From online dating to beauty pageants, Greek mythology to road trips, Leigh Stein gives us resilient young women in longing and in love. Post-confessional—like Sylvia Plath raised on MTV, or Anne Sexton on Twitter—the poems seduce with a narrative hook or startle with a pop culture reference, all the while wrestling fresh meaning out of our fantasy-saturated modern lives.

    He's ready to see you through to the end.

    Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me is Mark Leidner's first full-length collection of poems. A collection of poems that might make you feel like a flower, like a black hole, like punishment meted out at night by a giant tractor, like you have to get on fire, then slowly walk around your old neighborhood, like the town was real, like she thinks swoon is a funnier word than mulligan, and he thinks swoon is a funny word too, but no way in hell is it funnier than mulligan, like he's searching for the Holy Grail and she has little Holy Grail-shaped pupils, like an effusion of steam, like what's cool changes, like hemisphere paint, like a blue flower, like the house you have lived above forever.

    The woman who loves him is left scarred and haunted. In her fierce, one-of-a-kind debut, Rebecca Lindenberg tells the story—in verse—of her passionate relationship with Craig Arnold, a much-respected poet who disappeared in 2009 while hiking a volcano in Japan. Lindenberg’s billowing, I-contain-multitudes style lays bare the poet’s sadnesses, joys, and longings in poems that are lyric and narrative, at once plainspoken and musically elaborate.Regarding her role in Arnold’s story, Lindenberg writes with clear-eyed humility and endearing dignity: “The girl with the ink-stained teeth / knows she’s famous / in a tiny, tragic way. / She’s not / daft, after all.” And then later, playfully, of her travels in Italy with the poet, her lover: “The carabinieri / wanted to know if there were bears / in our part of America. Yes, we said, / many bears. Man-eating bears? Yes, of course, / many man-eating bears.” Every poem in this collection bursts with humor, pathos, verve—and an utterly unique, soulful voice.This widely anticipated debut, already selected as a finalist for several prominent book awards, marks the first collection in the newly minted McSweeney’s Poetry Series. MPS is an imprint which seeks to publish a broad range of excellent new poetry collections in exquisitely designed hardcovers—poetry that’s useful and meaningful to anyone in any walk of life.

    Her command of the poetic language is unparalleled and sets her apart from other contemporary poets.” —Alicia Cook, Bestselling author of Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately“It’s going to hit you below the belt. You’re going to reach for the closest stand-in lover you can find & you’re going to make a home in their body & you’re going to pretend your childhood memories are hung in his chest & you skinned your knee tripping over the curve of his arm & you have always been here.”In Exits, Desires, & Slow Fires Goodreads Choice Nominated poet J.R. Rogue shines bright. With heartbreaking language, the bestselling author revisits unreturned love like only she can. Unforgiving pain, wanting, longing, fierce betrayal, and sweet lies feel like a second skin in this collection about love and loss.

    In Outgoing, the speaker erases his brother s answering machine message to save his family from the shame of dead you / answering calls. In other poems, once-ordinary objects become dreamlike. A buried light bulb blooms downward, a flower / of smoldering filaments. A refrigerator holds an evening landscape, a tinfoil lake, vegetables / dying in the crisper. Destructive and redemptive, Black Aperture opens to the complicated entanglements of mourning: damage and healing, sorrow and laughter, and torment balanced with moments of relief.

    ―from "Fire" The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is Nick Flynn's first new poetry collection in nearly a decade. What begins as a meditation on love and the body soon breaks down into a collage of voices culled from media reports, childhood memories, testimonies from Abu Ghraib detainees, passages from documentary films, overheard conversations, and scraps of poems and song, only to reassemble with a gathering sonic force. It's as if all the noise that fills our days were a storm, yet at the center is a quiet place, but to get there you must first pass through the storm, with eyes wide open, singing. Each poem becomes a hallucinatory, shifting experience, through jump cut, lyric persuasion, and deadpan utterance. This is an emotional, resilient response to some of the essential issues of our day by one of America's riskiest and most innovative writers.

    This moment has waited its whole life for you.These are the opening lines of "Today Means Amen," YouTube star Sierra deMulder’s immensely powerful and virally popular poem, which lends its title to this collection. Like her fellow Millennial poets Tyler Knot Gregson, Clementine von Radics, and Lang Leav, Sierra has the gift of speaking directly to the reader. “Today Means Amen” has become an anthem of sorts to thousands, who find themselves reflected in its pain, its fierceness, its tenderness — but also in its triumphant culminating refrain:  You made it You made it You made it Here.The poems in Sierra's new book explore the rocky terrains of love, family, and womanhood with this same remarkable honesty and generosity. Today Means Amen brings this important young poet's work to an even broader audience.

    “Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief.

    As one of the most exciting new voices in American poetry, Zachary Schomburg's previous books have enthralled thousands of readers with surreal landscapes populated by gorillas in people clothes, jaguars, plagues of hummingbirds, and even Abraham Lincoln. His poems have inspired art installations, shadow puppetry, rock albums, and string quartets. In FJORDS, Schomburg inhabits the icy landscape, walking among all his little deaths as he explores the narrow inlets between the transcendent and the mundane. These are poems to be read by torchlight or with no light at all. As Schomburg explains, There is so much blood in the trees. It will be easy to fall in love like this.

    Embracing the elegiac, angry, and amorous with surrealistic wordplay and off-kilter music, Young coaxes us to "fall higher" into an intimate, vulnerable, expansive exchange. This is a major new book by one of America's most inventive poets.I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5,but now I want a Russian novel,a 50 page description of you sleeping,another 75 of what you think staring outa window. I don't care about the plotalthough I suppose there will have to be one,the usual separation of the lovers, turbulentseas, danger of de-commission in spiteof constant war, time in gulps and glitchespassing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sledout-racing the wolves on the steppes, the hugeglittering ball where all that mattersis a kiss at the end of a dark hall . . .Dean Young has published ten books of poetry, including finalists for the Pulitzer and Griffin Poetry Prizes. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

    Both personal and philosophical, her work can be read as a spirit-guide for those mourning the loss of a loved one and as a series of fundamental ponderings on the inevitability of death and separation. At first refusing to let go, desperate to feel the presence of her friend, the poet seeks solace in a belief in the spirit world. But life, not death, becomes the issue when she begins to see physical existence as "an interruption" that preoccupies us with shapes and borders. "Shape makes life too small," she realizes. Comfort at last comes in the idea of "reverse seeing": that even if she cannot see forward into the spirit world, her friend can see "backward into this world" and be with her.Death Tractates is the companion volume to a philosophical poetic work entitles Bright Existence, which Hillman was in the midst of writing when her friend died. Published by Wesleyan University Press in 1993, it shares many of the same Gnostic themes and sources.

    Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

    Whether it’s the garden, the bedroom, or the front porch, Madisen takes you into her own “home,” sharing some of the most intimate parts of her life so that you might also, someday, feel free to share some of yours. Filled with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations from Melody Hansen, this boldly intimate, preternaturally wise, and emotionally candid collection encourages you to consider what home means to you—whether it’s in the lush, green-lawned suburbs or a city apartment—and, more importantly, explores how you can find it even when home feels like it’s on the far-off horizon.

    Pop-culture characters—from Martha Stewart and Wile E. Coyote to zombie strippers and teen vampires—deliver humorous but insightful commentary on survival and resilience through poems that span imagined scenarios that are not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. The characters face their apocalypses in numerous ways, from strapping on rollerblades and swearing to taking notes as barns burn on the horizon. At the end of the world, the most valuable resource is human connection—someone holding our hands, reminding us “we are miraculous.”