Includes "There's a certain slant of light," "Because I could not stop for death," "It was not death for I stood up."

    

    Fables, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. The Pedestrians brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations.That Great DiasporaI'll never leave New York & when I doI too will be unbodied—what? youimagine I might transmogrify? I'm fromnowhere which means here & so wade outinto the briny dream of elsewheres likea released dybbyk but can't standthe soulessness now everyone who evermade sense to me has died & everyone I lovegrows from my body like limbs on a rootless treeRachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife, The Last Clear Narrative, Eating in the Underworld, and Annunciation.

    She is a true metaphysical poet...(At times) her dialectical fire produces poems of transcendent beauty.'-Carol Muske, New York Times Book Review

    Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space, In Chains create a visceral strangeness true to its own music.So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the veryair around us bound by chains. There wasstagnant water in which lightningwas reflected, like desperationin a dying eye. Like science. Likea dull rock plummeting through space, tossingoff flowers and veils, like a bride. Andalso the subway.Speed under ground.And the way each body in the room appeared to bea jar of wasps and flies that day—but, enchanted,like frightened children's laughter.

    His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet's father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading Survival Is a Style, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.

    Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.

    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Justice has been hailed by his contemporary Anthony Hecht as “the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens.” In poems that embrace the past, its terrors and reconciliations, Justice has become our poet of living memory. The classic American melancholy in his titles calls forth the tenor of our collective passages: “Bus Stop,” “Men at Forty,” “Dance Lessons of the Thirties,” “The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns.” This master of classical form has found in the American scene, and in the American tongue, all those virtues of our literature and landscape sought by Emerson and Henry James. For half a century he has endeavored, with painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance, to make those local views part of the literary heritage from which he has so often taken solace, and inspiration.School Letting Out(Fourth or Fifth Grade)The afternoons of going home from schoolPast the young fruit trees and the winter flowers.The schoolyard cries fading behind you then,And small boys running to catch up, as thoughIt were an honor somehow to be near—All is forgiven now, even the dogs,Who, straining at their tethers, used to bark,Not from anger but some secret joy.From the Hardcover edition.

    Daniel Borzutzky’s new collection of poetry, The Performance of Becoming Human, draws hemispheric connections between the US and Latin America, specifically touching upon issues relating to border and immigration policies, economic disparity, political violence, and the disturbing rhetoric of capitalism and bureaucracies. To become human is to navigate these borders, including those of institutions, the realities of over- and under-development, and the economies of privatization, in which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses. Borzutzky, whose writing Eileen Myles has described as “violent, perverse, and tender” in its portrayal of “American and global horror,” adds another chapter to a growing and important compilation of work that asks what it means to a be both a unitedstatesian and a globalized subject whose body is “shared between the earth, the state, and the bank.”

    It has the richness variety and compactness of true poetry. It is a book to read and remembered. Sexton is an accomplished lyricist. She can combine the straightforwardness of playing on his speech with the saddle with the control, tight formal structure, and brilliantly effective imagery. But she makes her singular claim on our attention by the fact that she has important things to tell us and tells them dramatically.

    Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.

    The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems gathers unpublished works from his last year, including the poem he wrote the day he died, as well as an essential and wide-ranging selection of works from throughout his career. An editorial team including his son Kim Stafford, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, and the poet, translator, and author Robert Bly collaborated on shaping this book of Stafford's pioneering career in modern poetry. The poems in The Way It Is encompass Stafford's rugged domesticity, the political edge of his irony, and his brave starings-off into emptiness.

    Now the video of that performance has been forwarded to mothers and daughters (and fathers and sons) all over the world. Originally written in 2007, "B" is a thank you note, a love letter, a wish, a promise, a confession, and a secret. With beautiful illustrations by Sophia Janowitz, "B" is finally available in this whimsical, magical book.

    . .--from "The Death of the Shah" The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is the tenderest, most savage collection yet from "the most frightening American poet ever" (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review).

    Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. One morning he walked out onto the battlements and climbed down to where the cliffs dropped sharply to the sea. From out of the fierce wind, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major opus—completely only after another ten, tormented years of effort—and one of the literary masterpieces of the century. Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator David Young, “to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.”