Our Numbered Days


Neil Hilborn - 2015
    To date, it has been watched over 10 million times. Our Numbered Days is Neil’s debut full-length poetry collection, containing 45 of Neil’s poems including “OCD”, “Joey”, “Future Tense”, “Liminality”, “Moving Day”, and many, many never-before-seen poems.

The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems


Lorine Niedecker - 1985
    Edited by Cid Corman. The section headings in this book of poems are all vintage Niedecker, but they stake out the poems in three large masses. The earlier work-apprentice to Zukofsky but finding her voice; the central work--when she discovers her range and depth; the final work--much of it known posthumously--showing how she was probing other voices into a larger plenum. One's first impulse, after awe, on reading THE GRANITE PAIL is a double dose of shame: shame at not being more familiar with her work; shame at ever having complained of the narrowness of one's life--Carolyn Kizer.

Sight Map


Brian Teare - 2009
    Teare provides us with poems that insist on the simultaneous physical embodiment of tactile pleasure—that which is found in the textures of thought and language—as well as the action of syntax. Partly informed by an ecological imagination that leads him back to Emerson and Thoreau, Teare's method and fragmented style are nevertheless up to the moment. Remarkable in its range, Sight Map serves at once as a cross-country travelogue, a pilgrim's gnostic progress, an improvised field guide, and a postmodern "pillowbook," recording the erotic conflation of lover and beloved, deity and doubter.

you are safe here.


AVA. - 2016
    for hurting. for healing. for souls becoming. for anyone who loves too deeply and loves too much. for anyone who doesn't love themselves enough. this is for you.

Gone


Fanny Howe - 2003
    Heralded as "one of our most vital, unclassifiable writers" by the Voice Literary Supplement, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books and is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the Most Outstanding Book of Poetry Published in 2000 from the Academy of American Poets.The poems in Gone describe the transit of a psyche, driven by uncertainty and by love, through various stations and experiences. This volume of short poems and one lyrical essay, all written in the last five years, is broken into five parts; and the longest of these, "The Passion," consecrates the contradictions between these two emotions. The New York Times Book Review said, "Howe has made a long-term project of trying to determine how we fit into God's world, and her aim is both true and marvelously free of sentimental piety." With Gone, readers will have the opportunity to experience firsthand Howe’s continuation of that elusive and fascinating endeavor.

Open House


Beth Ann Fennelly - 2002
    We at Zoo are eminently pleased to have such a fine book of verse for our inaugural Kenyon Review Prize volume. Fennelly's poems are well poised in their witty and sometime sassy ruminations, often "maximalist" in their scope (see "From L' HUtel Terminus Notebooks") and the pleasure one takes within them is of the rarest breed: it is the pleasure of unexpected revelation. Open House comes introduced by series judge and Kenyon Review poetry editor, David Baker.

The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way: Poems


Ethan Coen - 2001
    In his screenplays and short stories, Ethan Coen surprises and delights us with a rich brew of ideas, observations, and perceptions. In his first collection of poems he does much the same. The range of his poems is remarkable–funny, ribald, provocative, sometimes raw, and often touching and profound.In these poems Coen writes of his childhood, his hopes and dreams, his disappointments, his career in Hollywood, his physically demanding love affair with Mamie Eisenhower, and his decade-long battle with amphetamines that produced some of the lengthier poems in the collection. You will chuckle, nodding with recognition as you turn the pages, perhaps even stopping occasionally to read a poem. Handsomely and durably bound between hard covers, this is a book that will stand up to most readers’ attempts to destroy it.

The Bad Wife Handbook


Rachel Zucker - 2007
    Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

And Short the Season


Maxine Kumin - 2014
    In And Short the Season she muses on mortality: her own and that of the earth. Always deeply personal, always political, these poems blend myth and modernity, fecundity and death, and the violence and tenderness of humankind.

Our Deathbeds Will Be Thirsty


Shane L. Koyczan - 2012
    “The collection of poems speaks like a journey through each formative moment we’d forgotten we had: the monster under the bed and the intricate rules about how to overcome its powers; the ability to talk to girls or boys we liked; the fear of being bullied; our first experience with real anguish.” – Litlive.ca Please note: This is not a young adult title. Some works include language not suitable for some readers.

The Poet in Exile


Ray Manzarek - 2001
    There, to his amazement, he is re-united with the man once known as "the snake man," and hears the remarkable story of his faked death--and the rebirth it made possible. A happily married man, the father of two children, he has discovered the secret to life and is finally free of the demons that had driven him headlong through the American night. Now an enticing question arises: Would destiny smile upon the re-launch of one of the most influential rock and roll bands in history? ". . . a narrative that ends with a moment of authentic surprise and heart-tugging poignancy."--Los Angeles Times

Up to Speed


Rae Armantrout - 2004
    The poems in this book are polyphonic: they juxtapose the discourses of science and religion, Hollywood and the occasional psychotic stranger. The title poem, which appears in Best American Poetry 2002, leads off with a "sphinx" asking "Does a road / run its whole length / at once? / Does a creature / curve to meet / itself?" Armantrout's work, with its careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored short lines, is always struggling with the problem of consciousness, its blindspots and double-binds. The poems whirl like shifting and scattered pieces of the present moment. They attempt to "make sense" of our lives while acknowledging the depth of our self-deception and deception.

Riding Westward


Carl Phillips - 2006
    What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.

Of Lamb


Matthea Harvey - 2011
    Unbalanced. Flat-footed. High-strung. This is their story like you’ve never heard it—the tale of a loopy shepherdess and a depressive farm animal. In this version of the children's nursery rhyme, Lamb and Mary fall in love. They swoon, they are smitten. Then Mary has second thoughts. Lamb is a lamb, after all, not a man. Lamb, heartbroken, turns to drinking. Lamb goes to a madhouse. Mary buries her feelings. And then somehow, Lamb pulls it together. He leaves the madhouse mature—saddened but more dignified, ready for another chance to win Mary's heart. But will Mary let Lamb back into her life?Award-winning poet Matthea Harvey offers a story told in short packets of verse, and artist Amy Jean Porter brings each stanza vividly to life with her eye-popping illustrations. The collaboration yields a beautiful, off-the-wall tale of a lamb who wants only to be human, and a human who wants the love of a lamb.

Goest


Cole Swensen - 2004
    Likewise Swensen’s lyrics, which, with elliptical phrasing and play between visual and aural, change the act of seeing—and reading—offering glimpses of the spirit (or ghost) that enters a poem where the rational process breaks down.From “The Invention of Streetlights”Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own.There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin.and light entire rooms. .Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man.on any corner with a torch to light you home. were lamps made of horn.and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched.Notre Dame seem small. .Now the streets stand still. .By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium.to photograph a midnight ball.“Goest, sonorous with a hovering ‘ghost’ which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the ‘whites’ of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”—Anne Waldman