions for a modern “Home on the Range” read:Mix a drink of stock lot:vermouth and the water table.And the bar will smell of IBP.And you will lick my Laura Ingalls.In Boyer’s heartland, “Surfaces should be worn. Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.” And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed.Nothing, too, is a subject:dusk regulating the blankery.Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,fill in the metaphorical smell.A poet and visual artist, Anne Boyer lives in Kansas, where she co-edits the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln and teaches at Kansas City Art Institute.

    Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order -Bruce Boone.

    In her debut collection of fifteen short stories, Amina Cain makes ordinary worlds strange and spare and beautiful. A woman carves invisible images onto ice, a pair of black wings appears in front of a house, and a restless teacher sits in a gallery of miniature rooms. As Miranda Mellis describes, "The revelatory pleasure and hope [in these stories] emanate from an artistry driven by ethical desire." "I highly recommend reading I Go To Some Hollow," says Bhanu Kapil, "because of what it teaches you about love, and the relationship between love and writing." I GO TO SOME HOLLOW is published as part of the TrenchArt: Tracer Series, with an Introduction by Bhanu Kapil and collaborative visual art by Ken Erhlich and Susan Simpson.

    These poems take the reader on surprising journeys of healing, hard-won amid personal and social vicissitudes – including triumph over addiction, and alcoholism – and open spaces in which to share in emotional, quasi-spiritual transcendence despite. Who could ask for more? Rabbit was chosen for the PBS Wild Card Choice for Winter, 2018.

    Edited by Lee Ann Brown. SONNETS, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground- breaking works of writing consciousness.

    But [Flenniken] also wrote them to honor the people she grew up with." " - Seattle Times"The poems in "Plume" are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity.

    Chang sweeps together myth and fairy tale, skirting the edges of events to focus on the psychological tenor of experience: the underpinnings of identity and the role of nature in both constructing and erasing a self. From the edge of the ocean, where things constantly shift and dissolve, through "the forest's thick, / where the trees meet the dark," to an imaginary cliffside town of fog, this book makes a journey both natural and psychological, using experiments in language and form to capture the search for personhood and place.

    This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.