One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man descending into hell.

    His characters are often lost or confused, his settings bizarre, his scenarios brilliantly surreal. Opaque, inscrutable people float through a dreamlike world where nothing is as it seems. The Ghost Soldiers offers resounding proof, once again, that Tate stands alone in American poetry.

    In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populacein the edgy jazz portrait, "Suite Billy Strayhorn," for example, or the enthralling, interwoven sequence, "At the Adult Drive-In," which conveys, at once, a personal and communal corruption. Penetrating and compassionate, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart portrays, with a storyteller's arc, the troubled landscape of the left-behind.

    June Jordan's many selves, as poet, essayist, feminist, and activist come together here in a collection of poetry that is alternately lyrical, magical, shockingly spare, pungently political, yet universally resonate. Beautiful love poems are interspersed with poems about Bosnia, Africa, urban America, Clarence Thomas, affirmative action, her mother's suicide, and Jordan's bout with breast cancer.This collection of poetry will be warmly welcomed by June Jordan loyalists and new readers who will thrill to discover a voice that has been described as one of the "most gifted poets of the late twentieth century."

    But this poetry is not a sentimental celebration of the goodness of nature, and harmony with the world is never something assumed. The harmony Forché seeks goes deeper than simple submission to natural processes or identification with an ethnic group, and it must be fought for with a tenuous faith, the balance that must be found between the ugliness, the harshness of her history—both natural and social—and its intense beauty, is what distinguishes Forché’s poetry, gives it is depth and dimension.

    Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.So, while I lead this choir, I still find thatI'm being led…I'm a missionarymending my faith in the midst of this flock…I toil in their fields of praise. When folks seethese freedmen stand and sing, they hear their Godspeak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

    Phipps ruminates on the ways we are shaped as humans. Is it nature or nurture? Is it fate or a happen chance? What teaches us to love our generational inheritance, no matter how harmful? Phipps takes us to the most intimate parts of family matters in hopes of underantdatning conflict as a means of overcoming.

    Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address.Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

    The poems in this collection are at once seductive and dangerous; they are possessed by a singular lyricism and awareness, and her call to action has a major presence in her work.

    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.

    

    Everything that suffuses her well-loved prose is here: compassion, insight, lyrical precision, and the clear, minimalist eye that reveals how life can turn on a single moment. Musing on the undercurrents and interconnections between legacy, memory, motherhood and the natural world, the poems in the collection begin on the surface and then take us, gracefully and effortlessly, to a far more thought-provoking place.

    The heart of the collection is a series of autobiographical poems recalling family, school, neighborhood, and work experiences-from bouncer to tenant lawyer. There are moments of revelation and political transcendence here, which culminate in an elegy for the Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Velez, imprisoned for his advocacy of independence for Puerto Rico.

    Those who stayed at the plant to stabilize the reactors, willing to sacrifice their lives, became known internationally as the Fukushima 50.In tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh takes a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the disaster. Here we meet its survivors and victims, from a pearl-catcher to a mild-mannered father to a drove of mindless pink robots. And then there is Roripaugh's unforgettable Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and "annihilatrix." Tsunami is part hero and part supervillain--angry, loud, forcefully defending her rights as a living being in contemporary industrialized society. As humanity rebuilds in disaster's wake, Tsunami continues to wreak her own havoc, battling humans' self-appointed role as colonizer of Earth and its life-forms."She's an unsubtle thief / a giver of gifts," Roripaugh writes of Tsunami, who spits garbage from the Pacific back into now-pulverized Fukushima. As Tsunami makes visible her suffering, the wrath of nature scorned, humanity has the opportunity to reconsider the trauma they cause Earth and each other. But will they look?

    Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better."to the sea"great storage house, historyon which we rode, we touchedthe brief pulse of your flutteringpages, spelled with salt & life,your rage, your indifferenceyour gentleness washing our feet,all of you going onwhether or not we live,to you we bring our carnationsyellow & pink, how they floatlike bright sentences atopyour memory's dark hairAracelis Girmay is the author of three poetry collections, the black maria; Kingdom Animalia, which won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the NBCC Award; and Teeth. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome, Cave Canem, and Watson foundations, as well as Civitella Ranieri and the NEA. She currently teaches at Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University's low residency MFA program. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.