Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisIn Little Estuaries, Daniel Kramb goes in search for what’s fleeting between the shores. Amid a constantly shifting sense of what can be seen, sensed, experienced, the poet probes the estuary as sphere: an opening up, a possibility. Whittled down, like sea to stream, his poems emerge, in their own distinct form, estuary-shaped on the page. Intricate, at times playful, always open, these unassuming, small pieces reach beyond the confines, always returning to what’s undeniable, as body. Silt-smeared and salty, this is poetry not on landscape, but through it: formed not by what exists, but from what’s washed up within.

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Book SynopsisA Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Review 31 Book of the Year 2020. With The Barbarians Arrive Today, Evan Jones has produced the classic English Cavafy for our age. Expertly translated from Modern Greek, this edition presents Cavafy's finest poems, short creative prose and autobiographical writings, offering unique insights into his life's work. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Constantine Petrou Cavafy (1863-1933) was a minor civil servant who self-published and distributed his poems among friends; he is now regarded as one of the most significant poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an influence on writers across generations and languages. The broad, rich world of the Mediterranean and its complex history are his domain, its days and nights of desire and melancholy, ambition and failure - with art always at the centre of life.Trade Review'Do we need another Cavafy, the most translated of modern Greek poets? Surprisingly, Evan Jones shows us that the answer is a resounding 'yes.' Cavafy famously left behind a body of 154 'canonical poems,' a number corresponding conveniently with the number of Shakespeare's sonnets. But he also left us with 37 'repudiated' poems, some of which were composed in the synthetic literary 'katherevousa' register of Greek, 75 'hidden' poems, and 30 'unfinished' or 'imperfect' poems. Cavafy also wrote prose about some of the same subject matter, and that explored his ideas about poetry. Jones does not attempt to give us a complete overview of Cavafy's work, but by putting poems in thematic categories, and allowing 'hidden' poems to brush up against 'canonical' ones (one could note that the manuscript of 'The Horses of Achilles' and of the much less well known 'Priam's Night March' are written on two sides of the same piece of paper) we see them in a new, revealing light. Jones is sensitive not only to the sense, but the sound of the Greek, rhyming where the original does, and his afterword, while wearing its considerable scholarship lightly, reorients Cavafy's oeuvre for the reader. It is a great pleasure - one of the most important Cavafyian words - to have these poems and prose writings in one volume.' - A.E. Stallings; 'Evan Jones merits the rewards of modesty; not improving what needs no improvement, nor trumping the ace with jokers of his own, lean and keen he ghosts cleverly along, oddly angular Poet of the City on his arm.' - Frederic Raphael

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsA. America, you are so big, I feel endless What is the difference Light without her body Stained Glass Butterflies America, do you remember So much depends upon America, what do you hide Sus-toss The Country Who no Longer Wanted Her Children America, I visited Visit Conversation The Way I Pray to St. Catherine America, you made me in your image He Catches a Magic Fish A Man and a Woman in a Bedroom Once America, you watched me change Honey, this is the scary truth To the Foreign Woman... in the Post Office Dear Numbness America, here is the answer Dear One There once was a woman who wanted to be a better mother America, there will be nothing left Shame is a private punishment I Shame, Therefore I Am Wasn't it easier with less awareness? America, I love doing stupid things At some point you stopped The entire day I loved someone It's a Great Day to Burn, the Man Said Some Catastrophes Approach Slowly America, It's complicated 8th Floor Balcony Ghazal So, You Miss Your Depression I don't know America, if your eyes are dry Better Darling Everybody needs a pen America, what you have You'll be given everything, twice By the end of your life You look for proof America, if there were a rule The Body, the Collateral and in the morning, we saw a moth America, now I know We Must Be Very Careful When Using the Word Home Black Stone Over White Stone America, I don't know The Apple Who Wanted to Become a Pinecone A Dream America, would you be a part of me Imagine a raw egg Creative Spurt As I'm writing this America, I dally Bo from the Choctaw Nation What Happens to the Prophet B. Theorem: America is the greatest country in the world. Proof Conclusion Alternate ending Alternate conclusion Acknowledgements and Notes Brief Bio

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Book SynopsisThe Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.Table of ContentsInto Night I The Unseen Spotlight Safe Route Abscission PTSD Birthday, 1956 Shine The Dark Age of Providence Caesura Mam Recounts Family History This Morning, In the Mist The Time I Stole Dancing in the Stars Pocket Money Night Music Ode on an Onion Persimmons II Notes from the Forgotten Year Closed Hold Shadows Lair What I Learned Mississippi, 1964 Haiku Take This Leaf Longing Jack Higgs Walks Alone at Hindman Kept Things Persist Pyburn Creek Safety of Small Things Follow After Chemo #2 Neophyte Tobacco An East Tennessee Parking Lot III Remnants of a Saving Life Communion Drawn Cumberland Gap Above the Furnace The Farmer's Son Begs Relief Changeling Eclipse Solstice Bird Boy Walking the Wilderness Road at Cumberland Gap Buick Reverie Menagerie First Morning Publications Acknowledgements

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Book Synopsis“Serious art does not need to be weighty or explicitly topical. It can be, as it is here, apparently as light as a feather: The Lumberjack’s Dove is, in its manner, a folktale; it is also a meditation on attachment, on loss, on transformation. Like its less humble relatives, myth and parable, it is pithy, magical, its many insights, its cautions and clarifications, unfolding in a chain of brief scenes and koan-like revelations. This is a book of unexpected lightness and buoyancy, as necessary in our tense period as the more urgent confrontations.” --Louise Gluck A boldly original and visceral debut collection from the winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Louise GluckIn the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand

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Book Synopsis‘Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' Olivia Laing In this, her second anthology of poetry, Maggie Nelson experiments with poetic forms long and short as she charts intimate landscapes, including the poet’s enmeshment in a beloved city—New York—before and after the events of 9/11. The poems of The Latest Winter are rich with wit, melancholy, terror, curiosity, and love.Trade ReviewNelson's writing is fluid – to read her story is to drift dreamily among her thoughts * Praise for The Argonauts, Huffington Post *Maggie Nelson writes like no one else on the planet * Praise for The Argonauts, Jezebel *One of the great gifts of Nelson’s writing is how it embodies the process of her mind at work * Praise for The Argonauts, Los Angeles Review of Books *Nelson is so outrageously gifted a writer and thinker * Praise for The Argonauts, Washington Post *Nelson’s poems move fast, think on their feet, hit and run with equal parts of humor; glamor and horror. In every way, she is a thoroughly original voice for our time. * Elaine Equi *Maggie Nelson [is] so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time * Praise for The Argonauts, Karl Ove Knausgaard *I read The Argonauts in one breathless, tearful, mind-blown day and I'm still recovering * Praise for The Argonauts, Miranda July *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year""Provide[s] valuable context for Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece."---Michael Dirda, Washington Post"Stimulating. . . . Rasula's account wonderfully traces the evolution of literary thought, and his syntheses feel fresh and exciting. The result is a refreshing reappraisal of a classic." * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *"[What the Thunder Said is] adding more weight to the headstone that marks Eliot."---James Matthew Wilson, New Criterion"The book demonstrates [Rasula’s] uncommon ability to compress highly complicated artistic, cultural, and intellectual histories into accessible and enjoyable prose."---Daniel Kraft, On the Seawall"Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century’s most influential poem."---Marshal Zeringue, Campaign for the American Reader"Rasula makes the case for The Waste Land‘s lasting revolutionary impact in his engaging and insightful, if occasionally discursive, study."---Peter Keough, Arts Fuse"The book is much more than its title suggests, sympathetically conveying a whole complex literary world marked by revolutionary intensity." * Paradigm Explorer *"[What the Thunder Said] confirms Rasula's position as the US's most wide-ranging and aculturally astute historian of modernism." * Choice *"What the Thunder Said is an energetic book bristling with ideas and arguments."---Jason Harding, American Literary History

