"Alabanza" means "praise" in Spanish, and Espada praises the people Whitman called "them the others are down upon": the African slaves who brought their music to Puerto Rico; a prison inmate provoking brawls so he could write poetry in solitary confinement; a janitor and his solitary strike; Espada's own father, who was jailed in Mississippi for refusing to go to the back of the bus. The poet bears witness to death and rebirth at the ruins of a famine village in Ireland, a town plaza in México welcoming a march of Zapatista rebels, and the courtroom where he worked as a tenant lawyer. The title poem pays homage to the immigrant food-service workers who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. From the earliest out-of-print work to the seventeen new poems included here, Espada celebrates the American political imagination and the resilience of human dignity. Alabanza is the epic vision of a writer who, in the words of Russell Banks, "is one of the handful of American poets who are forging a new American language, one that tells the unwritten history of the continent, speaks truth to power, and sings songs of selves we can no longer silence." An American Library Association Notable Book of 2003 and a 2003 New York Public Library Book to Remember."To read this work is to be struck breathless, and surely, to come away changed."—Barbara Kingsolver "Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors. If it was up to me, I'd select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States."—Sandra Cisneros "With these new and selected poems, you can grasp how powerful a poet Espada is—his range, his compassion, his astonishing images, his sense of history, his knowledge of the lives on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his tenderness, his humor. "—Marge Piercy "Espada's poems are not just clarion calls to the heart and conscience, but also wonderfully crafted gems."—Julia Alvarez "A passionate, readable poetry that makes [Espada] arguably the most important 'minority' U.S. poet since Langston Hughes."—Booklist"Neruda is dead, but if Alabanza is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martín Espada."—San Francisco Chronicle

    . . These poems literally vibrate with Kearney's precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before."—Terrance Hayes

    Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him to see life in a wholly new way. Mosquito is a resilient meditation that is as much Zen as it is explosive, as clinical as it is philosophical and lyrical.

    In his sixth book of poems, James Galvin writes from a deep, philosophical engagement with the landscape and faces a "vertigo of solitude" with his marriage dissolved, his only daughter grown and gone, and the log house he built by hand abandoned. "What did I love that made me believe it would last?" he asks.Something has to be true enough to beTaken for granted.In the hospital I sawAn old manCaressing the face of an old woman.This same man, young, caressed her faceIn just that way.That’s the stillnessAt the center of change—A sadness worth dying for, I swear—There is no other.—from "Dying into What I’ve Done""James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry."—The Nation"In James Galvin we have a superior poet."—American Book Review"Galvin’s poems have the virtues of precise observation and original language, yes, but what he also brings to the table is a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make the slightest of his poems an architectural pleasure."—Harvard ReviewJames Galvin has published five collections of poetry, most recently Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975–1997, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, The Meadow and a novel, Fencing the Sky. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he works as a rancher part of each year, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

    This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard.

    This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

    Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear "the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world." We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.

    The posthumous influence of the Roman Republic and Empire have no equal in all of history. Their varied culture, stunning art, brilliant philosophy, and towering architecture is embedded in our modern world. Roman innovation has left behind a legacy that has remained admired and emulated for over a thousand years. They built massive networks of roads before the birth of Christ. They constructed elaborate public sewer systems over 1,500 years before the United States became a Nation, and had networks of aqueducts bringing running water. Their tactics in battle are still studied by historians and military leaders of today. Their history is filled with great conflicts, compelling love stories, and the most treacherous of leaders. Hollywood has explored their culture time and again on the silver screen. Larger than life commanders like Julius Caesar would help shape their ultimate destiny. In his book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire: Life, Liberty, and the Death of the Republic author Barry Linton highlights and explains the significant struggles and contributions that have made Rome so well known. Join us as we explore the meteoric rise, monumental life, inevitable death, and eventual rebirth of Rome.

    For anyone who's been let down by life and love, these poems reveal that the most important person one can fall in love with is oneself.

    Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who — not unhappily — finds that cockroaches are drawn to her.“God draws a life. And then begins to rub it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws a world in What the Soul Doesn’t Want, and then beckons us in. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.

    THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelg�ngers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow.The often funny yet haunting prose and verse poems of this eagerly anticipated debut deal with the subtle and unexpected ways things can transform, usually just beneath an observer's awareness.... Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around.--Publishers WeeklyZachary Schomburg is a wildly imaginative poet who will take you many places you've never been or even dreamed of, always with grace and quirky humor. Whether you are caught in Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene or the Sea of Japan, you are certain to enjoy the original vision of this highly entertaining poet. It's a book like no other.--James TateZachary Schomburg's THE MAN SUIT comes to us from the past but it is a thoroughly new book. It comes to us out of the familiar and it strikes us in the face with its novelty. You will recognize your own history, the history of our nation, the influence of Mad Magazine and Benjamin Peret. And underneath it all, and what holds it all together, however unlikely, is the deep and abiding love of the little things that make up our days.--Matthew RohrerIt is a rare and fine thing when a poet momentarily affiliates his words and his cadences with the entirety of a world, thus freeing his poem from all burden of mediation, all transgression. In our own era, Ren� Char and Pablo Neruda come most vividly to mind in this regard. With THE MAN SUIT, Zachary Schomburg, quietly but with deep conviction, begins to join their company. His book is a blessing.--Donald Revell

    is Alice Oswald's third book of poems, and follows on from the success of her widely acclaimed river-poem, Dart, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry in 2002. The poems in her new book compress this uniquely ruminative voice into a dazzlingly various sequence of lyrics about the natural order and the individual life within. Written over a period of several years, these poems combine abrupt honesty with an exuberant rhetorical confidence, at times recalling the oral and anonymous tradition with which they share such affinity.

    The poet wonders at his own existence and struggles between actual living and the desire to die."Cyril Wong continues to explore the nuances of relationships, in language that is lyrical, beautifully crafted, and erotically charged. There are several fine love poems that reach out to embrace a common humanity. Wong swims into the undercurrents of family tensions, hidden desires, and the meaning of a self... as well as questioning our understanding of both life and death."- Rebecca Edwards, author of Scar Country and Holiday Coast Medusa"Reading Cyril Wong is always to encounter risk, the painful suturing of art and life, trials of faith and baptisms of fire. I have only the deepest respect for someone who has razed the walls between the private and the public, and in doing so, carved more space for all of us."- Alfian Sa'at, author of One Fierce Hour and A History of Amnesia

    These are the engines, like poetry, that propel both our comprehension and misunderstanding. "If you're lucky," Harvey writes, "after a number of / revolutions, you'll / feel something catch."

    Fierce and visceral, Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic is canonical to Infrarealism, a poem that renders poetry inseparable from politics. It was published originally as part of the posthumous collection Jeta de Santo: Antología Poética, 1974–1997. This is the first widely available English translation of Santiago Papasquiaro's work.the thesis & antithesis of the world meetlike 1 white-hot meteor & 1 UFO in distress& inexplicably they greet each other:I'm the 1 who embossed on the back of his denim jacketthe sentence: The nucleus of my solar system is AdventureMario Santiago Papasquiaro founded the radical Infrarealist poetry movement with Roberto Bolaño. During his lifetime, Santiago published two books of poetry, Beso eterno (1995) and Aullido de Cisne (1996). He died in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1998.Cole Heinowitz is an associate professor of literature at Bard College.Alexis Graman is a painter and translator living in New York.