To anyone familiar with this writer -- whom the New York Times calls "taut, chillingly ironic," the Washington Post Book World terms "brilliant," and the Village Voice deems capable of "religious intensity" -- it will come as no surprise that before he achieved success as a novelist, Dennis Cooper was best known as a poet. The Dream Police collects the best poems from five of his previous books and also includes a selection of new works. From his darkly erotic early verse to the more refined, post-punk poems that led critics to dub him "the spokesman for the Blank Generation," to his later experimental pieces, Cooper's evolving study of the distances and dangers in romantic relationships has made him a singular voice in American poetry. The Dream Police is a vital addition to Dennis Cooper's riveting and disarming vision of life, love, obsession, and the depths of human need. "There can be no doubt about the power and originality of Cooper's writing." -- The Washington Post Book World; "Cooper's vision is at first intense, nearly minimal, then suddenly it ascends into vision." -- Kathy Acker; "In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper's books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe. He would risk his life for them, or maybe he'd just be sent to a mental asylum, like the Marquis de Sade, to whom he has been compared. This is high risk literature. It takes enormous courage for a writer to explore, as Mr. Cooper does, the extreme boundaries of human behavior and amorality, right to the abyss where desire and lust topple to death." -- Catherine Texier, The New York Times Book Review.

    The result is part carnival, part nightmare. A television pundit's rhetoric segues into an unusual succulent with writhing maroon tongues. When the world suddenly becomes legible, is that revelation or psychosis? In this book, the voice of the Lord and/or the voice of the security state can come from anyplace. The problem of identity becomes acute. The poems in Just Saying may be imagined as chimeras, creatures that appear when old distinctions break down and elements generally kept separate combine in new ways. Here Armantrout both worries (as a dog worries a bone) and celebrates the groundless fecundity of being and of language.

    Channeling "the primal vision of Hart Crane" (Harold Bloom), Adam Fitzgerald helped welcome the modernist aethetic into the twenty-first century. Part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide, Fitzgerald's chimerical poems confront "a surging ocean of sound and language" (Maureen McLane). In these forty-eight poems, he conducts a madcap symphony of language, memory, and fantasy with the "exhilarating assurance of nonstop invention" (Timothy Donnelly).

    It takes its legitimate place with the great works of the century of like kind, Ezra Pound's "Cantos," Louis Zukofsky's "A," Charles Olson's "Maximus," and Robert Duncan's "Passages." Its own specific character is, however, brilliantly singular."Robert Creeley"A late harvest of seeds sown by Blake, L. Frank Baum, the Bible, and Zukofsky, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. It is for those who can see visions, and for those who know how to look well and be taught that they can see them."Guy Davenport

    These lively and provocative lectures function as a gloss to Spicer's own poetry, a general discourse on poetics, and a cautionary handbook for young poets. This thorough documentation of Spicer's unorthodox poetic vision is an authoritative edition of an underground classic.

    Dorn is one of the few political poets in America; this fantasy about a demigod cowboy, a saloon madam, and a talking horse named Claude Levi-Strauss, who travel the Southwest in search of Howard Hughes, has become a minor classic.

    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.

    He's set to wrestle and study creative writing at Columbia University in New York. These poems are a look into his early experiences with love and loss, an introspective coming of age tale told in verse.

    As one of the first counter-cultural collections of American verse, this volume fits in Robert Lowell's famous definition of the raw in American poetry. Many of the contributors once derided in the mainstream press of the period are now part of the postmodern canon: Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Guest, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Levertov, O'Hara, Snyder, Schuyler, and others. Donald Allen's The New American Poetry delivered the first taste of these remarkable poets, and the book has since become an invaluable historical and cultural record, now available again for a new generation of readers.

    The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise LevertovSupplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.

    

    A collection of poetic meditations by the National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist author of Leaving Saturn evaluates the solemn richness of everyday lives, from a grandfather who gardens in a tenement backyard to a teacher to renames her black students after French painters.

    While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted but rather is lively, irreverent, sexy, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets.

    In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.   Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

    The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t