It will convert you and install a skylight in your brain. Alive and kicking in these pages is the voice of a brilliantly comic consciousness. McDaniel is a candid, frisky survivor: hyperalert, conversant with drugs and sobriety, obscene phone call addicts, 'boner etiquette, ' fatherhood, the special hell of family, being an 'emotional warrior' and so much more. He's an urban wordsmith of the first order. You hold in your hands his anguished autobiography, a smorgasbord of famished compassion, tenderness, luminous surprises, and armor-piercing humor. - Amy Gerstler It was an energetic moment when I encountered Jeffrey McDaniel for the first time. Even after a few lines it became obvious that he was someone who produced not only a very vivid but also innovative poetry. A fusion of pain and goodness, comic reliefs, and explosive moments on the crunchy surface of daily horrors/shocks

    Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.

    Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear "the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world." We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.

    Because I always stutter politely. Because there's always the chatter before the kiss. --from "In Need of Subtitles"In this award-winning debut, Sjohnna McCray movingly recounts a life born out of wartime to a Korean mother and an American father serving during the Vietnam War. Their troubled histories, and McCray's own, are told with lyric passion and the mythic undercurrents of discovering one's own identity, one's own desires. What emerges is a self- and family portrait of grief and celebration, one that insists on our lives as anything, please, but singular. Rapture is an extraordinary first collection, with poems of rare grace and feeling.

    Written in dialogic fragments and intersped with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma, it is arranged around the two different discourses. The bed on which America sleeps, and which America has made, is built on the fear that the nations it has oppressed will rise up against it, a monstrous shadow in a child’s nightmare. Written in English, while they sleep points to a imperialist American identity: the dormant body of the text. Answering in Spanish, under the bed is another country is the footnote, the monster under the bed, the colony: Puerto Rico.

    A breathtakingly beautiful collection of contemporary poetry and prose, offering powerful insights into love, heartbreak, relationships, and self-empowerment. Filled with wisdom and encouragement, every single page is a testament to the power of words, and the impact they can have on the relationships you build with others. And most importantly, the one you have with yourself.Lang Leav captures the intricacies of emotions like few others can. It's no wonder she has been recognized as a major influencer of the modern poetry movement and her writing has inspired a whole new generation of poets to pick up a pen.Love Looks Pretty on You is truly the must-have book for poetry lovers all over the world.

    In November of 2010, I read at the ‘Ear Eater’ reading series in Chicago. Ana was another reader. She was reading via Skype. There were a lot of people at the reading. After I read, I walked out of the room and stood in a hallway, staring at the floor. After a few difficult conversations with people in the hallway, I heard the host of the reading talking to someone on the computer. It was Ana. Ana started reading. I laughed a lot and enjoyed her reading. Seemed like other people weren’t enjoying it as much as me but I was enjoying it a lot. I stood in the hallway laughing and shaking my head ‘Yes’ and people looked at me. I kept thinking, ‘I want to go into the room and watch her face reading’ but then I would think, ‘No, don’t do that, just listen.’ Not sure why I kept telling myself not to go into the room where she was reading but I stood in the hallway and listened and enjoyed it a lot. Two years later, Ana emailed me Baby Babe. I opened the PDF just to skim a few poems but then I read the whole book. When I was done reading the book, I thought, ‘I’ll be glad to have this book so I can look at it whenever I want.’” — Sam Pink

    A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness―how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.

    For the first time, Mojgani has given us a collection which combines his poems with his illustrations, at times using them to infuse and inform one another. The poems and pictures of The Pocketknife Bible climb through the child-like heart of its author to bring stories from the well that are enhanced by the imagery. This book is a celebration of childhood and family, or rather the mythology of what that entails, exploring the intersection of how we may have once seen the world and how we remember how we saw it. This is an almost-children s book for those who might no longer be young, but could use a map to find their way back to that world."

    Impelled by metaphor and lilting repetition, Mulberry seeks a sense of the world, and ultimately, finds a sense of the Infinite. Affording continual discoveries, Mulberry is a major work for the new century by an assured and lavishly gifted poet. Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of North True South Bright and Spell, He is chair of the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency.

    . .Taking as its starting point the classic 'wheel of balance' life-coach model, this beautifully packaged collection of extracts and short poems gathers wisdom old and new in a perfect gift for anyone who needs comfort in this f**ked up world of ours.'This is not a poetry book as you know it, this is a life raft.' Emerald Street on Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t.

    

    The book is Hillman's sixth collection and her most wide-ranging. The problem the book poses is nothing less than a phenomenology of transformation. In her previous work, Hillman's investigations of alchemy and of contemporary life have created their own distinct mythologies, and here she turns to the first of the four basic elements, earth, to demonstrate a visionary science with a combination of lightness, wit and force.Embodied in syntax as unpredictable as the earth's movements, these poetic forms speak to and query the landforms as the line between faith and science blurs. Short lyrics inspired by the California missions, each with a retablo of punctuation, reflect on the solitude and history of the sign as it moves through the quotidian. Set among these lyrics, each of the three long poems in the book presents an aspect of Hillman's topography. By the end of this powerful work, a new state is visible: a Modernist poetics, subjected to immense internal pressures, above and beneath unsettled ground, has emerged in original shapes

    Like I do with all great books, I kept have to stop and step away every few pages to think about what I’d just read. Crybaby is tender and full of carefully chosen, luxurious language. It’s poem after poem of sensual, wide-eyed desire and a total rejection of shame. There was something I wanted to tattoo or study or steal on every page.” – Clementine von Radics, author of Mouthful of Forevers & founder of Where Are You Press“Crybaby is a masterpiece. This collection is one of the greatest triumphs of Caitlyn Siehl’s young career. There are few poets who simultaneously reveal the wonder in everyday life and expand our understanding of the world. Caitlyn is one of those poets. She perfectly balances radical tenderness and gritty truth telling in her sophomore collection. There is a ravenous appetite in her words, a deep yearning to achieve complete wholeness. This hunger empowers readers to explore their identities and discover their best parts. Crybaby is a compelling read from cover to cover. Bring it home to someone you love. Allow your heart to be expanded by this collection; there is truly something here for everyone.” – Christian Sammartino, co-founder & editor-in-chief for The Rising Phoenix Review“Crybaby cries with you. Caitlyn’s second collection is what every second collection should be: equal parts heartbreak, forgiveness and honesty so clear it hurts. I read this and couldn’t believe I didn’t have something like this to turn to when I was younger. Hell, I regret that I didn’t have this last year. Caitlyn possesses a true gift in writing about the things that hurt us, the things that haunt us, and the things that also give us endless hope. I am breathless from the sheer unapologetic way in which she describes the mundane nuances of everyday life—from the pancakes to the flowerbeds and all the lovers in-between. Caitlyn’s collection tells you that you’re going to fall, but more importantly, it shows you how to do it. A triumph.” – Kristina Haynes, author of It Looked A Lot Like Love & Chloe

    Chang sweeps together myth and fairy tale, skirting the edges of events to focus on the psychological tenor of experience: the underpinnings of identity and the role of nature in both constructing and erasing a self. From the edge of the ocean, where things constantly shift and dissolve, through "the forest's thick, / where the trees meet the dark," to an imaginary cliffside town of fog, this book makes a journey both natural and psychological, using experiments in language and form to capture the search for personhood and place.