Asian-American. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is one of the very few poets writing in the United States today whose voice and writing style are immediately recognizable. In her new collection, NEST, the medium of her poetry continues to be the sentence. To the formalities of syntax and grammar she adds the structures of domestic architecture, isolation, health, desire, play, and family life. Her writing offers a unique poetics of metaphysics and manners. As always the poetry is sensuous and stunning, and Richard Tuttle has once again designed an arresting cover.

    To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transform, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively we enter inside of that which we devour.--Nick FlynnThis is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It's the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It's not too late. We can start over from right here and right now.--Marie HoweIn every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading RENDER how deeply I was handing everything over.--Nikky Finney

    What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe).

    In addition to including many more pieces, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order.It isn't what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art," Williams maintained, "it's what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

    

    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.

    But Poe is also the author of some of the most haunting poetry ever written--poems of love, death and loneliness that have lost none of their power to enthrall in this unique Signet Classic edition.

    "An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting" Cole Swensen."

    Often frightening and sometimes downright funny, the world of Cemetery Nights is haunted by regret, driven by desire and need, illuminated by daring make-believe -- the remarkable bridge between pure entertainment and deep psychological insight.

    Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery -- and Jorie Graham. The New Yorker places Ms. Graham in this distinguished line of poets, heralding the Pulitzer Prize winner as a profound voice in American poetry. Now, in her eighth collection, she further enhances her reputation with a book-length sequence of verse that is a stunning work of grandeur.The New Republic writes, "for 'swarm,' in other words...read 'be born again.' Graham is writing about a spiritual turning point, a new beginning.... Beauty -- that is, the pure sense-perception which has long been a concern for Graham -- is no longer the most important criterion. Now goodness is...[and] the idea of submission, of obedience, without understanding: one must 'yield' before 'hearing the reason' for yielding."

    Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

    In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

    As with his debut, The Final Voicemails brushes up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force of an artist in full command of his craft and the teeming affection of a human utterly in love with the world.The representation of the end of life resists simplicity here. It is physical decay, but it is also tedium. It is alchemy, "the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where, / with what." It is an antagonist--and it is a part of the self. Ritvo's poems ring with considered reflection on the enduring final question, while suggesting--in their vibrancy and their humor--that death is not merely an end.The Final Voicemails is an ecstatic, hopeful, painful--and completely breathtaking--second collection.

    Liv, an expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, are at an impasse from her reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world. The couple's journey is charted through conversations, dreams, memories, and meditations, expanding and exploding the emotive capabilities of language and form. A text like no other, it crosses genres, combining verse, prose, and dialogue to achieve an unparalleled understanding of creation and existence.

    E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."