During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.

    Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics. Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the elements-to their destructive and creative aspects and to their roles in the human and more than human worlds. Both nest and crypt, the book's center holds an alphabet of "shadow georgics," poems of instruction and doubt that link knowledge and the unconscious. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate these poems. In one poem an apple calls the narrator back from the dead to savor the echoes of its varieties in myth and literature. In another, the seeds of a pear tree reveal the essential unity that makes the diversity of existence possible.Stewart's Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.

    Bringing the Shovel Down is a re-imagination of the violent mythologies of state and power.

    Men with picked voices chant the names of cities in a huge gallery: promises that pull through descending stairways to a deep rumbling.

    Against the backdrop of the war on drugs and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a Korean girl comes of age in her parents' bodega in the Queensbridge projects, offering a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.In Su Hwang's rich lyrical and narrative poetics, the bodega and its surrounding neighborhoods are cast not as mere setting, but as an ecosystem of human interactions where a dollar passed from one stranger to another is an act of peaceful revolution, and desperate acts of violence are "the price / of doing business in the projects where we / were trapped inside human cages--binding us / in a strange circus where atoms of haves / and have-nots always forcefully collide." These poems also reveal stark contrasts in the domestic lives of immigrants, as the speaker's own family must navigate the many personal, cultural, and generational chasms that arise from having to assume a hyphenated identity--lending a voice to the traumatic toll invisibility, assimilation, and sacrifice take on so many pursuing the American Dream."We each suffer alone in / tandem," Hwang declares, but in Bodega, she has written an antidote to this solitary hurt--an incisive poetic debut that acknowledges and gives shape to anguish as much as it cherishes human life, suggesting frameworks for how we might collectively move forward with awareness and compassion.

    The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.

    Attempting to imagine the unimaginable and see the unseen, Armantrout evokes a "next life" beyond the current, and too often degraded, one. From the new physics to mortality, Armantrout engages with the half-seen and the half-believed. These poems step into the dance of consciousness and its perennial ghost partner--"to make the world up/of provisional pairs." At a time when our world is being progressively despoiled, Armantrout has emerged as one of our most important and articulate authors. These poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the "next life" and find it where we can.

    She tells of the trials of immigration, of exile, of thwarted interracial love, and of social injustice. Some poems recall the Confucian "Book of Songs," while others echo the African American blues tradition and Western railroad ballads. The title poem references the Han Dynasty rhapsody but is also a wild, associative tour de force. Political allegories sing out with personal revelations. Personal revelations open up to a universal cry for compassion and healing. These songs emerge as a powerful and elegant collection: sophisticated yet moving, hard-hitting yet refined.

    Collected by Elisa Sampedrin.Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past — its ideas, its personages, its syntax — to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language — whiplike — casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage. Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

    When we reach the camp, there will be thousands like us.If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roadsand waiting pastures of America. We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffaloas we used to many years ago, nor will we foragefor the sweetest mangoes. I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep.—from “Transmigration”Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family, and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture’s ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War against communism, only to abandon them after that war went awry. That history is little known or understood, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of extraordinary force and grace, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.