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.

    No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

    As one of the most exciting new voices in American poetry, Zachary Schomburg's previous books have enthralled thousands of readers with surreal landscapes populated by gorillas in people clothes, jaguars, plagues of hummingbirds, and even Abraham Lincoln. His poems have inspired art installations, shadow puppetry, rock albums, and string quartets. In FJORDS, Schomburg inhabits the icy landscape, walking among all his little deaths as he explores the narrow inlets between the transcendent and the mundane. These are poems to be read by torchlight or with no light at all. As Schomburg explains, There is so much blood in the trees. It will be easy to fall in love like this.

    Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate.Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights—on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.

    Ortiz has created a new literary form, a parallel plane where the cast of characters are the people that occupied one’s waking life; Bruja is a narrative that’s equal parts delicate and bold, a literary adventure through the boundaries of memoir, where the self is viewed from a position anchored into the deepest recesses of the mind."The book collects Ortiz's dreams over a period of four years, in spare and at times mesmerizing prose...It is a literary work in its own right...It's testament to Ortiz's courage as a memoirist that she's willing to live for a while on this submarine plane, among the elements that dictate her fate -- and to invite her readers along for the show." -The Los Angeles Times"LA-based writer Ortiz continues her innovative soul-search by weaving dream with memory in order to piece together a poignant story from the elusive symbolism of the subconscious...A few entries into this stunning dreamoir, it's evident that Ortiz is making bold statements about love, desire and womanhood as she defiantly navigates the absurdities and strangeness of everyday reality and taps into the comforting properties of fantasy and daydream." -NBCNews.com"Bruja is a personal history and a travel journal, a book of emotional heft and bizarre incantations, a revelatory experiment and a literary scar produced by life...This is a smart, strange, wonderfully expressive combination of fact and everything that hovers in the periphery of fact." -Vol. 1 Brooklyn"In Wendy Ortiz's dreamoir, Bruja, she finds an utterly fascinating middle ground between the two perspectives. Except that even "middle ground" is insufficient; rather, she presents an inclusive, paradigm-shifting theory in narrative form, one that embraces the interconnectedness of stories, focalization, the unconscious, and how we construct reality." -Angel City Review"In Bruja, Wendy C. Ortiz deftly navigates the land of dreams in what she calls a dreamoir. By telling us her dreams, by revealing her most unguarded and vulnerable self, Ortiz is, truly, offering readers the most intimate parts of herself--how she loves, how she wants, how she lives, who she is. Bruja is not just a book--it is an enigma and a wonder and utterly entrancing." - Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling book of essays, Bad Feminist"Bruja calls into question not only what is a memoir, but what is a life. Politics, books, mass media, random encounters, work, relationships tumble into the depths of consciousness, and the self spirals open, huge and passionate. Ortiz’s dreamoir is a multidimensional love story with the whole mess of existence. I loved it. - Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World, The TV Sutras, and Cunt-Ups"Wendy C. Ortiz has invented her own genre, in her sleep, no less. Bruja is at once lush and spare, funny and weird, disturbing and sometimes even beautiful in the way that dreams can be. She's crafted an absurdly real and compelling story here, one dream at a time." --Elizabeth Crane, author of The History of Great Things"A memoir of the dreaming soul and reportage from the frontline of a writer's consciousness, Bruja is surreal, mesmerizing, and beautiful. I completely fell under its spell." --Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles and managing editor of The Scofield

    But his resilient voice and consistent perspective is neither blaming nor didactic, and ultimately enlightening. From the shadowed corners into which we dare not look clearly, Hicok makes us witness and hero of The Legend of Light.

    As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, "Dangers here. Perils there. It'll go how it goes." The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy's knack for noticing what's so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.

    I was born part precious metal, part pirate."), an orphaned girl who is taken in by blind Mr. Pew, the mysterious and miraculously old keeper of a lighthouse on the Scottish coast. Pew tells Silver stories of Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman. Dark lived two lives: a public one mired in darkness and deceit and a private one bathed in the light of passionate love. For Silver, Dark's life becomes a map through her own darkness, into her own story, and, finally, into love.One of the most original and extraordinary writers of her generation, Jeanette Winterson has created a modern fable about the transformative power of storytelling.

    Thomas-born, Florida-raised poet Nicole Sealey’s work is restless in its empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human.The ranging scope of inquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast—at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential—is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history, and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.

    Hailed as “an essential book for those seeking self-love,” this heartfelt anthology lends voice to the heartbreak and healing of our soul’s quest to reunite with whom we always hoped we could be—ourselves.

    That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perceptions, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical.

    Linda Pastan writes, "the art that mattered / was the life led fully / stanza by swollen stanza." That life is portrayed here, from memories of the poet's earliest childhood and the ambiguities of marriage and love to the surprises that come with age, always with a consciousness of what is happening in the larger world.

    —from "The Doomsday Clock"The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time—our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.

    As a poet who has achieved success in the realms of both grassroots popularity and national critical attention, Kocot is poised to claim her place as America’s boldest new poetic voice.

    I wanted not a tract, but a tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processes—sexuality, mortality—inseparable from it.""Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and, recently, that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidart’s poems sound like no one else’s; they look like no one else’s. . . . He is, in the feeling of our jury, one of the great poets of our time."—Louise Glück, jury chair, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award The Academy of American PoetsThe inaugural edition in Sarabande's Quarternote Chapbook Series which will feature a select group of poets by invitation onlyFrank Bidart's collections of poetry include Desire (1997), which received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990); The Sacrifice (1983); The Book of the Body (1977); and Golden State (1973). Among his many honors are the Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.