It was filled with hundreds of niches, one over the other. There is a country in each one; they're like boys, they're dead." In this landmark poem, written at the height of the Pinochet dictatorship, major Chilean poet Raul Zurita protests with ferocious invention the extinguishment of a generation and the brutalization of a nation. Of the role of poetry and of his own treatment by the military under this regime, Zurita has said, "You see, the only thing that told me that I wasn't crazy, that I wasn't living in a nightmare, was this file of poems, and then when they threw them into the sea, then I understood exactly what was happening." This elegy refuses to be an elegy, refuses to let the Disappeared disappear.

    He invokes the words of Whitman in “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. “El Moriviví” uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto Rico: “May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.” Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” urges us to “melt the bullets into bells.” Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean “actor,” finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s “numberless unknown heroes.”

    Here, though, the poet's electric narratives and portraits extend beyond the working class streets of urban New Jersey. Modeling poems on the kundiman, a song of unrequited love sung by Filipinos for their country in times of oppression, he professes his conflicted feelings for America, while celebrating and lamenting his various heritageswhether by chatting up St. Patrick, riffing on race relations, or channeling Lapu Lapu in a rejoinder to Magellan. Passionate, provocative, and irrepressible throughout, My American Kundiman further establishes Rosal as a poet to be reckoned with.

    Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery -- and Jorie Graham. The New Yorker places Ms. Graham in this distinguished line of poets, heralding the Pulitzer Prize winner as a profound voice in American poetry. Now, in her eighth collection, she further enhances her reputation with a book-length sequence of verse that is a stunning work of grandeur.The New Republic writes, "for 'swarm,' in other words...read 'be born again.' Graham is writing about a spiritual turning point, a new beginning.... Beauty -- that is, the pure sense-perception which has long been a concern for Graham -- is no longer the most important criterion. Now goodness is...[and] the idea of submission, of obedience, without understanding: one must 'yield' before 'hearing the reason' for yielding."

    Grounded in a series of mediations upon the life of the feeling heart in the world, Jane Hirshfield's long-awaited third collection of poetry explores the ways that radiance dwells most truly in the ordinary, the difficult, and the plain.

    These poems alternately rage, laugh, celebrate and grieve, singing in the voices of people ravaged by cycles of war and news coverage and inviting the reader to see the human lives lived beyond the headlines.

    Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at-risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, she survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinos in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer—another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities—and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. The dissociative states that mark the middle—a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma—is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history.

    Peppered with Spanish and touches of magical realism, ordinary life and its simple props—morning showers, spilled birdseed, winter lemons—becomes an exploration of mortality and humanity, and the many possibilities of how lives might yet be lived.Mad HoneyMade from magnificent rhododendron, poisonous rhododendron,Very difficult-to-pronounce rhododendron—whateverRhododendron even is—I would have to look it up myself,This word sounding puffed up, peacocky with itsIndianapolisly-long spelling, all those letters moving in and out.But the plant itself, the plant and the bees that find it:The bees see in its purple flower, first, a purple flower.They do not spell it. They do not live in fear of quizzes,Purple offering what it has to offer, unapologetic, without furtherDefinition, purple irresistible to the artist's and to the bee's eye—Who can blame either one this first-grade impulse toward love?Purple, always wearing something low-cut . . . Alberto Rios is the Poet Laureate of Arizona and host of the PBS program Books & Co. He was a finalist for the National Book Award for his poetry volume The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body. He teaches at Arizona State University and lives in Chandler, Arizona.

    . . . Hustle is full of dashing nerve, linguistic flair, and unfakeable heart."—Tony HoaglandThe dark peoples with things:for keys, coins, pencilsand pens our pockets grieve.No street lights or signs,no liquor stores or bars,only a lighter for a flashlight,and the same-faced trees,similar-armed stonesand crooked bushesstaring back at me.There is no path in the woods for a boy from the city.I would have set fire to get off this wildernessbut Palomar is no El Camino in an empty lot,the plastic dripping from the dashand the paint bubbling like a toad's throat.If mountains were old pieces of furniture,I would have lit the fabric and danced.If mountains were abandoned crack houses,I would have opened their meanings with flame,if that would have let the wind and trees lead my eyesor shown me the moon's tiptoe on the moss—as you effect my hand,as we walk into the side of a Sunday night.David Tomas Martinez has published in San Diego Writer's Ink, Charlotte Journal, Poetry International, and has been featured in Border Voices. A PhD candidate at the University of Houston, Martinez is also an editor for Gulf Coast.

    He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. In his first collection, Muscular Music, he took the reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. His second collection, Hip Logic, continued these explorations of popular culture, fatherhood, cultural heritage, and loss. Wind in a Box, Hayes’s resonant new collection, continues his interest in how traditions (of poetry and culture alike) can be simultaneously upended and embraced. The struggle for freedom (the wind) within containment (the box) is the unifying motif as Hayes explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality. This new book displays not only what the Los Angeles Times calls the range of a "bold virtuoso," but also the imaginative fervor of a poet in love with poetry.

    He loved heroin, ecstasy, the sad musicof the bars. He said he loved you too. You arethinking of the night you met him. Late October night, the breeze as soft as his black eyes. He wasso hungry for trouble. You were so hungryfor anything that resembled love. Your fingertracing the tattoos on his chest, you dreamedof living in the prison of his arms. But you refusedto live in the prison of his deadly nights. Youcan’t survive without the morninglight. You repeat this again and again:He’s a man, not an illness. Tattoos and prison.Novels and poems. A bird can love a fish but they can’tlive in your apartment. He called again last nightand left a message that was meant to wound.He said: I want to know what you meant whenyou said I love you. You said: I love you. I meant I love you.He said: I want to know what you meant whenyou said goodbye. You said: Goodbye. I meant goodbye.You whispered his name in the dark.Benjamin Alire Sáenz in 2013 won the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Lambda Award for his book Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. His young adult novel Dante and Aristotle in Paradise was a 2013 Printz Honoree. He lives in El Paso, Texas.

