A new myth, maybe, was formingthere, but the sun was so brightI couldn't see it. --from "June 2nd, 1989 (for Xiaobo)"Empty Chairs presents the poetry of Liu Xia for the first time freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original. Selected from thirty years of her work, and including some of her haunting photography, this book creates a portrait of a life lived under duress, a voice in danger of being silenced, and a spirit that is shaken but so far indomitable. Liu Xia's poems are potent, acute moments of inquiry that peel back to expose the fraught complexity of an interior world. They are felt and insightful, colored through with political constraints even as they seep beyond those constraints and toward love.

    Brown. Brown is the winner of the Texas Book of The Year Prize, 2013. The New York Times calls his work a rekindling of the faith in the shocking, weird and beautiful power of words. Brown finally sold the ship, The Sea Section, upon which he lived for years in the Long Beach harbor, after which he took to hunting for a city that was affordable and had a bustling writer s community. He landed in Austin, Texas and when the progress of that town got to be intense, he moved to the nearby countryside in Elgin, Texas, and from that pastoral setting came unfurling this new collection of his most personal work to date. Brown has been known as one of the most touring, well travelled living poets in America. He has based his whole writing career on changing peoples minds about poetry and he feels a quality, unforgettable live experience can achieve that. Brown told himself he needed a 10-year hiatus from writing poetry when he felt the well of creativity had dried up. 2 years ago, he wrote a one-hour long poetic play called Strange Light, commissioned by The Noord Nederlands Dans Group in Holland. The piece was performed by 14 dancers and accompanied by a live orchestra using music composed by fellow Americans, Emily Wells and Timmy Straw. While he was working on a new libretto for Wayne State University in Detroit, he was set up in a seemingly pastoral country setting, where, as Brown says, an incredible war broke out inside and out, such bright, massive storms, snakes, guns, howling wind, hard sun: all kinds of poems gushed forth. I gave in to the process and my best work to date was born, this will be my 5th book. Our Poison Horse touches on more autobiography than the romantic and fantastical that was so present in his past work. In Derrick Brown s words: I found a poetry in the real events that shaped or broke me. Every morning, I would quiet down, stare out into the field where we were watching our neighbors horse, a horse that was poisoned with pesticide by some local boys, a horse with massive scars all down its body from it s skin peeling from the poison sprayed upon it maliciously by some bastard kids. I watched the horse heal and finally come to me, and trust me and eat carrots. Something about that horse, Lacey, about it not trusting me and then warming up pulled something out of me that I didn t know I was ready for. There is a theme that in beautiful places, you will"

    From vantage points on both sides of the Atlantic, Chatti investigates the perpetual exile that comes from always being separated from some essential part of oneself.“Tunsiya is Arabic for Tunisian/female, and Amrikiya is Arabic for American/female. This naming makes a cross of empowerment even as it is it requires great effort to bear it. Muslim female power is real and undeniable in thesecoming of age poems. In this collection, arcs spark between Tunisian and American citizenship, male and female duality, sky and earth, and yes and no. This is one of the punchiest and powerful chapbooks to appear in recent years. Leila Chatti is someone to watch.” —JOY HARJO“I marvel at Leila Chatti’s poems, their deceptive ease, their ‘calligraphy of smoke,’ their luminous concern with identity and self, love and family, her aesthetic command. ‘I orbited the town of my origin.’ She writes an America that belongs to the world, not the other way around. ‘What kind of world will we leave/ for our mothers?’ In poems filled with vision, desire, tenderness, she disarms our most guarded partialities, those we hide in our slumber, or deep under our tongues: ‘a Muslim girl who loved her father’; ‘ghost of a word mixed up with our bodies.’ Leila Chatti is a remarkable poet. Take notice.” —FADY JOUDAH“Leila Chatti is a major star. She writes exquisite, indelible, necessary poems, from two worlds mixing, rich as the threads of finest tapestries— glistening, warm. I’m struck by her vibrant sense of detail and perfect pacing. We need her honest, compassionate voice so much, at this moment, and everywhere.”—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

    Along the way Young riffs on Basquiat's paintings and sayings, on the music he loved, on the artists he ran with (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, among them), and on the black heroes (Charlie Parker, Muhammad Ali, Billie Holiday) who inspired him.Young's poetic channeling of Basquiat--a jostling, poignant brand of downtownspeak--makes for an urban epic in the tradition of Langston Hughes's "A Dream Deferred." To Repel Ghosts, along with Young's Jelly Roll: A Blues and Black Maria, his recent book of film noir verse, forms an American trilogy--Devil's Music--that explores other art forms through poetry. In its creation, Yound has become a poet whose work speaks both for and beyond his genre, with a music all its own.