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The magnificent work of one of the most important contemporary novelists, essayists, and poets in the field of what we in Europe and North America call postcolonial literature."—American Book Review"Reading or re-reading these texts, published over half a century, one is struck by the power of this poetry, the extraordinary persistence in its original inspiration and the manner in which it announces and then exemplifies the theories developed in Poetics of Relation or Caribbean Discourse."—Literature and Arts of the Americas

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Book SynopsisA Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees is a collection of poems made of natural imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances surrounding honeybees. In the aftermath of a fictional bee extinction, these poems are presented to the post-bee reader as "artifacts." These are poems in hindsight.Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry's "natural" inclinations towards building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether in a line or an entire premise, none of the poems could think, speak, or see in the same way if bees—and the relations they make possible—suddenly disappeared. Like any natural resource, the bee is a wellspring of possibility. Essential. Fragile. Causal. And like any animal, the pollinating bee has enabled a diverse phylum of phrases and myths that humans trade to express our most hard-to-name feelings. What changes about our imaginations after a peg in the environment is removed? What could disappear from our minds, our fantasies, and our self-descriptors, if nature is no longer a mirror?Consider a museum of language. As artifacts, these poems are the residue of a dead species—but they are also the offshoots of a playful, abundant, delicate ecosystem. Playingwith Bees covets what's left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments an ecologically intact dream; an apocalypse in reverse.Trade ReviewIn the introduction to this new collection of poems, A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees, RK Fauth tells us that the subsequent verses are 'artifacts' of a fictional world. The book itself is more of an assemblage of testimonies that support the imagined environment—a group of artifacts (poems) uncovered in the same archeological (fabled) context. In the aftermath of this chimerical calamity, the writer finds a space of infinite reflection wherein the intrinsic values of these precious creatures are examined in hindsight. The poetry doesn’t follow the literal echoes of such a loss as much as the infinitude of metaphorical and cultural ripples, growing the more they spread through our dreams, our language, and our identities. In Fauth’s brilliant collection of unearthed, lyrical artifacts, the poetry is volcanic and mesmerizing as it exposes the truth about our language—that it needs to be expressed to and for someone who can act, and that it exists in that space between and among things, in the relations between us. Fauth’s poems guide us through the work needed to be done to reach out simply by looking in."—Mikal Wix, West Trade Review (January 2024)

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Book SynopsisFROM THE WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRYWhen My Brother Was an Aztec is a work of courage and invention - one that foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of Western mythologies and a deeply rooted cultural history. Natalie Diaz's arresting debut explores a brother's addiction and its devastating effects on a household, while offering a political critique of our nations and their pasts. It acknowledges absences and uncomfortable silences, as well as conjuring vivid voices and presences, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus.Stolen cowboy boots, violins on fire; a mariachi band playing in the bathroom, a black bayonet carried between the shoulder blades; the beauty of busted fruit, the sight of hellish visions - Diaz both revels and reveals through her distinctive use of language and imagery, bringing to life every intimate and communal encounter, blooming abundance from scarcitTrade Review'She is a poet who understands tradition but is not beholden to it. She is a poet who will help us write into the future as she excavates the past and interrogates the present.' - Adrian Matejka, Poetry Society of America'Her work is a kind of confession, but also an assertion.' - Spectator

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1928, The Tower was Yeats's first collection published after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923, and it is perhaps the major work that most cemented his reputation as one of the foremost literary figures of the twentieth century. The titular poem, 'The Tower', refers to Thoor Ballylee Castle, a Norman tower that Yeats purchased in 1917, and which formed the basis of the original cover design - evoked in the cover of this edition. The collection also includes some of his most inventive and profound work, and develops deep themes regarding life, love and myth. With explanatory notes, this edition seeks to bring the collection to a greater readership and to offer a more profound understanding of the great poet’s work.Trade Review'His verse is inspired, his poetic persona is magnificent.' (Peter Ackroyd, The Times) 'Together with Joyce, Yeats made modern Irish poetry possible.' (Timothy Webb)

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Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDSBeautiful, haunting, thought-provoking A book I will return to again and again' Bernardine EvaristoA gorgeously produced, hugely original examination of Black Britishness in the 21st centuryWhat is Black Britain?In 2021, award-winning poet Roger Robinson and acclaimed photographer Johny Pitts rented a red Mini Cooper and decided to follow the coast clockwise in search of an answer to this question. Leaving London, they followed the River Thames east towards Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948. Too often, that is where the history told about Black Britain begins and ends but Robinson and Pitts continued out of London, following the coast clockwise through Margate to Land's End, Bristol to Blackpool, Glasgow to John O'Groats and Scarborough to Southend on Sea. Here, the authors found not only Black British culture long overlooked in official narratives of Britain, but also the history of Empire and transatlantic slavery to which everTrade Review’This beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking fusion of poetry and photography offers us layers of society, the self, the subconscious and Britishness from a Black perspective. It’s a book I will return to again and again’ Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other ’Home is Not a Place has echoes of The Sweet Flypaper of Life but to compare them would do this work a disservice. It is a thing of brilliance, with its own immersive energy, pulling the reader in and allowing them to wander around the world of Black Britain created on these pages. In the authors’ hands, the quotidian becomes transcendent. Robinson’s words are as careful as they are masterful; Pitt’s casual gaze is warm and conversational. This is a book I have been waiting for’ Caleb Azumah Nelson, Costa Book Award-winning author of Open Water ‘Rich and evocative … Pitt’s photos capture the beauty of Black British culture’ Dazed – Praise for Afropean by Johny Pitts Winner of the Jhalak Prize 'A revelation' Owen Jones 'Afropean seizes the blur of contradictions that have obscured Europe's relationship with blackness and paints it into something new, confident and lyrical' Afua Hirsch A Guardian, New Statesman and BBC History Magazine Best Book of 2019 – Praise for A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson WINNER OF THE TS ELIOT POETRY PRIZE 2019 WINNER OF THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2020 'Ranging from the most breath-taking poems about the Grenfell Tower fire to the most exquisitely moving poems about the premature birth of his son, who had to fight for his life in an incubator. His poems are deep, mature, moving and inventive.' Bernadine Evaristo for New Statesman