    In 1972, after her work was banned under a repressive military regime, she left her country, moving to Spain.This collection of poems, written during her journey and the first period of her self-exile, was so personal that it remained unpublished for almost thirty years. It is accompanied here by two brilliant essays on exile, one by Peri Rossi and the other by translator Marilyn Buck, who is an American political prisoner, exiled in her own land.Cristina Peri Rossi is the author of thirty-seven works, including The Ship of Fools.

    A collection examining America's loss of innocence, the poems in this title range from the horrific flight of a World War II pilot to the World Trade Center attack, from the death of JFK Jr to the poet's own bastard birth.

    Oh cabbage leaves, oh roses, oh orange-slice childhood grins: this book broke my heart. Its sad memory-tropes come from fairy tales and childhood books. With language, Gaudry is as loving and careful as one is with a matchbook . . . when wishing to set the whole world on fire.” —KATE BERNHEIMER“Molly Gaudry’s debut evokes the spirit of iconic fairy tales that have transported readers for centuries. Her variations on these themes delineate the psychological journey from girlhood to womanhood. But We Take Me Apart is more than a retelling. In it, Gaudry reconstitutes the essence of what makes fairy tales compelling, and she does so imaginatively and with great attention to language, the earmarks of poetry.” —CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY“If you consider her novella poetry, then it borrows much from prose. And if you see it as prose, it allows for a poetic flavor. Gaudry walks this line with great poise and in that poise we find her greatest strength as a writer.” —THE BROAD SET WRITING COLLECTIVE“A Molly Gaudry word is so precise, it feels like a sentence.” —GREAT TWIN CITIES POETRY READ & ROAD SHOW“An epic poem of epic mastery, We Take Me Apart centers on a girl who grows into a woman who grows into a heroine.” —PRICK OF THE SPINDLE“This incredible verse novel(la) is infused with fairy tales and Gertude Stein, not to mention Gaudry’s own dreamlike, luscious voice. An almost visceral delight.” —FLAVORWIRE“Gaudry’s mastery of language, [her] use of . . . silence, the wet white space around the burn of language, reads at times as if a character from Beckett had crawled or hobbled into a fairy tale—the kind of Beckett character that keeps his or her silence, only to suddenly wax eloquent in manic bursts.” —AMBER SPARKS“A cross between silence and fairy tale, Gaudry’s Beckettian narrative sews bright bits to near-faint whispers, slowly swaddling us in quiet and darkness.” —BRIAN EVENSON“Amid this stark environment, Gaudry’s gorgeous lyric voice guides us through.” —ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE FANS“Molly Gaudry must have revised this gem of a novella over and over and over to get the wording, the rhythms, the images, etc. just so. . . . Not a word is out of place, nothing is missing, no extra words are added. Molly Gaudry has worked this section, and every other section in the book, to the very essence of what is necessary to capture her readers and not let them go.” —EMERGING WRITERS NETWORK“[Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian] is famous for its poetic prose and unflinching violence, but there’s a void of femininity. . . . Enter Molly Gaudry. . . . [Her] prose, steeped in poetry as much as McCarthy’s, spirals upward, elevating and exploding. The creators and destroyers, the beautiful and the gory, and the mythical and contemporary all thrive in balance. To read Molly Gaudry is to read Angela Carter’s cutthroat narrative spoken through the hopelessly hopeful characters of Lydia Millet, all arranged in space with the care of an impressionist painter.” —HOBART“We Take Me Apart is a dazzleflage of a book. The stuttering disrupted language of this cubist concoction disappears before your ears, sinks into your eyes. This aggressive dress camouflage reweaves Gertrude Stein’s rewoven grammar of worsted silk-screened gabardine into a fully ripped patois-ed pattern of stunning wonder.” —MICHAEL MARTONE“Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart works ‘thread into lace.’ . . . Especially vivid in this book-length work is the mother’s entrance and exit, where the ragged lines swell and turn sonnet-like with love.” —TERESE SVOBODA“In Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart, the ordinary becomes mythical, what may be autobiographical becomes a fable, and simple lines or sentences ring with ominous music. Even the empty space between the lines seems to resonate with invisible narrative. A stunning debut.” —RICHARD GARCIA “White space, planes and planes of it. . . . We Take Me Apart is a novel’s answer to a room. . . . I read it three times . . . inhaling its perfume. . . . The scent is delicate and leaves a trace of itself. . . . The book details grace. . . it will haunt like a remembrance of fragrance or swoosh of hair or panoply of mother as tart then sweet and suddenly elusive as memories of one’s own.” —AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW“Gaudry’s work implies that life, at its most essential, is the memory of love, hope, and the rooms it has occupied. . . . We Take Me Apart is an exercise in empathy for the reader. It is pure song and story. This book is a gift.” —[PANK]

    By juxtaposing fragments of her poems with short pieces of prose, we begin to know her as poet, friend, enemy, woman, lover, and revolutionary.From "Poems for Moscow (2)":From my hands—take this city not made by hands,my strange, my beautiful brother.Take it, church by church—all forty times forty churches,and flying up over them, the small pigeons;And Spassky Gates—in their flower—where the Orthodox take off their hats;And the Chapel of Stars—refuge chapel—where the floor is—polished by tears;Take the circle of the five cathedrals,my soul, my holy friend.Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892 and died in 1941. Her poetry stands among the greatest works of twentieth century Russian writers.Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writers' Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship awarded annually by Poetry magazine.Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets award for Dream Barker in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, from Copper Canyon Press. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.