Responding to the post-industrial landscape of rural life, Jenny George braids together regional plains poetry and the darkly fantastic imagery of medieval painting. Alluding to Goya’s grotesque bestiary, The Dream of Reason is similarly preoccupied with creatures of all kinds: tiny husks of insects, bats crawling across porches like goblins, purring moths, and pigs, in many forms. George names these creatures and documents the traumas of farm life, the role of the handlers involved, and the empathy and horror that comes with it. The collection lingers, transfixed by its strange imaginings, searching for sense in the dark.

    These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.From the Hardcover edition.

    Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous" (San Diego Union-Tribune).from "To Kiss Frank," make out with him a bit, this is what my friend would like to do oh these too many dead summers later, and as much as I want to stroll with her into the poet's hazy fancy all I can see is O'Hara's long gone lips fallen free of the bone, slumbering beneath the grainy soil.

    This probing of the changes in the American psyche through the 1970s is carried forward in the second part, Landscapes of Living Dying (1979)—a work originally hailed by Library Journal as "Ferlinghetti's strongest work since his 1957 A Coney Island of the Mind. . . . [He] pursues his disheveled muse with the innocent passion of a young beatnik, hiding his authentic erudition behind a comfortable guise of spontaneous composition."

    The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

    poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” (Poetry magazine).

    Complemented by striking cover art from Carrie Mae Weems, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.Praise for Aja Monet:“[Monet] is the true definition of an artist.”—Harry Belafonte“In Paris, she walked out onto the stage, opened her mouth and spoke. At the first utterance I heard that rare something that said this is special and knew immediately that Aja Monet was one of the Ones who will mark the sound of the ages. She brings depth of voice to the voiceless, and through her we sing a powerful song.”—Carrie Mae WeemsOf Cuban-Jamaican descent, Aja Monet is an internationally established poet, performer, singer, songwriter, educator, and human rights advocate. Monet is also the youngest person to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title.

    As such she is deeply fascinated-and intimately familiar—with the toll exacted from young women whose lives are offered in sacrifice as starlets. The stories of these actresses, both famous and obscure-tragic stories of suicide, murder, obscurity, and other forms of death—inspired this empathic and emotionally charged collection of new poetic work. Featuring subjects from Marilyn Monroe and Frances Farmer to Dana Plato and Brittany Murphy—and paired with original artwork commissioned for the book by luminaries including David Lynch, Adrian Tome, Marilyn Manson, and Marcel Dzama—Dark Sparkler is a surprising and provocative collection from a young artist of wide-ranging talent, culminating in an extended, confessional epilogue of astonishing candor and poetic command. Actresses featured in Dark Sparkler include:Marilyn MonroeBrittany MurphyDana PlatoJayne MansfieldJean HarlowDominique DunneSharon TateHeather O’RourkeBridgette AndersenShannon Michelle WilseyJudith BarsiPeg EntwistleCarole LandisAnissa JonesSusan PetersBarbara La MarrLucy GordonSirkka SariLi ToblerThelma ToddSamantha SmithLupe ValezTaruni SachdevRebecca Shaeffer

    Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively school -- or refuse to -- the poems explore ways girls are trained in the broadest sense of the word.Gossips, the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In Early Lessons, the third section, children narrate as they also observe similarly solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.The Mannequin above Main Street MotorsWhen the only ladies' dress shop closed, she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable, one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her on a lark -- drunken impulse -- and for years kept her leaning in a corner, beside an attic window, rendered invisible. The dusk was also perpetual in the garage below, punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close over the engines. An oily grime coated the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits, even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel conceding to that place a greater, echoing sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained, back turned forever to the dark storagebehind her, gaze leveled just above anyone's who could have looked up to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing -- her expression still reluctant figure for it.

    Like a "fast animal," the poet's voice can swiftly change direction and tone as he crisscrosses between present and past.Built like one single sustained song, Fast Animal is alive with music, ardor, and wit that flow in utterances that are uniquely [Seibles'] and his alone."—Laure-Anne Bosselaar, author of The Hour BetweenFrom "Delores Jepps"It seems insane now, butshe’d be standing soakedin schoolday morning light,her loose-leaf notebook,flickering at the bus stop,and we almost trembledat the thought of her mouthfilled for a moment with bothof our short names. I don’t knowwhat we saw when we sawher face, but at fifteen there’sso much left to believe in… Tim Seibles, who teaches at Old Dominion University, is the author of six previous books, including Body Moves and Hurdy-Gurdy. His poetry has been featured in Best American Poetry 2010. Seibles has been the recipient of an NEA grant for poetry and Open Voice award.

    Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

    A reissuing of The Afterlife, poetry by Larry Levis.

    Deeply researched and even more deeply felt, Perennial inhabits landscapes of emerging adulthood and explosive cruelty―the hills of Pittsburgh and the sere grass of Colorado; the spines of books in a high school library that has become a killing ground; the tenderness of children as they grow up and grow hard, becoming acquainted with dread, grief, and loss.

    Even more, his culture and learning, worn so lightly as almost to pass unnoticed, link his verse to other and larger traditions, as in this reflection on Baudelaire - clearly intended as an artistic credo of sorts ... - Open Letters Monthly

    From vantage points on both sides of the Atlantic, Chatti investigates the perpetual exile that comes from always being separated from some essential part of oneself.“Tunsiya is Arabic for Tunisian/female, and Amrikiya is Arabic for American/female. This naming makes a cross of empowerment even as it is it requires great effort to bear it. Muslim female power is real and undeniable in thesecoming of age poems. In this collection, arcs spark between Tunisian and American citizenship, male and female duality, sky and earth, and yes and no. This is one of the punchiest and powerful chapbooks to appear in recent years. Leila Chatti is someone to watch.” —JOY HARJO“I marvel at Leila Chatti’s poems, their deceptive ease, their ‘calligraphy of smoke,’ their luminous concern with identity and self, love and family, her aesthetic command. ‘I orbited the town of my origin.’ She writes an America that belongs to the world, not the other way around. ‘What kind of world will we leave/ for our mothers?’ In poems filled with vision, desire, tenderness, she disarms our most guarded partialities, those we hide in our slumber, or deep under our tongues: ‘a Muslim girl who loved her father’; ‘ghost of a word mixed up with our bodies.’ Leila Chatti is a remarkable poet. Take notice.” —FADY JOUDAH“Leila Chatti is a major star. She writes exquisite, indelible, necessary poems, from two worlds mixing, rich as the threads of finest tapestries— glistening, warm. I’m struck by her vibrant sense of detail and perfect pacing. We need her honest, compassionate voice so much, at this moment, and everywhere.”—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE