Ada Limon's first full-length poetry book--startling and funny--Limon is a poet to keep your eye on.

    "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."

    The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

    

    Blood and death attend. But when the war is won, and life stares, hungry, in the parents’ faces, where does that violence, anxiety, and shame go? The poems in Patter re-imagine miscarriages as minstrel shows, magic tricks, and comic strips; set Darth Vader against Oedipus’s dad in competition for “Father of the Year;” and interrogate the poet’s family’s stint on reality TV. In this, his third collection, award-winning poet Douglas Kearney doggedly worries the line between love and hate, showing how it bleeds itself into “fatherhood.”

    Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are “accursed,” that are limited—and unanswered—by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow—or at least measure—time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover’s breaths; by remembering a father’s space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.

    . .--from "The Window"Lynda Hull's Collected Poems brings together her three collections--long unavailable--with a new introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, and allows, for the first time, the full scale of her achievement to be seen. Edited with Hull's husband, David Wojahn, this book contains all the poems Hull published in her lifetime, before her untimely death in 1994.Collected Poems is the first book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. Each volume--chosen by series editor Mark Doty--is introduced by a poet who brings to the work a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series brings all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry into the hands of a new generation of readers.

    Sin and Robert M. Drake. What are you hiding behind your smile? If those empty bottles that line the walls of your room could speak, what tales would they spill? So much of your truth is buried beneath the lies you tell yourself. There’s a need to scream to the moon; there’s this urge to go out into the darkness of the night to purge. There are so many stories living inside your soul, you just want the opportunity to tell them. And when you can’t find the will to express what lives within your heart, these words will give you peace. These words will set you free.

    African American Studies. "Cameron Awkward-Rich's wintry collection is full of broken surfaces. Fists surge in bodies, blades cleave skin, but most recurrent, a boy dives into black water. Think of an anti-Narcissus who longs to break the liquid mirror, both fractalizing and multiplying his image. Yet the poet winds tight TRANSIT's shifting reflections of puncture and fracture into poems of great tonal discipline and grimly mordant observation, pushing us deeper into memory into myth into girl into bird into mouth into sex onto cars onto trains into your hands, reader. Open the book and get opened by it." Douglas Kearney"

    Written in a direct, conversational style, the poems in Sun Bear display full-force why Zapruder is one of the most popular poets in America.From "I Drink Bronze Light":Great American summer lakesright now I am flying above youthrough a rare cloudless transparent skyback to the city where it is alwayscold even in summerthe round hole I press my face againstshows only a blue expansewith white sails belowspeckled exactly the waythe Aegean would have beenthree thousand years agoif one could have seen it from abovemaybe riding in the dark clawof a god who didn't care. . . .Matthew Zapruder is a poet, translator, and editor at Wave Books. He is the author of three collections of poetry, and his book The Pajamaist won the William Carlos Williams Award. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many publications, including BOMB, Harvard Review, Paris Review, the New Yorker, McSweeney's, and the Believer. He lives in San Francisco, California.

    In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner’s "Meep! Meep!" to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young’s poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.

    In the time of space shuttles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, outer space is the only place equality seems possible, even as the stars serve to both guide and obscure the earthly complexities of masculinity and migration. In Matejka's poems, hope is the link between the convoluted realities of being poor and the inspiring possibilities of transcendence and escape--whether it comes from Star Trek, the dream of being one of the first black astronauts, or Sun Ra's cosmic jazz.

    . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book ReviewQuietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see.Shirt in HeavenCome upon a snapshotof secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches—come upon letters I thought I'd burned—I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs.I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat downin the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried.He yelled at the aide to get out.His two sons had been your students.—me too, little-knowing—Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

    What Would your life say if it could talk?                                                            —from “No Fly Zone”With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

    With honesty, poignancy, and romantic flair, Atticus distills the most exhilarating highs and the heartbreaking lows of life and love into a few perfectly evocative lines, ensuring that his words will become etched in your mind—and will awaken your sense of adventure.