I am not impatient—My skin will wait to greet its old complexions.I'll lie here till the world swims back again. —from "Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh"Thomas James's Letters to a Stranger—originally published in 1973, shortly before James's suicide—has become one of the underground classics of contemporary poetry. In this new edition, with an introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido and four of James's poems never before published in book form, this fraught and moving masterpiece is at last available.Letters to a Stranger is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Mark Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

    Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backwards in time to 1 BC, where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art’s strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating—a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang’s sly and elegant commentary on poetry’s enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.

    This new book of eighteen rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry's ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.unfastenedin the backseat aportion of the music ismucus flying into stillnessat what point do we submitto the authority of flowersat what point after it entersthe mouth is it no longer in themouth but the throat the colonmaking sumptuous death of the worldthis is what crossing the line gainsno need to pretend weare the people wewant to be inthe next lifebone undertongue drivestaste of snow to metal…CAConrad is the author of ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, and The Book of Frank, as well as several other books of poetry and essays. Most recently, he has co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.

    Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.

    Littlefoot, the eighteenth book from one of this country's most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator's search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on "the other side of my own death." Following the course of one year, the poet's seventieth, we witness the seasons change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, "it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind." Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, "all things come from splendor," and the urgent question that the poet can't help but ask: "Will you miss me when I'm gone?

    It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

    R. Ammons's long poems—following Tape for the Turn of the Year and preceding Garbage—that mark him as a master of this particular form. The sphere in question is the earth itself, and Ammons's wonderfully stocked mind roams globally, ruminating on subjects that range from galaxies to gas stations. It is a remarkable achievement, comparable in importance to Wallace Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

    Graham Foust's third book offers agile poems of dread and humor. Robert Creeley writes, "These poems move in close to luxuriant circles, round and round each particular syllable, neither hurrying nor dragging behind--just there. At times there seems an almost physical presence to them, a third dimension, which is substance." Foust is also the author of AS IN EVERY DEAFNESS and LEAVE THE ROOM TO ITSELF, available from SPD. He teaches Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California.

    "Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, con-man extraordinaire and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Walt Whitman."--Bob Dylan

    each poem is incredibly impactful and beautifully written. stories of love, heartbreak, suffering, and healing come alive on the page in an incredible way. let this book of poetry touch your soul and help you feel free. join trevor capiro on this journey towards healing.

    Opening with a powerful cycle of elegies for her long-distant, half-brother, this major new collection by one of our bestselling poets then goes on to include both serious and funny poems about women and poems about the precarious balance of nature, ending with the beautiful, life-affirming "The Art of Blessing the Day." 160 pp.

    In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugene Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.

    These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.'Like the central conceptual apparatus, Queyras is smart and insightful in her work to expand and challenge the nature of language and poetry . . . Lend Queyras your ears, your minds, your hearts, your Time. She will reward you, repeatedly.' – The Rumpus'A collection of gorgeous and cantankerous poems that ask testy questions of all contemporary poets, and for this, the book is a must-read.' – The Globe and Mail'This year's most devastating and enlightening Canadian poetry collection.' – Telegraph-Journal

    This collection of poetry showcases the unique talent of James Schuyler and highlights the writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

    I love how thick this writing is, sublimely claustrophobic yet expansive, like a child's nightmare of scale."—Dodie Bellamy"Autodidact and knight-errant, Ward often betrays the procedural forms he tries to impose on his labyrinthine ruminations in order to remain faithfully engaged to the traditional task of the post-Romantic poet, an 'ecstatic commingling' of okay-you know and 'starry anaphor.'"—Tyrone Williams"I should write a real blurb with real blurb-like things in it, but TCOIW, a kind of lullaby arranging the psychic terrain of my future prosodically, is saving my stupid ass."—Anselm Berrigan