Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next.Illustrated with photographs from the author's personal collection, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure tells the story of the Gibson women -- sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts -- and the men who loved them, often abused them, and, nonetheless, shared their destinies. With luminous clarity, Allison explores how desire surprises and what power feels like to a young girl as she confronts abuse. As always, Dorothy Allison is provocative, confrontational, and brutally honest. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, steeped in the hard-won wisdom of experience, expresses the strength of her unique vision with beauty and eloquence.

    a grave, attentive holding of a light” by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs’s experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems deal with Mammoth Cave’s four- thousand-year human history and the thrills of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond. Often the poems search for oblique angles into personal experience, and the caves and the landscape they create form a personal geology.

    Hart Crane, prodigiously gifted and tragically doom-eager, was the American peer of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Lorca. Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899, Crane died at sea on April 27, 1932, an apparent suicide. A born poet, totally devoted to his art, Crane suffered his warring parents as well as long periods of a hand-to-mouth existence. He suffered also from his honesty as a homosexual poet and lover during a period in American life unsympathetic to his sexual orientation. Despite much critical misunderstanding and neglect, in his own time and in ours, Crane achieved a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic yet central to American tradition. His visionary epic, The Bridge, is the most ambitious and accomplished long poem since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative presentation of Hart Crane's work available. For this centennial edition, Harold Bloom, who was introduced to poetry by falling in love with Crane's work while still a child, has contributed a new introduction.

    The book's mood is best captured in the closing lines of the title poem, which takes its name from the ship that brought the poet's mother to America: A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.

    A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry." --Library JournalDrawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and rural, past and present in the haze of the reservation. Bitsui proves himself to be one of this century's most haunting, raw, and uncompromising voices.From "(Untitled)" . . . Jeweled with houseflies, leather rattles, foil-wrapped, ferment in beaked masks on the shores of evaporating lakes.This plot, now a hotel garden, its fountain gushing forth--the slashed wrists of the Colorado River.Sherwin Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is the author of two other books of poetry, among them Flood Song, which won an American Book Award. He currently lives in Arizona where he has serves on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

    Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

    But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.

    Blood Lyrics is a mother's song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: "Don't say it's the beautiful / I praise," Ford writes. "I praise the human, / gutted and rising."

    To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transform, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively we enter inside of that which we devour.--Nick FlynnThis is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It's the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It's not too late. We can start over from right here and right now.--Marie HoweIn every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading RENDER how deeply I was handing everything over.--Nikky Finney

    Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher—now a registered sex offender—continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been just five years long, but would imprint itself on her and her later relationships, queer and straight, for the rest of her life.In Excavation: A Memoir, the black and white of the standard victim/perpetrator stereotype gives way to unsettling grays. The present-day narrator reflects on the girl she once was, as well as the teacher and parent she has become. It's a beautifully written and powerful story of a woman reclaiming her whole heart.

    Wright pushed the bounds of imagination as she explored desire, loss and physical sensation. Her posthumously published book, ShallCross features seven poem sequences that show her tremendous range in style and approach. As she considers, among other topics, some dark intuitions about human nature, she also nudges readers to question who is telling the story and where one’s thought can lead."—The Washington Post"Wright gets better with each book, expanding the reach of her art; it seems it could take in anything."—Publishers Weekly"Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."—New York Times Book Review"C.D. Wright is entirely her own poet, a true original."—The Gettysburg ReviewIn a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet.From "Obscurity and Elegance":Whether or not the park was safeshe was going in. A study concluded, for a parkto be successful there had to be women.The man next to the monument must have brokenaway from her. Perhaps yearsbefore. That the bond had been carnal is obvious.He said he was just out clearing his head…C.D. Wright (1949-2016) taught at Brown University for decades and published over a dozen works of poetry and prose, including One With Others, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a National Book Award; One Big Self: An Investigation; and Rising Falling Hovering. Among her many honors are the Griffin International Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.

    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.

    Corral is the 2011 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, joining such distinguished previous winners as Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and John Ashbery. Corral is the first Latino poet to win the competition.Seamlessly braiding English and Spanish, Corral's poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience. He employs a range of forms and phrasing, bringing the vivid particulars of his experiences as a Chicano and gay man to the page. Although Corral's topics are decidedly sobering, contest judge Carl Phillips observes, "one of the more surprising possibilities offered in these poems is joy."From "Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso"I'm a cowboy        riding barebackMy soul is        whirlingabove my head like a lasso.        My right handa pistol. My left        automatic. I'm knockingon every door.        I'm coming on strong . . .

     It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, strayfrom home.So better by far for me if you were stone.—from "Medusa"Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of famous—and infamous—male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

    The debut collection from the vibrant voice of Roxane Gay is a unique blend of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all interwoven to represent the Haitian diaspora experience.