Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking. Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood. A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.

    here’s a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.”—Publishers Weekly“One is simply content to be in the presence of a writer this vital, this large-spirited.”—The New York Times Book ReviewAlthough best known for his acclaimed fiction, Jim Harrison’s poetry has earned him recognition as an “untrammeled renegade genius.” Saving Daylight, his tenth collection of poetry–and first in a decade–is grounded in thickets and rivers, birds and bears, and the solace of dogs in a crazed political world. Whether contemplating the ephemerality of 90,000,000,000 galaxies or the immediate grace of a waitress, Harrison relishes the art and mysteries of being alive. “I’m enrolled in a school without visible teachers,” he writes in the title poem, “the divine mumbling just out of ear shot.”From “The Little Appearances of God”When god visits us he sleeps without a clock in empty bird nests. He likes the view. Not too high. Not too low. He winks a friendly wink at a nearby possum who sniffs the air unable to detect the scent of this not quite visible stranger...Jim Harrison is the author of two dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva. His work has been translated into 20 languages and produced as four feature-length films. Mr. Harrison divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.

    Doughty’s poems are at once absurdist and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he reimagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in “For Charlotte, Unlisted,” he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.

    Covering topics from love and heartbreak to chaos and self-discovery, each poem is laced in a cozy, magical energy that is sure to hold the reader suspended in the in-between.

    "The Himalayas Within Him" finds Heart worrying about the sound of his own heartbeat, wondering why it doesn't "blare like a quartet of trombones" as it reflects his "ardent complexity." In "Goodbye to the Hands That Have Touched Him" Heart, after suffering many sleepless nights, decides "that love exists at the root of his problems. Without love his path would be as smooth as a plate of glass and he'd sleep like a kitten." Dividing the Heart poems is the long "Oh, Immobility, Death's Vast Associate, " a jazzy disquisition on human isolation and inaction in the midst of a planet full of people feeling similarly. Throughout Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides Dobyns has painstakingly sculpted straight-forward language into a distinct sound, creating an unforgettable collection of poems that offers readers unexpected revelations about the complexities of the heart.

    Gathered into a 95 page compilation with accompanying images, "Poems from the Attic" is at once playful and pensive. It is a love letter to the reader, singed at the edges and creased many times over. It is a walk through the creative process and an ode to the shadowy, quiet places we all carry inside of us.

    

    The poems deal with the impossibility of such an endeavor and celebrate our persistence in striving anyway.At its core, the collection is built around a very wise line from a Beatles song: I want to hold your hand. I want to hold your hand with no further expectations. I want to hold your hand instead of telling you I understand when I don’t. I want to hold your hand although we don’t always get along. I want to hold your hand despite the calluses, scratches, and scars that get in the way. I want to hold your hand knowing I’ll have to let it go one day.I just want to hold your hand.

    But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active 25-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style.Interrogations at Noon displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.

    In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

    As in much of his earlier work, the poems are gentle, beautiful, alternatelylonely and happy, but these are poems unlike any the author has written before. They speak directly to man's uniquelyu human condition -- his wants, his solitude, and, most of all, his desire to be understood. But most importantly, these poems represent a new and different kind of McKuen writing -- more mature, more compassionate and more deeply in touch with both public and private feelings.

    Now in one volume, the first and second in Susan Howatch's acclaimed series of novels; compelling, searching, wise and witty, they have gained her a huge following.

    Journeying between his native Ulster and his adopted London, he balances ideas of home and flight, the need for belonging and the need to remain outside. Formally deft, rhetorically fresh, these poems never shy from difficult choices, exploring cruelty and vengeance wherever they may be found: in love, in work and against political backdrops. But these are brave, resolute writings that resist despair at all times, affirming instead the need to rebuild and to right oneself, to dust down and carry on.

    Poems in English and Spanish that discuss what it means to be Puerto Rican in the United States today.

    The book teaches that a person's softness is their biggest strength and that having a big heart is not always a bad thing and that a glimmer of light can be found in the darkest places.A Handful of Stars is raw and unapologetic, soft and kind, reflective and inspirational all at the same time. Some of Ruby's most loved poems are shared within the pages of this book, in hope that they will have the same effect on readers the second time as they did the first.