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Book SynopsisA haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.” “Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly? Here, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.” A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.Trade ReviewPraise for Meltwater "Wahmanholm delivers a dynamic collection of poems in which parenthood, nature, reverie, and anticipation intersect in a surreal landscape that illustrates the cognitive dissonance of an age of impending destruction. [...] This is a hypnotic and devastating maelstrom of introspection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review“Meltwater feels necessary and urgent. And comforting… Art that surveys the atmospheric wreckage of the Anthropocene might be the only way to soothe the existential dread that accompanies this fast-warming planet’s forecast”—Racket“Despite the inherent sorrow that accompanies our necropastoral landscape, this collection nevertheless remains tender and beautiful as it ruminates on ongoing loss.”—Marissa Ahmadkhan, West Review"Meltwater guides readers through a deep-welling grief for a world in upheaval while offering an antidote to some of that grief. While the collection is heavy with mourning, it is also subtly and deftly uplifting, prompting us to remember the simple things that we “suffer the empty universe for.”—Zoe Binder, zyzzyva“Claire Wahmanholm is a poet of devastating inevitability, of all the living that comes after the apocalypse, and Meltwater is ‘a vast, organic machine / running like static behind everything.’”—Allison Flory, Arkansas International“Wahmanholm most certainly writes the body and land electric—and I am charged, crackling, and grateful for these stunning poems. Meltwater makes a wholly original music of land, loss, and motherhood. A must for anyone wanting to read the hard beauty and fragility of the environment anew.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil “When we call a poet visionary, we usually mean that the poet in question shows us impalpable abstractions in realms far removed from our own. But Claire Wahmanholm is a visionary of the concrete, the stippled and slippery textures of the precarious present, and the unthinkably imminent. The patterns she reveals to us are the fractal geometries of fear as our surroundings, our loves, and our very selves are pulled into the spiraling inevitabilities of ecological collapse. These poems are devastating, even in their heartrending tenderness. Wahmanholm is a poet of singular and essential power.”—Monica Youn“In Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater, ‘the world’ means entanglement. In these poems, things pour through one another; even thinkings pour through one another, via the melting form of the erasure. There is no outside to the book’s ecology, and nothing to be considered in isolation: alphabets and glaciers; human love and human loss, human folly and human violence; animal continuity and species devastation; hairdryers and zygotes. We are inescapably permeated by the everything that is ‘us’: water, ice; land; animal, mineral, vegetable beings and their ways of making meaning; human beings and human ways of making meaning. When Wahmanholm writes, with others before her, that ‘you are grass,’ I know it.”—Éireann LorsungPraise for Redmouth“Claire Wahmanholm’s book, Redmouth, is grief-stricken. But how does the poet make grief so beautiful? Who knew the language of grief could be stricken itself with the language of beauty? Here the deer have disappeared but when the speaker closes her eyes, she ‘can see them / licking the coats of their fawns, anchoring / their spots to their fur to their bodies to the forest floor.’ There’s simply no doubt that Wahmanholm is a poet because language is the center of all of her work, whether it is describing a decayed world where ‘mountains have unraveled into sand’ to the stripping away and lifting out of language in the equally stunning erasures sprinkled throughout this book. Yes, darkness razors across these poems, but what comes out of the experience of reading is beauty. I don’t know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation: ‘The children’s hair lies dewy on the hillocks of their heads / until shreds like cornsilk come off in the breeze.’ Gorgeously rendered, devastatingly stunning.”—Victoria Chang“Redmouth is singing. In these poems, Claire Wahmanholm again and again proves that music intensifies not only emotions, but also ideas: ‘I carried a groan in my throat. Mostly it sat silent, but at night / I untethered it note by note. It pillared above me in the dark, / curling into the shape of a dog, a horse, a goat. It made a moat around me.’ This is a poetry of the greatest skill; this is a book that could make a person who had never cared for poetry before want to write it.”—Shane McCrae“Redmouth is a book of lush privacies, of ‘lamb-lioned’ promises (the sort that grief makes, always disingenuously). ‘The doe [is] a torch in the garden,’ she writes at one point—or excavates, in one of a series of bravura erasures. Claire Wahmanholm is the purest of lyric poets, if purity can be reconciled with the creaturely—which is, perhaps, the work that Redmouth most aspires to. Each poem here is a small, glittering emblem commemorating that effort.”—G.C. Waldrep“‘Let all / Headlong fall from this / song,’ Claire Wahmanholm urges in her prophetic and sonically-lush second collection of poems, Redmouth, which blooms—singing—out of the void. As the poet brings us to ‘the nightside / of the heart,’ words whirl into worlds, from sunrise’s ‘quartz-cold tongue’ to a beloved’s absence, which ‘clings to the undersides of leaves like chrysalides.’ There are disappearances in this book: the names of what we love most are driven ‘to the edge of a cliff’ and the author even imagines molting from her own name, eating it, ‘crushing that sorrow gently into my jaws.’ But there are also risings from the darkness, from a world left fallow: ‘If of sunflowers.’”—Nomi StonePraise for Wilder “Long after I finished reading Wilder, I was in grief that its beauty had ended, and also in grief over the spoiled world it describes. Stripped wholly of autobiographical content, the poems in this book seem like the texts written by an ancient collective—texts that are at once full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain. Except that the book’s voices aren’t those of the ancients after all, but of those in a disturbingly probable future where bleach dapples the ground, relaxation tapes play in manic loops, there are bombs in everyone’s bellies, and grief travels through the body like mercury. Intimate as well as mythic, Wilder is a staggeringly dark proposition about where we are going. And while the book offers no easy scenarios of rescue or solace, its lyricism is nonetheless steeped in vibrant making. As the speaker of one poem says, ‘We had seen many last things: the last acorn, the last lightning storm, the last tide.’ And maybe, just maybe, in the artfulness brought to that exquisitely vatic catalog, the work of repair takes place.”—Rick Barot“In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come . . . What I appreciate most about these speakers is their impulse to move closer to one another. It’s a reminder to me to do the same.”—MAYDAY Magazine “Claire Wahmanholm channels the singular voice of H. D. as she travels us through a landscape wounded, this time not by the industrial military complex, but by the industrial greed complex. Wahmanholm’s gorgeous, epic lyric breathes across time and place, self and other, blame and consequence—placing the song of impossible hope not with our news cycle but in our lungs, on our tongues. In its end, this oracular voice teaches us that despite it all we grow to ‘see deeply into each other, all the way to the marrow.’ Please God, may it be so.”—Rebecca Gayle Howell “Wilder is a gorgeous, heady book of fables touched with a kind of black moss, or jellyfish tendrils, or nets and ghosts. Throughout the collection, we are implicated in a never-ending journey—continuously emerging from the underneath of things, the excavations of the world, the lightless places that lead to the sea. Moments are exquisitely strange and strangely exquisite. There is an abundance of being lost, of encroaching upon apocalyptic moments, of falling back to burning music. In Wilder, we are all eternally, or suddenly, feral children left to our own shared devices. Merry with memories that are now suspect, we are led on circular treks through one shifting illusion after another. Doom and freedom seem to be the same in these landscapes but our senses are more alive than ever. Here we are howling, smoking, crooked, afloat through skies of vultures and honeycombs.”—Sun Yung Shin“Wilder is bewildering and born of collapse. These searing poems spring not only from the end but from the imagined after, excavating from the ruins of this world ‘the birds swooping from the trees to land / beside their own bones, // our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows by the hands.’ I cannot recall a collection of poems that thrilled and devastated me more.” —Maggie SmithTable of ContentsO HungerYou Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill YouGlacierMeltwaterMIn a Land Where Everything is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would Be Very Bad If I DiedMeltwaterMetamorphosis with Milk and SugarIn a Land Where Everything is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an AutotomistPoem That Cries WolfGlacierMeltwaterStarlingMore RabbitsPrimerThe Child Puts Apples into the Mouth of the TreeMeltwaterThe New HorticultureGlacierApotropaeiIn A Land Where Everything Is Trying To Kill Me, I Consider Letting ItThe Sun, the ShipMeltwaterAt the End We Turn Into TreesGlossary of What I’ll MissThe New FearThe New LanguageGlacierMeltwaterPDeathbed Dream with Extinction ListIf Anyone AsksIn Sorrow Thou Shalt Bring Forth ChildrenPoem With No Children In itMeltwaterThe FutureMeltwater:The Empty UniverseXYZ NotesAcknowledgments

