Planisphere is a new collection by one of America’s most innovative and influential poets—an exceptional artist whose work stands alongside the finest of Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane. For more than half a century Ashbery has been producing timeless works such as Chinese Whispers, Hotel Lautréamont, A Wave, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Where Shall I Wander. Planisphere is proof that the master only improves with age.

    It assures you that tomorrow will be a better day and encourages you to realise your potential and achieve your aspirations. Petit à Petit is centred on themes like self-love, self-confidence and taking life into your own hands.No matter how far-away and impossible your dreams seem, don't be afraid to reach for them.

    . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book ReviewQuietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see.Shirt in HeavenCome upon a snapshotof secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches—come upon letters I thought I'd burned—I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs.I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat downin the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried.He yelled at the aide to get out.His two sons had been your students.—me too, little-knowing—Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

    “In its stern and quiet way Sandra Lim’s The Wilderness is one of the most thrilling books of poetry I have read in many years” (Louise Glück).From “Aubade”From the last stars to sunrise the world is dark and enduringand emptiness has its place.Then, to wake each day to the world’s unwaveringlimits, you have to think about passion differently, again.

    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.

    Framed by random celebrity encounters, the shocking ordinariness of rape culture as seen through the female gaze reveals just how deeply sexual violence on macro and micro scales can affect and infect women's lives. The speaker's voice evolves as she ages, yet retains throughout a "clarity of observation" via fast-paced reflective musings that offer as well the joy in moments where enmity between men and women is notably absent. Especially geared toward women who come from working class backgrounds, who might not have the means to escape difficult circumstances and must somehow find a way live through them, Queen's book transports us via hatchbacks and buses and even the KITT car through a life of hard-won confidence and strength. Far from a narrative of fame-chasing or conceit, however, the speaker says "right now I am laughing at myself" and that the age of "40 holds beauty as the accumulation of bliss & survival." Rather than centering the famous men named in the book, I'm So Fine places the lens squarely on what it means for a woman to come into her own power as she decides what she wants for herself "& mostly gets its every fineness."

    He is a forceful, cogent, incisive phrase-maker."—Bill Knott"The yearning in these poems is awash in dense, spiritual sexuality buffeted by time and the mishandling of promises and breakable bonds."—apt The Truth Is We Are Perfect contains fifty-four lyrics exploring the loss of oneself through the loss of an other, and how we seek to recreate ourselves in that absence. Stucky journeys into nothingness and, consequently, into awareness. His meditative sensibilities and minimalist style create ritualized poems acting as spells—transcribed to be read aloud and performed in the service of realizing that which we seek to become: "Because I love a burning thing / I made my heart a field of fire."Janaka Stucky is the publisher of Black Ocean as well as the annual poetry journal Handsome. He is the author of two chapbooks: Your Name Is The Only Freedom, and The World Will Deny It For You. His poems have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Fence and North American Review, and his articles have been published by the Huffington Post and the Poetry Foundation. He is a two-time National Haiku Champion and in 2010 he was voted "Boston's Best Poet" in the Boston Phoenix.

    In her critically acclaimed memoir Dork Whore, Iris Bahr finally lost her virginity in the summer between high school and Brown University. In this book, she’s ready for love a year later—but not much wiser. Through all of her uproarious capers, she tries to reconcile her craving for mindblowing sex with her desire for a meaningful relationship—all in an attempt to become an adult. Sort of.

    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."

    With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort's Music for the Dead and Resurrected confrontsthe legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet asks: How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?Mort traces a route of devastation from the Chernobyl fallout and a school system controlled by ideology to the Soviet labor camps and the massacres of World War II. While musical form serves as a safe house for the poet's voice, old trees speak to her as the only remaining witnesses, hosts to both radiation and memory.Valzhyna Mort, born in Belarus and now living in the United States, conjures a searing, hallucinogenic ritual of rhythmic remembrance in a world where appeals to virtue and justice have irrevocably failed.

    Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse.Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

    G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad. The prefatory lyric, "Burial Practice," imagines the posthumous narrative of "then’s" that follows an individual's extinction; in the poem "Aria," a stagehand steps onto the floorboards to wax poetic after the curtain has dropped on an opera; and the extended sequence of "Circle" poems obliquely revisits Dante's ethical landscape of the afterlife.Many of these poems were written while Srikanth Reddy worked for a rural literacy program in the south of India, a fact reflected in the imagined postcolonial world of lyrics such as "Monsoon Eclogue" and "Thieves’ Market." Yet the collection moves beyond the identity politics and ressentiment of postcolonial and Asian-American writings by addressing the fugitive dreams of shared experience in poems such as "Fundamentals of Esperanto." Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other "formless" modes, Facts for Visitors re-negotiates the impasse between traditional and experimental approaches to writing in contemporary American poetry.

    At once melancholic and jubilant, Jackson considers the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination. From “The Absurd Man at Fourteen”He punched her again, a woman called the house,some yelling then us out the door leavingthe kitchen phone cord swinging.

    Juliana Spahr has lived in many places, including Chillicothe (Ohio), Buffalo (New York), Honolulu (Hawaii), and Brooklyn (New York). She has absorbed, participated in, and been transformed by the politics and ecologies of each. This book is about that process. THE TRANSFORMATION "tells a barely truthful story of the years 1997-2001," a story of flora and fauna, of continents, islands, academies, connective tissue, military and linguistic operations, and of that ever-present "we," to name only a few. At once exhilarating, challenging, and humbling, THE TRANSFORMATION is a hefty book in its honesty and scope, a must-read.

    Here Wright adds to his third trilogy (Chickamauga [1995], Black Zodiac [1997], and Appalachia [1998]) a section of new poems that suggest new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet.