THIS CAN'T BE LIFE is Dana Ward's first full-length collection of poetry. Although some of this writing may look like prose, everything here is written both AS, and under the sign of, "poetry." THIS CAN'T BE LIFE is an infinite frame-dissolve between art and life engined by the thoughts and feelings associated with the relationship between mortality and politics. These things, working together and against one another, constitute the funeral fun-house physics which delimit the (temporary) reality in which the book operates. Following Notley and Kerouac, Ward's poetics is a generative problematics of voice in which "the counter-poised figures of porousness, multiplicity, & instability are first principals."

    From online dating to beauty pageants, Greek mythology to road trips, Leigh Stein gives us resilient young women in longing and in love. Post-confessional—like Sylvia Plath raised on MTV, or Anne Sexton on Twitter—the poems seduce with a narrative hook or startle with a pop culture reference, all the while wrestling fresh meaning out of our fantasy-saturated modern lives.

    With formal invention and a wild personae, ZIRCONIA compels one to follow gem-strewn trails of feminine intuition, savagery, ennui, fantasy, and intimacy to their diabolically fruitful conclusions.

    Fountain’s voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the “pure holiness in motherhood” with the “thuds the giant dumpsters make behind the strip mall when they’re tossed back to the pavement by the trash truck.” In these wise, accessible, deeply emotional poems, she captures a contemporary longing for spiritual meaning that’s wary of prepackaged wisdom—a longing answered most fully by attending to the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

    Between facing the traumas of her past and navigating daily life, the narrator of Magdalene yearns for the guidance of her spiritual teacher, a Christ figure, whose death she continues to grieve. Erotic, spirited, and searching for meaning, she is a woman striving to be the subject of her own life, fully human and alive to the sacred in the mortal world.

    In turns sad, troubled and angry, her voice has always been one of great empathy, knowing, as she says, “the only mercy is memory.” In this, her 12th book of poetry, the National Book Award-winner speaks to the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters, the debilitating power of cancer, the open wound of racial prejudice, the redemptive gift of story-telling. “September Song,” a sequence of seven poems, featured on National Public Radio, presents a modern-day Orpheus who, through her grief, attempts to heart-intelligently respond to the events of September 11th. The last sequence of poems—a tightly-woven fabric of caveats and prayers—was initially written in the 1970s, then revised and reshaped in the last few years.Lucille Clifton is an award-winning poet, fiction writer and author of children’s books. Her most recent poetry book, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1969–1999 (BOA), won the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry. Two of Clifton’s BOA poetry collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 and Next: New Poems, were chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, while Clifton’s The Terrible Stories (BOA) was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Clifton has received fellowships from the NEA, an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Shelley Memorial Prize and the Charity Randall Citation. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities as St. Mary’s College in Maryland. She was appointed a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999. She lives in Columbia, MD.

    Haunted by their childhoods of material and emotional poverty, Jimmy and Rita float through days in urban San Francisco.

    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.

    Whether recalling her former career as a naturalist experimenting on white rats or watching birds from her wheelchair, she draws the reader into unforgettable places rich in image and story. Lucia Perillo is the author of four books of poetry that have won the Norma Farber First Book Award, the Kate Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her critically acclaimed memoir, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature, was published in 2007.

    There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

    Possessing rapid-fire comedic timing, Shapero touches on subjects such as religion, perpetual war, birth, and death—exposing humanity’s often faulty sense of what’s important and displaying a willingness to self-incriminate. These poems exhibit an expansive, searching sensibility that balks at the standard-issue hopes and fears of modern American culture.

    Of The Babies, poet Claudia Rankine writes, “Rarely do we encounter poems that are so precisely framed, though on their surface seemingly whimsical and erratic. These poems are gorgeous, intelligent, and disturbing.”

    In his fourteenth collection of poems, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn reveals his concerns, ranging from meditations on salvation and time to the difficulties and pleasures of loving in this "already brutal century." In language that Gerald Stern has called "unbearably fearless and beautiful," Dunn continues to probe the elusive in the lives we live.

    Chronicling the relationship between a lonely artist and her absent--albeit abusive--muse, Magic with Skin On will gently break you, then put you back together again.

    They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now.”—Joy Harjo, prize citationfrom “The Piano Speaks”     For an hour I forgot my fat self,     my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.     For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.     For an hour I was a salamander     shimmying through the kelp in search of shore,     and under his fingers the notes slid loose     from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs     that took root in the mud.