    The book is Hillman's sixth collection and her most wide-ranging. The problem the book poses is nothing less than a phenomenology of transformation. In her previous work, Hillman's investigations of alchemy and of contemporary life have created their own distinct mythologies, and here she turns to the first of the four basic elements, earth, to demonstrate a visionary science with a combination of lightness, wit and force.Embodied in syntax as unpredictable as the earth's movements, these poetic forms speak to and query the landforms as the line between faith and science blurs. Short lyrics inspired by the California missions, each with a retablo of punctuation, reflect on the solitude and history of the sign as it moves through the quotidian. Set among these lyrics, each of the three long poems in the book presents an aspect of Hillman's topography. By the end of this powerful work, a new state is visible: a Modernist poetics, subjected to immense internal pressures, above and beneath unsettled ground, has emerged in original shapes

    From the author of My Song For Him Who Never Sang to Me and We Hardly See Each Other Any More, another intimate, illustrated collection of verse to share with those we love.

    Everything you need to hear, but already know.

    Merwin is one of them. Read him." —The Guardian"Merwin has attained a transcendent and transformative elevation of beaming perception, exquisite balance, and clarifying beauty." —Booklist, starred review of The Moon before Morning "Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page." —Helen Vendler, The New York Review of BooksW.S. Merwin composed Garden Time during the difficult process of losing his eyesight. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated his new poems to his wife, Paula. In this gorgeous, mindful, and life-affirming book, our greatest poet channels energy from animated sounds and memories to remind us that "the only hope is to be the daylight."From "A Breath of Day":Last night I slept on the floor of the sea in an unsounded part of the oceanin the morning it was a long way upthrough the dark streets of a silent countrywith no language in its empty housesuntil I had almost reached the surfaceof a morning that I had never seenthen a breeze came to it and I beganto remember the voices of young leaves . . .W.S. Merwin served as Poet Laureate of the United States and has received every major literary accolade, including two Pulitzer prizes, most recently for The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon), and the National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon). He lives in Hawaii.

    “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning. Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility. Ben Lerner, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of No: a journal of the arts. He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

    First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text. As the author explains, "To etch is 'to cut away, ' and each page, as in Blake's concept of a book, is a single picture." With God and Satan crossed out, RADI OS reduces Milton's Baroque poem to elemental forces. In this retelling of the Fall, song precipitates from chaos, sight from fire: "in the shape / as of / above the / rose / through / rose / rising / the radiant sun.

    Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times. The sea is one of humanity's oldest metaphors for life, and a sea journey, Blumenberg observes, has often stood for our journey through life. We all know the role that shipwrecks can play in this journey, and at some level we have all played witness to others' wrecks, standing in safety and knowing that there is nothing we can do to help, yet fixed comfortably or uncomfortably in our ambiguous role as spectator. Through Blumenberg's seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of letters, from ancient texts through nineteenth-century reminiscences and modern speeches, we see layer upon layer revealed in the meaning humans have given to these metaphors; and in this way we begin to understand what metaphors can do that more straightforward modes of expression cannot. This edition of Shipwreck with Spectator also includes "Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality," an essay that recounts the evolution of Blumenberg's ideas about metaphorology in the years following his early manifesto "Paradigms for a Metaphorology."

    A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this "American Youth," as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing--whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, "Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you."

    Best of all, he's packed us in his suitcase. He represents an ever-changing population of those raised elsewhere who find themselves beckoned by the history, mystique, and magic-makers of New York City. These poems inhabit their own contradictions, and exquisitely navigate the many complicated sides of what it means to be alive. About The Author: Jon Sands has been a professional teaching and performing artist since 2007. He's a recipient of the 2009 NYC-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam. He is the Director of Poetry and Arts Education Programming at the Positive Health Project, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. His work has appeared in decomP magazine, The Millions, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre, The November 3rd Club, and others. He lives in New York City, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know.

    Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new."Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.From Devils Lake Journal:“Keetje Kuipers’ Beautiful in the Mouth is at once lovely, frank, and haunting. The poems move easily between landscapes, inhabiting the American west, Paris, and New York City with equal ease and yet, they never exploit sympathies of locale for their power. Instead, they rely on nothing but the speaker’s own candor, who is able to speak through such disparate poems as “Bondage Play as Substitue for Prayer” alongside “Waltz of the Midnight Miscarriage,” “Reading Sappho in a Wine Bar,” and “Barn Elegy” with a good spattering of honest-to-goodness sonnets.”From ForeWord Reviews:“The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into thin air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, “a wave as well as a particle.””

    The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.