Valente's first full-length poetry collection, where freaks, emperors, bodhisattvas, beasts, witches, wicked stepmothers, Greek heroes, told seductively and wickedly in poem and prose, jostle and vie for supremacy . .

    This collection presents forty-two new poems-an entire volume in itself-along with works chosen by Oliver from six of the books she has published since New and Selected Poems, Volume One.

    Hicok gives readers unexpected conjunctions and oddly offbeat thoughts, most darkly whimsical, and has us embrace them wholeheartedly. If he can survive the scary carnival that is this world, we can, too. Highly recommended for a wide range of readers.”— Library Journal, starred review“Bob Hicok is one of my favorite poets. Partly, it’s the movement of his lines, which are both conversational and utterly unexpected, almost as if he (or we) are joining a conversation that extends beyond the framework of the poem…And then there’s his unrelenting vision, a sense of the world as both utterly real and utterly elusive, and heartbreaking because we have to die. Death is at the center of Hicok’s writing—not in a maudlin, self-pitying way, but rather as a vivid presence, infusing everything, even the deepest moments of connection, with a steely sense of loss.”—David Ulin, reviewing Elegy Owed in the Los Angeles Times“This gorgeous collection [Elegy Owed] spans the landscape of loss with unexpected leaps and ripples, as if someone has skipped stones across a lake. …Wordplay, subtle humor and unexpected moments of hope give these lush poems depth and dimension. Hicok’s work is memorable because of the new vistas it creates.” —The Washington Post"Words have weight in Hicok’s poems. They feel nailed in place, and the meter hits like the sure pounding of a hammer. Yet as heft, muscle, and precision draw you forward, Hicok evokes not solidity but, rather, shifting ground, flux, metamorphosis, and, most arrestingly, most unnervingly, death. In his seventh collection, Hicok builds startling images out of the everyday and the surreal, the comic and the sorrowful. Avoiding abstraction and pretension, he cleaves to earth, skin, breath." –Donna Seaman, Booklist“Hicok’s poems [in Elegy Owed] are like boomerangs; they jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter.” —Publishers Weekly"Seamlessly, miraculously, [Hicok's] judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."—The New York Times Book ReviewWhen asked in an interview “What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?” he answered, “Bob Hicok.” Elegy Owed, Hicok’s eighth book, is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and “you can never step into the same not going home again twice.” His poems are the messenger at the door, the unwanted telegram—telling a joke, imparting a depth of longing, returning us finally to a different kind of normality where “the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call.” There is grief in these poems, though it is a grief large enough for odd awakenings and the unexpected, a grief enlarged by music, color, and joy as well as sober wisdom.“Hicok is funny as hell, in Blake’s sense of the infernal: irreverent, anarchic, undeceived. His bracing ill humor is a vehicle for outrage, longing, tenderness, and a shy cynicism that is the necessary counterbalance to a tenacious sense of hope. He is one of our premier anatomists of contemporary American life, and a wildly refreshing, necessary poet.” —Mark DotyBob Hicok is one of the most active poets writing today, and his poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker and Poetry. His honors include the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and a "Notable Book of the Year" from Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

    The central question of this eloquently impassioned book is: How can a country that we persist in calling a welfare state consciously risk the lives of its people for profit.

    It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

    This inventory of lacks becomes an incantation: if only for an instant, it transmits a presence to these "units" that had previously been lost to the history of human creativity and thought.- A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removed from the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels are discovered - A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailed alive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop the film, look at the photograph, and destroy it - The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst, burned by the Nazis -- from "The Missing PiecesThe Missing Pieces" is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality on the enigmatic creations it recounts -- rather than reminding us of the death that inhabits everything humans create.Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's (accdidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's pubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); "Spinoza's Treatise on the Rainbow" (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac's original typescript for "On the Road" (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); and the one moment in Andre Malraux's life in which he exclaimed "I believe, for a minute, I was thinking nothing." "The Missing Pieces" offers a treasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored of the void."

    "Contexts" provides readers with invaluable materials on The Waste Land's sources, composition, and publication history. "Criticism" traces the poem's reception with twenty-five reviews and essays, from first reactions through the end of the twentieth century. Included are reviews published in the Times Literary Supplement, along with selections by Virginia Woolf, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, Conrad Aiken, Charles Powell, Gorham Munson, Malcolm Cowley, Ralph Ellison, John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, Delmore Schwartz, Denis Donoghue, Robert Langbaum, Marianne Thormählen, A. D. Moody, Ronald Bush, Maud Ellman, and Tim Armstrong. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

    What is admirable about Duffy', commented Robert Nye in The Times, is that she celebrates such places without sentimentalizing them, and wrings the last drop of meaning from each visit.' Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. Her awards include first prize in the 1983 National Poetry Competition; three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards; Eric Gregory, Somerset Maugham and Dylan Thomas Awards in Britain and a 1995 Lannan Literary Award in the USA. In 1993 she received the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award for her acclaimed fourth collection Mean Time. On May 1, 2009 she was named the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

    His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound to his Songs, O'Hara to the Sun at Fire Island.  Koch, in this new book, talks to things important in his life -- to Breath, to World War Two, to Orgasms, to the French Language, to Jewishness, to Psychoanalysis, to Sleep, to his Heart, to Friendship, to High Spirits, to his Twenties, to the Unknown. He makes of all these "new addresses" an exhilarating autobiography of a most surprising and unforeseeable kind.From the Hardcover edition.

    Obsessive, brilliant, linguistically playful—the mesmerizing world of The Boss is as personal as it is distinctly post-9/11. The result is a breathtaking, one-of-a-kind exploration of contemporary American culture, power structures, family life, and ethnic and personal identity.

    The Rainy Season, Amy Wilentz’s award-winning 1989 portrait of Haiti after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, was praised in the NY Times Book Review as “a remarkable account of a journalist’s transformation by her subject.” In her relationship with the country since then, she's witnessed more than one magical transformation. Now, with Farewell, Fred Voodoo, she portrays the extraordinary people living in this stark place. She traces the country’s history from its slave plantations thru its turbulent revolutionary history, its kick-up-the-dirt guerrilla movements, its totalitarian dynasty that ruled for decades & its long, troubled relationship with the USA. Yet thru a history of hardship shines Haiti’s creative culture—its African traditions, French inheritance & uncanny resilience, a strength often confused with resignation. Haiti emerged from the 2010 earthquake like a powerful spirit. This book describes the country’s day-to-day struggle & its relationship to outsiders who come to help out. There are human-rights reporters gone awry, movie stars turned aid workers, priests & musicians running for president, doctors turned diplomats. A former US president works as a house builder & voodoo priests try to control elections. A foreign correspondent on a simple story becomes over time a lover of Haiti, pursuing the essence of this beautiful, confounding land into its darkest & brightest corners. Farewell, Fred Voodoo is a spiritual journey into the heart of the human soul. Haiti has found an author of astonishing wit, sympathy & eloquence.

    Myung Mi Kim's language is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge" (Kathleen Fraser). In "Under Flag," winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." ("Body As One As History"). The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, "a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized."

    Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feelingor of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title Curves to the Apple combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."

    With a storyteller’s rhythm, Lease braids humor, political bite, psychological intensity, and lyric beauty, taking us to a place of warning, critique, and elegy.

    Set in an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world that is disturbing because it is uncannily familiar, National Anthem chronicles the aftermath of the failure of imperial vision. Allowing Rome and America to bleed into one another, Prufer masterfully weaves the threads of history into an anthem that is as intimate as it is far-reaching.