These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.

    Hard to imagine that no one counts,that only things endure.Unlike the seasons, our shirts don't shed,Whatever we see does not see us,however hard we look,The rain in its silver earrings against the oak trunks,The rain in its second skin.--from "Scar Tissue II"In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality--"thing is not an image"--but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject--language and "the ghost of god." And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, "something un-ordinary persists."Scar Tissue is a groundbreaking work from a poet who "illuminates and exalts the entire astonishing spectrum of existence" (Booklist).

    This is a major new voice.” — Margaret AtwoodThe Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. Forché's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

    Included are his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners The Walking, Words for the Wind, and The Far Field.

    The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.

    Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.“In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar exquisitely and tenaciously braids astonishment and atonement into a singular lyric voice. The desolation of alcoholism widens into hard-won insight: ‘the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven.’ Doubt and fear spiral into grace and beauty. Akbar’s mind, like his language, is perpetually in motion. His imagery—wounded and resplendent—is masterful and his syntax ensnares and releases music that’s both delicate and muscular. Kaveh Akbar has crafted one of the best debuts in recent memory. In his hands, awe and redemption hinge into unforgettable and gorgeous poems.” —Eduardo C. Corral

    Now in paperback, "Complete Short Poetry" gathers all of Zukofsky's poetry outside his 800-page magnum opus entitled" "A""--including work that appeared in "All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1964," the experimental transliteration (with Celia Zukofsky) of Catullus, the limited edition "80 Flowers," as well as several fugitive pieces never before collected."Zukofsky is the American Mallarm," writes Hugh Kenner, "and given the peculiar intentness of the American preoccupation with language--obsessive, despite what you may read in the newspapers--his work is more disorienting by far than his exemplar's ever was. Mallarm had a long poetic tradition from which to deviate into philology. Zukofsky received a philological tradition, which he raised to a higher power."

    I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter.The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.

    Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels.... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate."

    I’m now tempted to believe that Blake himself has sent us Derrick Austin and his remarkable collection, Trouble the Water. At once gospel and troubadour song, these deeply spiritual and expansively erotic poems are lucid, unflinching, urgent. This is an extraordinary debut." —Mary Szybist, winner of the National Book AwardRich in religious and artistic imagery, Trouble the Water is an intriguing exploration of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly where self-hood is in constant flux. These intimate, sensual poems interweave pop culture and history—moving from the Bible through several artistic eras—to interrogate what it means to be, as Austin says, fully human as a “queer, black body” in 21st century America.

    It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Make a cup of tea and let yourself feel.

    Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest popular poet since Walt Whitman.  Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel.Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes the author's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed.  Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

    It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

    This definitive collection includes short verse published between 1913 and 1922 by Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and many others.

    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.