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Book SynopsisIn these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity. Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence, In Time’s Rift, and Wallless Space—provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities. Trade ReviewPoetry translation is such tricky and unappreciated work—“translation is impossible,” Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick declare in their introduction to a volume of Ernst Meister's work in which they've performed that exact miracle. —Arielle Greenberg, American Poetry ReviewLike his subject matter, Meister’s writing is ominous, intangible, and inescapable. —Publishers WeeklyMeister compacts a meditation on the nature of space, nothingness and our interaction with the two in the work’s sparse, dense lines. —Lindsay Choi, The Daily Californian

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Book Synopsis'A la lumiere d'hiver' (1977) is a central work in the writing of the Swiss French poet Philippe Jaccottet (1925-2021). Written in middle age, it forms a bridge between the poet's intricate early lyrics and his more expansive and meditative later work. Starting from a direct confrontation with the raw facts of mortality, its three poem-sequences strip away further layers of illusion until a glimmer of meaning starts to appear in the 'winter light' of the landscape of the Drome area of northern Provence, where Jaccottet made his home from 1953 until the end of his life. Tim Dooley's translation, 'In Winter Light', is the product of a long relationship with the original, which he first read at the time of its publication. His English version mirrors the tentative, scrupulous exploration of being he finds in Jaccottet's French, both its hesitancies and circular movements and, finally, its 'unblinking eyes'.Trade Review'In this fine translation of Phillipe Jaccottet's elegiac three-part collection Tim Dooley wonderfully combines the grace of his own attentive poetics with a clear intimacy of understanding. In his hands, In Winter Light relays Jaccottet's lucidly charged journey through loss and mourning in language that's as close to the ear as it is to the imagination and the heart' - Jane Draycott; 'Philippe Jaccottet often employs a negative theology in which attempts at simile are discarded in the imperative to arrive at the mot juste - considered both as language and as philosophical position. Tim Dooley is alert to this ascesis, and his translations seem to me quite excellent: they are chaste, rhythmically sound, and retain the constant decorum that is a chief quality of this quiet, essential voice' - Stephen RomerTable of ContentsIntroduction: 'In the old days it would be called song' The Lessons Songs from down there In Winter Light

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Book Synopsis''Extremely funny'' Sunday Telegraph _____________________________A poet is a rock star without the sex''n''drugs, or the rock''n''roll. But that never stopped Simon Armitage dreaming, and in Gig, he explores how music and the muse intertwine in work and in life. Crammed with stories, anecdotes, jokes, absurdities, the odd informal homily, pitfalls and pratfalls (not all the author''s own), Yorkshire life and death, Gig is about the dream and reality of what you are, and what you might have been._____________________________''One of our most entertaining authors'' Independent''Very, very funny'' GQ''Witty, terrific, stupendously funny'' Daily Telegraph Trade ReviewI read this book in one sitting. It moved me to tears, to shouts of laughter, and made me look at even the most mundane things in a different way * Sunday Times *Extremely funny, brilliant * Sunday Telegraph *Engaging, eccentric, hilarious, incredibly good company. A wonderwall of moments and memories . . . one of our most entertaining authors * Independent *Very, very funny . . . the kind of book you'll want to press on your friends * GQ *Witty, terrific, stupendously funny * Daily Telegraph *Warm, funny . . . wonderfully accurate and evocative . . . we close the book wanting more * Times Literary Supplement *Pitch perfect * Financial Times *Funny, perceptive, thought-provoking. Armitage has a poet's eye for the poignant detail and the bigger theme * Scotsman *

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Book SynopsisIn a photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation and, for perhaps a singular moment, assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing.Trade Review“In a famous photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes, for a magical moment, the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation, arcing and swooping as they will, and for perhaps just a singular moment assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing. Some of these poems, inspired by love, grief, and wonder, have been tucked away for years; others are freshly written. All here find their place.” CBC Books

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Book SynopsisExpansive poems connect personal, national, and global historiesIn her wide-ranging third book, poet Kathleen Flenniken undertakes the difficult task of re-seeing what is before us. Post Romantic fuses personal memory with national and ecological upheaval, interweaving narratives of family, nuclear history, love of country, and a dangerous age moving too fast. Flenniken takes these challenging momentsbits and pieces of childhood, marriage, cultural touchstonesand holds them up to the light, seeking comfort in a complicated world that is at once heartbreaking, confounding, and dear.Trade Review"Concerned with nostalgia, masculinity, and the state of America, the 2014 Washington State Poet Laureate’s latest collection holds a magnifying glass to the personal and political past to understand how it shapes our present." * Ampersand Magazine *"Post Romantic explores and weaves together the politics of country and self... clear, straightforward yet nuanced poems." * Poetry Northwest *

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Book SynopsisNew collection of poems from prizewinning poet and translator.

