Exploring war, plagues, and the search for a new God in exile, these poems create a chorus of wanderers haunted by empire, God, and personal trauma.

    Here, though, the poet's electric narratives and portraits extend beyond the working class streets of urban New Jersey. Modeling poems on the kundiman, a song of unrequited love sung by Filipinos for their country in times of oppression, he professes his conflicted feelings for America, while celebrating and lamenting his various heritageswhether by chatting up St. Patrick, riffing on race relations, or channeling Lapu Lapu in a rejoinder to Magellan. Passionate, provocative, and irrepressible throughout, My American Kundiman further establishes Rosal as a poet to be reckoned with.

    In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration of Jacob’s Ladder (with its questions of identity and shifting realities) with the microscopic compulsiveness of Einstein’s Dreams. The book’s sense of hypnotic premeditation brings Donnie Darko to mind as well, as poem after poem scatters the breadcrumbs of a murder mystery leading us further away from the present self and deeper into the past. I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is an astounding debut collection that will crawl under your skin and stay there."I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is a remarkable book. It is innovative, original, unprecedented, and, at the same time, its originality and innovation are predicated on a passionate, even obsessive relationship with the past."—Lynn Emanuel

    Lara Glenum was raised in the gothic South, studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Virgina, and now teaches at the University of Georgia. In this entirely unheimlich debut, she enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model. Glenum recovers the political intensity and daring of the Surrealist project. The extraordinary precision of these poems is so stunning, we can't help but feel blinded by their visions: sock-monkeys, dollhouses, and a circus made of meat vibrate between the playful and the brutal so deftly, each line is a perfect shard of some fantastic planet, gloriously and sadly like our own. As in Blake's apocalyptic images, the sky rolls itself up like a scroll--brilliant in its colors and infinite in its scope. Glorious!--D.A. Powell.

    The poems negotiate the colossal movement of hearts figuring and being figured by history. This is a voice that knows the intelligence of passion, that moves through and inside the questioning of who we are in the structures of things we give the power to name us until a song sends us out to question the territory. The poet moves with the exactness of math or physics, with the fearful knowledge of careful imbalances that would have us believe in equilibrium, and with the assuredness of art that knows all is change, that the semblance of order is creation, something we are given the gift of imitating in some small way. The poems in this collection summon the largeness, the volume of a voice that disembodies itself in order to search for the love that made it whole.

    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.

    Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including "still lifes," "instructions," and "symptoms."From "Symptoms of Aftermath":…When I am saved, a slim nurseleans out of the white light. I needto hear your voice, sweetheart. I seemy escape. I walk into the water.The sky is blue like the ocean,which is blue like the sky.Camille Rankine is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship, her poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, and other publications. Currently, she is assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in Harlem.

    Bambrick began writing poems in order to document the forms of violence she witnessed towards the people and the environment of the Columbia River. While working there she found that reservoirs foster a uniquely complex community--from fish biologists to the owners of luxury summer homes--and became interested in the issues and tensions between the people of that place. The idea of power, literal and metaphorical, was present in every action and encounter with bosses and the people using the river. The presence of a young woman on the crew irritated her older, male co-workers who'd logged, built houses, and had to suffer various forms of class discrimination their entire lives. She found throughout this experience that their issues, while not the same, were inherently connected to the suffering of the lands they worked. Introduction by Sharon Olds.

    Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos--and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure--yawns wide.Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left," writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky--when we were told to pay attention to our breath--we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon."

    I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work.” —Corduroy Books “Bob Hicok's poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.” —Los Angeles Times on This Clumsy Living “The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok's compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself, a sweet waggery that suggests there's almost no problem that can't be solved by this poet's gentle humor.” —New York Times Book Review on Insomnia Diary

    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.

    Bellocq photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. His remarkable, candid photos inspired Natasha Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia, the subject of Bellocq's Ophelia, her stunning second collection of poems. With elegant precision, Ophelia tells of her life on display: her white father whose approval she earns by standing very still; the brothel Madame who tells her to act like a statue while the gentlemen callers choose; and finally the camera, which not only captures her body, but also offers a glimpse into her soul.

    Her writing is gorgeous and cerebral (imagine Anne Carson) but she doesn't skimp on the wit (imagine Anne Carson's ne'er-do-well niece). Poetry-fearers, don't back away from this beautiful book; these might be the pages that bring you back into the form.” --Dave Eggers

    The extraordinary sequence at the heart of this book taps into the radical power of the sonnet form, bending it into a kind of metaphysical and psychological outcry. Beginning in the cramped space of selfhood―in the bedroom, cluttered with doubts, and in the throes of marital loss―these poems edge toward the clarity of “what I can know and admit to knowing.” In song and in silence, Ford inhabits the rooms of anguish and redemption with scouring exactness. This is poetry that “can break open, // it can break your life, it will break you // until you remain.” If You Have to Go is Ford’s most luminous and moving collection.

    At once a personal document as it is an occult text, Milk investigates overused paradigms of what it means to be a creator and encapsulates its horrors and joys—setting fire to the enigma that drives the vital force that enables poems, love, and life to happen.