But they’re real, they’re honest, and hopefully they’ll make you feel a little less alone." -Ashley Dun

    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"

    H. Auden (1907-73) came to prominence in the 1930s among a generation of outspoken poets that included his friends Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis. But he was also an intimate and lyrical poet of great originality, and a master craftsman of some of the most cherished and influential poems of the past century.Other volumes in this series: Betjemen, Eliot, Plath, Hughes and Yeats.

    Technically brilliant, using strict, classical prosody, yet entirely modern in sensibility, Virginia Adair's poetry will play a central role in the ongoing American poetry renaissance.

    At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: “I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry.” That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and, most recently, the savage, inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.

    This is their story--ultimately a love story--darkly funny, mournful, testy. It is about a reader who at times presides over the page like a god, and at others follows the leash of the author's voice through the dark streets of the book like a dog, and it is about a writer of determined slipperiness.  As we read, we think that each of us is The Reader, the one who knows the Real Story. But the more we think we understand, the more the story moves away from us—all is not what it seems. This eagerly awaited third volume by the poet whose work The New York Times described as "at once charmed and frightening" is a book of high-spirited subversiveness, a work of argument, seduction, and a relentless devotion to language. Then, Suddenly— bristles with the sound of the author's voice--insistent, vital, hilarious, and iconoclastic--tearing away at the confinement of the page and at the distance between the page and the reader. Emanuel's images are dazzling. She creates a performance that is fearsome and funny in its portrayal of the argument between the work of the text and the world of the body. The Gettsyburg Review has called her a writer of "exquisite craftsmanship" who can "strike from language . . . images chiseled clean as bas-relief." Then, Suddenly— is a book of spectacle and verve, part elegy, part vaudeville.

    Clover fuses formal control, a solid grounding in poetic tradition (his allusions range from Shakespeare to Dickinson to John Cale), and sheer visionary exhilaration into a technical, moral, aesthetic, and imaginative lexicon that irradiates each page.The eerie cyberglow of Clover's lines illuminates a pageant of blurred and fragmented desolation: the Bomb, death camps, the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King, the whole numbing litany of modern horrors. Clover is a master of poetic shorthand, of the stark, unnerving image as immediate as yellow tape at a crime scene.Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with "God in abeyance" where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief. And here. in this utterly convincing vision of a world whose center has long since lost its hold, we see the life on whose brink we, at the end of the millennium, find ourselves poised.

    This book is about the girls whose lives were ruined by me. I want to write about my story, for it’s the only way to be immortal. I want you to feel the pleasure of falling in love. The lust, the passion, the desire, and the craving that turns into an unhealthy addiction. And I want you also to feel the pain of losing someone, the ache, the agony, the bitterness, and the grief that cripples your soul forever. This is for everyone. The forgotten souls buried under the melancholy of the past. Yes, I will show you how much you hurt me, I will write. This is what my heart holds for you; half pleasure, half pain.

    In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word.Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York—Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

    Everything you need to hear, but already know.

    They illuminate the gritty idiosyncrasies of immigrant life in urban barrios spanning Los Angeles to Chicago to Harlem. Rodríguez lends powerful voices to those struggling to keep the gas on, to find work, and to keep love.  Populated by a vibrant cast of characters, ranging from the drugged, to the eccentric, to the heartbroken, Rodríguez’s poems protest capitalism, violence, and exploitation while reveling in the potential of compassion.

    Think about the reaction you would get. That’s how it all started for Diva Woods, but instead of candy it was drugs, guns, and men. She didn’t live the average life of a 16 year old. She had things that ordinary people didn’t have. She experienced things that ordinary people didn’t experience. She owes that to her father Jamel ‘Capo’ Woods, he is the King of Harlem which makes her the Princess. Diva took her title very seriously along with all the fame, fortune, trials, and tribulations. It was all a part of her rise to the top. But like that old saying goes, what goes up must come down. Take a ride through Harlem with Diva and experience the lies, infidelity, and deceit she occur in The Rise of Harlem’s Princess.

    Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet. In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. “Take everything,” Wright suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.” With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, Kindertotenwald pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.

    The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role.  All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry. bird trick iv It’s all about disappearance. About a bird in a cagewith a mirror, a simple twiston the handle at the sidethat makes it come and go at the magician’s insistence. It’s all about innocence.It’s all about acceptance.It’s all about compliance.It’s all about deference.It’s all about silence. It’s all about disappearance.

    Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna WarrenThis debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.Antique BookThe sky was crazed with swallows.We walked in the frozen grassof your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.Trees shook down their gaudy nests.The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.I was jealous of the river,how the light broke it, of the skeinof windows where we saw ourselves.Where we walked, the ice crackedlike an antique book, openingand closing. The leavesbeneath it were the marbled pages.Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.