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsSHELBY COUNTY ALABAMA THE INVITATION ROSTRUM BOOKISH GIRL SWEEPS THE SANCTUARY THE BLACK BOOK A REVOLUTIONARY LOVE STORY WATER WILD CHILD JUBILEE THE PEOPLES TEMPLE AGRICULTURAL PROJECT WISHING TREE FOR YONDER COMPOSTING MAKING SOAP DISAPPEARANCE THE RULES HOW TODAY WILL LOOK WHEN IT'S HISTORY I LEARN TO LOVE THE BODY SHE LOVES A TREE GETS IN THE WAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH CHRISTINE BUCKET BRIGADE HARVESTING HOW SLEEP FINDS US SOMETIMES MOLASSES GOVERNMENT NAME WHAT WE TALK ABOUT IN OUR COTTAGE WHEN SHANDA SAID NO THE SCENT OF HER GROOMING IN DEFENSE OF DEVOTION SPIT SHINE ALGEBRA MAKESHIFT DADDY FOR JUST PENNIES A GLASS [REDACTED] EARNS HIS WINGS IMAGINE, FIRST, A GIRL AS FOR DANCING AFTER THE GAME LOOKING THE CAMERA IN THE EYE WARREN FETUS HOUSE ON STILTS A MEDIC MISTAKES ME FOR DEAD SEPIA AFTER AN NBC INTERVIEW I MISSED YOU MORE MARROW OIL DRUM NOTES ACKOWLEDGEMENTS

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Book SynopsisThis poetry collection offers insight into life in Appalachia and hope for the members of the LGBTQ+ community that live there.Table of ContentsPreface Minnie Mouse Toy Supermodel (You Better Work) Goodbye First Crush Clean Room Found Kitten Biscuit Girl Self-Hating Preacher Creek Cornmeal and Water Pancakes Neckbones Embarrassing Thank You, Jerry Springer Library Hard to Take Seriously Clubhouse Character Food Stamp Holiday Song Waiting for God Gay Road Home Salt-Free Funeral Power of Ain't Josh A Guy Named Casey Who I Had Never Met I'm Sorry, Chris The Space Under the Pews Mountain Learning Charisma Scientist Promise Ramen Noodles Bluegrass Moon Trombone Cogitating Builder Someday Child Reassurance Family Dollar Orange Drink Product and Beef Jerky Take a Seat The Truth will Stand Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisEvie Shockley''s new poems invite us to dream - and work - toward a more capacious we In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious we. How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley''s poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.perchedi am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting my soul in the discouraging world.under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize

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Book SynopsisSpring and All (1923) is a book of poems by William Carlos Williams. Predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his works, often comprised of a seamless blend of both forms of writing. In Spring and All, the closest thing to a manifesto he wrote, Williams addresses the nature of his modern poetics which not only pursues a particularly American idiom, but attempts to capture the relationship between language and the world it describes. Part essay, part poem, Spring and All is a landmark of American literature from a poet whose daring search for the outer limits of life both redefined and expanded the meaning of language itself. “There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.” In Spring and All, Williams identifies the incomprehensible nature of consciousness as the single most important subject of poetry. Accused of being “heartless” and “cruel,” of producing “positively repellant” works of art in order to “make fun of humanity,” Williams doesn’t so much defend himself as dig in his heels. His poetry is addressed “[t]o the imagination” itself; it seeks to break down the “the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment.” When he states that “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow,” he refers to the need to understand the nature of language, which keeps us in touch with the world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Book SynopsisA powerful collection from the T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Annie Freud. Hiddensee represents Annie Freud’s most ambitious work to date, not least because it is a book about ambition and its necessity, the need to go beyond oneself, and to do what one cannot: Freud dives into other ways of thinking, other art forms, the taboos of illness and desire, and – spectacularly – other languages. This ambition has also emboldened Freud to pursue and confront the complex truth of herself: her German Jewish inheritance, her teachers, the remarkable minds of the exiled individuals who raised her – and the exiles she herself then pursued. The book also celebrates the work of the French-language Swiss poet Jacques Tornay, whom Freud identifies as a spiritual brother – and a route back into her own French and symbolist influences. These astonishing and generous versions of Tornay remind us that our voices should not and cannot be uncomplicatedly our own. Hiddensee is named for the Baltic island where Annie Freud’s grandmother spent her summers before the war (and its famous artistic community, whose members included George Grosz and Käthe Kollwitz). In its unselfconscious internationalism and breathtaking cultural range, Hiddensee offers a radically European and multilingual perspective to counter the cultural narrowness and closing borders of the current age, and again confirms Freud as one of our most essential poets.Trade ReviewOften witty and light-hearted, sometimes worried and sad, Freud’s poems are highly evocative of the complicated life she has led. * Guardian *Modest, gentle and universal, these understated poems are a small masterclass in the art of synthesis * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisBefore becoming the bestselling author we know today, Barbara Kingsolver was a fresh college graduate who had just moved to Tucson, Arizona with hopes of open space and adventure. What she found was quite different, "another America" that she chronicled through her poetry, in which she came to share her home with refugees and committed to paper their tragic stories of life at and beyond the borderland. Interweaving past political events from the US-backed dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, to the government surveillance carried out in the Reagan years, Kingsolver's early poetry expands into a broader examination of the racism, discrimination, and troubled immigration system she lived beside. They coalesce in a record of her emerging adulthood, in which she confronts the realization that the national myth of America she'd signed on to was a hypocrisy -- a realization that would come to shape her not only as an artist, but as a citizen.Written with a balance of clarity regarding America's shortcomings and empathy for her subjects, Another America is a luminous book of poems, a deeply moving and beautifully crafted exploration of American society and our individual place within it. As in her fiction, Kingsolver's poetry rings with a richness of language and spirit, eloquently expressing her insights with great compassion.With a new introduction from Kingsolver that reflects on the current border crisis, Another America is a striking portrait of a country separated by those with privilege, those without, and the lives that are lived in between.

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Book SynopsisPoems to read in the small hours before dawn, when the sirens start up again. Swivelmount’s concerns – the collapse of subject and world, eros and law, knowledge and bafflement – gain new urgency as Babstock fiercely reimagines and reassembles the remnants into a viable order. At the core of their kinetic imagery is a freefall into mourning, but also a faith in others: a Babstock poem is the voice next to you in the ER waiting room, becalmed, compassionate, darkly humorous. This is Babstock at his best. Past Praise: “This is a poetry that is so uncompromising in how it deals with traditions – of poetic forms, of dictions, of militaristic histories – that it becomes something magnificent: brittle and hard. It will change how you think.” —Juliana Spahr for On Malice “On Malice is a fascinating and elegiac rebuke to surveillance technologies and its discontents. Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet. His work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity.” —Peter Gizzi “The flavour of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge.” —Ange Mlinko for Methodist Hatchet “I felt as if I were reading poems written with a scalpel. Methodist Hatchet swaggers with confidence, intelligence, technique, humour, and that pinioning accuracy of observation we’ve come to expect from Babstock, surely one of the most versatile, switched-on, and linguistically savvy poets of our time.” —Simon Armitage “Methodist Hatchet is as precise as it is expansive, as complex as it is companionable. It refuses to look away from the unstable nature of self and world and word. That is why Babstock is one of the most exciting lyric poets writing today.” —Sina Queyras, The Globe and Mail for Methodist HatchetTrade Review“I love the ease with which these poems overturn and half-describe things, out-doing industry with their mouthloads … Also when the global romantic registers a crack in the globe – Babstock does this on a dime, and often. The crack of course is the revelation (I don't think he would like the use of this word, or 'global romantic' for that matter), but it’s what all his weird geography always leads to … Swivelmount has come out from under something dark and brittle (see On Malice) to dance with a literally sick world. Or maybe not dance, but dazzle and hold.” —Dan Bejar, Destroyer“To experience his poetry is to feel, suddenly, while falling from a high place, a firm hand on the scruff of your neck. Startling, pain-filled, life-saving.” —Miriam Toews“I have never read anything quite like Swivelmount. The poems in this book are lapidary yet expansive. They are highly polished yet quirky, erudite - drawing on art, biology, geology, and history - yet utterly unpretentious, impersonal and then, suddenly, personal after all. As Babstock puts it, ‘… I’m never/sure if it’s agency/or deep structure that wants/what it wants.’ In other words, this work is delightfully resistant to categorization. Babstock is an original.” —Rae Armantrout

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Book SynopsisJoin Chris Martin for a poetic walking tour of hell—or is it heaven? In this wickedly clever collection, Martin asks how we go about living in the tension between protesting lunatic politicians and picking up the kids from school, mourning a dying Earth and making soup, combating white supremacy and loving our dear ones. Martin’s poems pick at the tender scabs protecting our national and individual identities, and call for more honest healing. Things to Do in Hell channels 2016 anger into 2020 action with sophisticated, rhythmic verse that compels us to beat our swords into ploughshares and join the fight.Trade Review“Masterful, breathless, and prescient, Chris Martin’s fourth poetry collection, Things to Do in Hell, is both antidote and screed, reliquary and reckoning. In this diatomic opus exhuming the most intimate aspects of our human[e]-ness, Martin probes capitalism, toxic masculinity, fatherhood, and whiteness to inventory the disasters and desires that have fueled our perilous consumption toward impending collapse. And yet there is hope—for love endures. Retooling language like molten metal—letting its fire snake then seethe into new realms of syntax and meaning—this poet at the height of his powers reimagines a deliberate, unflinching future ensconced in wisdom and tenderness from ‘the circle whose center is everywhere.’ There’s no turning back.” —Su Hwang “Chris Martin’s poems in Things to Do in Hell are like people grabbing anything they can find and beating it until a new, found music comes forth. Isn’t that what we do these days when the humdrum of flogged, dead horses is not enough to awaken us? Cacophonous raps full of improvisation, these meditations ricochet somewhere between Rimbaud, Huidobro, Stein, and Borzutzky, expanding and contracting in their syntactical agitation, unraveling and unpeeling, since ‘I don’t care I’m going to love you until my name reverts to a word.’ Hell is Earth, these poems seem to proclaim, inside the mind, inside the television, within the simulacrum, through language itself: ‘All day clinging to ghastly seaweed on the naked internet ocean.’ Where does one find meaning when meaning is tired of us? What can the ‘difficult words / in the crowded mouth of hope’ even teach us ‘if everything’s a mouth’? Things to Do in Hell brings all these contradictions together, suggesting that even if all we have in the end is our restless inquisitiveness, we take it and we run!” —Roy Guzmán “The opening incantation to Chris Martin’s new collection causes a tear in the very fabric of our ritualized quotidian. Lyrical disruptions shock the imperatives as the speakers in the poems pursue the ordinary in a miraculous time. But the miraculous resides within the uncertainty of our contemporary state of being, humming in the low thrum of background noise. In singing and singeing lines, Martin critiques and adores. The multitudinous riches presented in this engaging book are vast and stretch deep into our psyches. Pleasure is a deep and syncopated virtue in Things to Do in Hell, while the wisdom of this collection provides a constant and needed nudge.” —Oliver de la Paz Praise for The Falling Down Dance: “To read The Falling Down Dance from cover to cover—and it’s best read that way—is also to see a dad start separate and strive for connection, catching the baby when he falls down, or feeling like a welcome but slightly distant addition to a maternal dyad. . . . Martin makes the clearest example for the new American poetry of fatherhood.” —Boston Review “Martin’s poems traverse expansive concepts while confined to the space of an apartment, where new parents in ‘the shipwreck / of fatherhood, of motherhood’ are cloistered during a brutal winter.” —Star Tribune “In this spare, poignant collection, Martin invites readers into the microcosm of new fatherhood against a wintry backdrop that produces isolation and intimacy in turn. . . . Martin encourages his readers to see parenthood in all its contradictions; the beautiful addition and the nexus of complication.” —Publishers Weekly “Martin’s attention is tender, even when it is dark. In the end, though, [The Falling Down Dance] is a book that closes in on domestic moments, moments of the physical body’s experiences, and these attentions manage to feel somehow profoundly political. For what is more political than the effort to create a space of love?” —FIELD “The Falling Down Dance is a book of poetry so tenderly, playfully, and, often, still, sorrowfully in tune with the modern world. Ranging from Frank Ocean to fatherhood, from modern love to modern sadness, Martin’s poems tilt and turn down the page, full of dance and momentum. . . . The Falling Down Dance is a pulsing joy of a book. It feels so full, its slim lines bursting at the edges, trying to get out.” —Full Stop

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Book SynopsisIn Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him—love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.Trade Review"In one of the late poems included in this generous selection of his work, Frederick Morgan refers to 'life’s daily chances.' Every preceding page in the book proves that from first to last, Morgan was fully alive to those chances and able to respond to them in ways that turned vigilance into a form of self-affirmation. In the more reserved formalities of his early work, and the comparative freedoms of his later poems, readers will find a consistently marvelous generosity of spirit—one that allows the work to explore personal matters as dexterously as it investigates matters in the wide public world. Epilogue may collect a lifetime’s writing, and therefore inevitably contain a good deal of remembering, but one of its many distinctions is to retain a strong appetite for beginning—for seizing on those 'daily chances' and turning them into brightly-seen and durable actualities." —Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate (1999–2009) "Two features tie all the poems in Epilogue together: their limpidity of style and their tireless effort, through memory, dream, story, and fable, to tell the truth. The candid clarity of Morgan’s voice, consistent through changes of experience and mood, is precisely what enables the poet and his readers to apprehend that truth."—Rachel Hadas, author of Poems for Camilla "This final work —not always 'safe for work'—reveals a poet still full of life, but a life 'faced as honestly as Morgan faces our morality,' notes David Mason in his insightful introduction. All the while, 'Morgan’s poetic is that of an ordinary man, albeit a thoughtful and cultivated one, among other things a body in time.'”—James Panero, executive editor of The New Criterion

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Book SynopsisThe North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, Tuệ Sỹ is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ’s Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the “fleeting dream of red blood at dusk” to the quiet determination of one who sets out to “repaint the dawn,” these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.Trade ReviewPraise for Dreaming the Mountain“[Dreaming the Mountain] is a collection of great depth and longing. Sy is attuned to the gossamer impermanence of clouds and dreams, of all that we know shifting, disappearing, returning. He names what goes and comes across a thousand years.[. . .] If there’s loneliness in these poems, it’s the loneliness of a soul aware of his small place among a mysterious immensity, an immensity that includes the butterfly wing, the bending grass, the wet eyes of a love. And it’s the loneliness that somehow, powerfully, makes one feel less alone.”—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe “Dreaming the Mountain is a moving depiction of a mind seeking freedom in a chaotic world: the doubts and certainties, the careful, profound observations, and, ultimately, the dedication to liberation. It belongs with the greats of wartime poetry and Buddhist literature, but it’s also a generous companion for any of us seeking to understand this human life.”—Rachel Abrams, Tricycle Magazine“[Dreaming the Mountain] embodies the Zen view that everything we experience is simultaneously present and evanescent. [. . .] the best way to describe anything, physical, emotional, or spiritual is to shine light on it from more than one direction. Which is what Tuệ Sỹ does luminously—Lola Haskins, On the Seawall “Sỹ is a master of blending the body and its surroundings, making the metaphysical tangible.”—Poetry Foundation, Harriet BlogPraise for the Seedbank Series“Milkweed’s Seedbank series is one of the most exciting and visionary projects in contemporary publishing. Taking the long view, these volumes run parallel to the much-hyped books of the moment to demonstrate the possibility and hope inherent in all great literature.”—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books“Through its cultural-linguistic contribution to narrative diversity, Milkweed's Seedbank series is a vital tool in imagining the futures possible for humanity beyond the anthropocene. Bringing works from Greek, K'iche', German, Russian (and more!) whose authors are deeply rooted in their homelands, each voice encountered has resonated with me on a seemingly cellular level—shifting and changing both who I am and can be. I will continue to press these books into the hands of compassionate readers and cannot wait to share the forthcoming titles in the project!”—Erin Pineda, 27th Letter Books"Milkweed as a publishing house has long been championing literary works both fictitious and true to life centered around culture, nature, and environmentalism. The Seedbank series serves as both a marvelous introduction to the books Milkweed provides and as a collection of essential stories that ought to be on everyone's radar. The words behind these front covers highlight life-changing experiences, knowledge, and ways of life from communities that are seldom otherwise heard from in the publishing world through an authentic cultural lens. What I've read from the Seedbank line is phenomenal, and I look forward to spending time with future works in the series."—Andrew King, Secret Garden BooksPraise for Martha Collins’s Translations“A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century in supple and complex poems.”—AWP Chronicle“Underlying tensions animate these arresting poems by Ngo Tu Lap [in Black Stars], movingly translated by Martha Collins and the author. . . . We, as readers, are enriched.”—Arthur Sze, author of Sight Lines“A delightful aspect of My Da’s poetry [in Green Rice] is the surprising way it summons human feeling from the ancient landscape, from river and field, from fruit and fragrant tree, culling a contemporary self from timeless images. In carrying this across into English, My Da could not have found better translators than Thuy Dinh and Martha Collins.”—John Balaban, author of Empires“[Nguyen Quang Thieu’s The Women Carry River Water] is both timely and necessary for those who are interested in learning more about contemporary Vietnamese culture, literature, and poetry. The translations are perfect.”—Ngo Nhu Binh, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction xiOn the Translations xixKhung Trời Cũ 2A Piece of Old Sky 3Cánh Chim Trời 4Bird Wing Sky 5Hương Ngày Cũ 6Scent of Past Days 7Mưa Cao Nguyên 8Rainy Season in the Highlands 9Tóc Huyền 10Black Hair 11HoàiNiệm 12ARecollection 13Hận Thu Cao 14NobleAutumnRancor 15Mộng Trường Sinh 16Dream of a Long Life 17Kết Từ 18Last Words 19Những Năm Anh Đi 22The Years Away 23Một Bóng Trăng Gầy 24ASlenderMoon 25Phố Trưa 26Street at Noon 27Tự Tình 28Reflection 29Chân Đồi 30Nightmares in the Forest 35Một Thoáng Chiêm Bao 36Fleeting Dream 37Những Bước Đường Cùng 38End of the Road 39Bóng Cha Già 40My Father’s Shadow 41Ước Hẹn 42Promise 43Cây Khô 44Dried Tree 45Những Phím Dương Cầm 46Piano Keys 47Bên Bếp Lạnh 48By a Cold Fire 49Tống Biệt Hành 50Leave-Taking 51

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Book SynopsisThe chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s acclaimed trance poem trilogy. Ultramarine distills gleanings from four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne permit spells of fevered play with Italian, French, and German. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface, as if the poet were trying to figure out anew the nature of blue, pink, orange. Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.Trade Review"Urges, observations, memories, directions, and aspirations scissor, smear, and echo one another within and between verses demarcated by austere, unbroken dashes. The book is filled with carbonated queries—philosophical, literary, homophonic, ontological—that burst and fizz on ultramarine’s oceanic, auratic surface. When Koestenbaum asks, 'Isn’t art / a transcendent category?,' the answer can only be an emphatic yes."—Artforum"If the voluminous allusions, usually divorced from context or analysis, are what a cerebral, queer, Jewish American culture vulture reared in the 1960s and ’70s would predictably fall for... they often bestow pleasures deeper than passing giggles, uncovering, as Koestenbaum does while reading Simone Weil, 'the hurt, pocked portion / of being.'"—Harriet"Koestenbaum, unflinching as he observes and notates his interior, brings a heroic quality to this poetic feat.'"—Rain Taxi"Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another."—[PANK]"This project, which began with The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and continued with Camp Marmalade (2018), is remarkable for many reasons... Each collection of trance notebooks reflects the degree to which Koestenbaum is attuned to real-time realities while he composes."—The Brooklyn Rail"The final volume of his 'trance trilogy'—preceded by The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018)—the collection is both a joyful language game and a bracing reminder that queer play is serious business."—The Yale Review"In Ultramarine, Wayne Koestenbaum sifts through four years of trance notebooks to stitch together a revealing collage."—Library Journal"Koestenbaum delves into paintings and the artistic process, using color as a metaphor through which to consider desire and memory."—Read Poetry"There is a linguistic playfulness here that will appeal to some readers, as well as an insistence on modernity and the high-low duality of daily experience."—Publishers Weekly

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Book SynopsisA book of prismatic, lyrical poems that enhance and disrupt the pastoral tradition to consider organic and mineral worlds, queer desire and experience, the mathematical and the spiritual; struggle and resistance.Pink Noise orbits in spaces of memory, longing, violence, solidarity, the ecological, and the mystical. Experimental in its forms and lexicon, in poems ranging widely in style and scale, it moves through layers of musical intensity as it reworks the visual space of the page to generate sensations of presence and revelation. Simultaneously lucid and syntactically disjunctive, these poems are queer and radical not only in their content, but in their grammar.Trade Review"Pink Noise is delightfully attuned to the living complexity of language, an experience that Holden renders as both conceptual and tactile."—Michael Martin Shea, Colorado Review"In Pink Noise, sometimes like a crackling icicle you see a glimmer of diamond dust, pink by nature. Here, in this book of poems. The lines are electric, conveying a new kind of sensuality, all quick and zapped. An on-coming fusion of poetic thinking with the sciences. Exciting! What we’ve been waiting for."—Fanny Howe"These poems are flecked with quartz and risk, love and dejection, pink and blood-red ecstatic brooding. Kevin’s line redirects consciousness to the magic of forgotten minutia and overlooked associative deliverance 'from cypress to pine before / fierce queen on a blank stage.' His language sets that stage for a tenderness that is in no way meek, for a sense of divinity found where life is. His is one of the voices that sets the bar for what poetry can do in this world."—Harmony Holiday"A queer lyric—like a queer body—holds within itself culture’s dueling impulses. In Kevin Holden’s singular poetics, libido’s lavish disordering resists rationality’s drive toward 'the war and reality / of our clear / civilization.' What results is a “rose tone row,” a nonce musical system he calls Pink Noise. Here queer experience sings alongside angular, abstract phrases sampled from math and science. Beautifully resisting conventional beauty, Holden makes atonal music whose fine phrasing 'glints, glitters, shines, shimmers, glows.'"—Brian Teare"This book is like a vardøger. I felt it before it arrived—'a former ghost.' Holden’s formations come together, crystalline and spinning, into consummate shape. Geometry, mathematics, gay sex, earth, cosmos, mysticism, and skepticism are held together in these pages as in a polyhedron, semi-transparent, where each facet is visible at a certain angle but from another angle disappears to show a facet on the shape’s opposite side. Beautiful and distinct, this work is filled with discrete infinities."—Edgar Garcia

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Book SynopsisOsip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it. Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsA Note on the TextOsip Mandelstam: “Centuries encircle me with fire”On Translating MandelstamОсип Мандельштам (1891–1938)Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)Из книги «Камень» (стихотворения 1908–1915)From Stone (poems of 1908–1915)Дано мне тело—что мне делать с ним . . .I am given a body—what should I . . .Я ненавижу свет . . .I hate the light . . .Паденье—неизменный спутник страха . . .The fall is a constant companion of fear . . .Айя-СофияHagia Sophia. . . На луне не растет . . .. . . Not a single blade . . .ПосохThe WandУничтожает пламень . . .The fire destroys . . .Из книги «Tristia» (стихотворения 1916–1922)From Tristia (poems of 1916–1922)ДекабристA DecembristКогда в тёплой ночи замирает . . .When a feverish forum of Moscow . . .Прославим, братья, сумерки свободы . . .Hail, brothers, let us praise our freedom’s twilight . . .TristiaTristiaНа каменных отрогах Пиэрии . . .On steep stony ridges of Pieria . . .Сёстры тяжесть и нежность, одинаковы ваши приметы . . .Sisters, heaviness and tenderness, your traits are akin . . .Вернись в смесительное лоно . . .Go back to the incestuous womb . . .Веницейской жизни, мрачной и бесплодной . . .The meaning of fruitless and gloomy . . .За то, что я руки твои не сумел удержать . . .Because I could not hold your hands in mine . . .Из книги «Стихотворения» (1928 г., стихотворения 1921–1925 гг.)From Poems (1928, poems of 1921–1925)С розовой пеной усталости у мягких губ . . .With the pink foam of fatigue around soft lips . . .ВекThe AgeНашедший подковуThe Horseshoe FinderГрифельная одаThe Slate OdeЯзык булыжника мне голубя понятней . . .Clearer than pigeon’s talk to me is stone’s tongue . . .А небо будущим беременно . . .And the Sky is Pregnant with the Future . . .1 января 1924January 1, 1924Нет, никогда, ничей я не был современник . . .No, I’ve never been anyone’s contemporary . . .Я буду метаться по табору улицы тёмной . . .I’ll rush along a gypsy camp of a dark street . . .Из Новых cтихотворений 1930–1934 гг.From New Poems of 1930–1934Армения1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12Armenia1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12На полицейской бумаге верже. . .On the police laid paper the night. . .Не говори никому . . .Don’t tell it anyone—forget . . .Колючая речь Араратской долины . . .A prickly speech of the Ararat Valley . . .Как люб мне натугой живущий . . .How dear to me are those people . . .Дикая кошка—армянская речь . . .A wild cat—the Armenian speech . . .Я скажу тебе с последней . . .I will tell you this, my lady . . .За гремучую доблесть грядущих веков . . .For the thunderous courage of ages to come . . .Нет, не спрятаться мне от великой муры . . .No, I won’t be able to hide from a great mess . . .НеправдаUntruthПолночь в Москве. Роскошно буддийское лето . . .Midnight in Moscow. A Buddhist summer is lavish . . .Отрывки из уничтоженных стихов1 | 2 | 3 | 4Excerpts from Destroyed Poems1 | 2 | 3 | 4Еще далеко мне до патриарха . . .I am far from being as old as patriarch . . .Сегодня можно снять декалькомани . . .Today we can take decals . . .ЛамаркLamarckИмпрессионизмImpressionismБатюшковBatiushkovДайте Тютчеву стрекóзу . . .Give Tiutchev a dragonfly . . .АриостAriostoНе искушай чужих наречий, но постарайся их забыть . . .Do not tempt foreign tongues—attempt forgetting them, alas . . .Квартира тиха как бумага . . .An apartment is quiet as paper . . .Давай же с тобой, как на плахе . . .Let’s start preparing for the scaffold . . .Мы живём, под собою не чуя страны . . .We live without feeling our country’s pulse . . .Восьмистишия1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11Octaves1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11Стихи памяти Андрея БелогоTo the Memory of Andrei BelyУтро 10 января 19341 | 2 | 3The Morning of January 10, 19341 | 2 | 310 января 1934 [вариант 2]January 10, 1934 [version 2]Из Воронежских тетрадей (стихотворения 1935–1937)From the Voronezh Notebooks (poems of 1935–1937)Из Первой тетрадиFrom the First NotebookПусти меня, отдай меня, Воронеж . . .Let go, Voronezh, raven-town . . .Я должен жить, хотя я дважды умер . . .I have to live though I died twice . . .Лишив меня морей, разбега и разлета . . .Having deprived me of seas, flight, and space . . .День стоял о пяти головах. Сплошные пять суток . . .The day was five-headed: five unbreakable days . . .Еще мы жизнью пóлны в высшей мере . . .We are still sentenced to life . . .Римских ночей полновесные слитки . . .Solid gold bars of the Roman nights . . .За Паганини длиннопалым . . .They run like a gypsy throng . . .Исполню дымчатый обряд . . .I’ll fulfill a dim rite . . .Из Второй тетрадиFrom the Second NotebookНе у меня, не у тебя—у них . . .Not I, not you—but they . . .Улыбнись, ягненок гневный с Рафаэлева холста . . .Smile, angry lamb from Rafael’s canvas, don’t rage . . .Дрожжи мира дорогие . . .World’s golden yeast, our dear . . .Еще не умер ты, еще ты не один . . .You haven’t died yet. You are not alone . . .Что делать нам с убитостью равнин . . .What should we do with murdered plains . . .Вооруженный зреньем узких ос . . .Armed with the vision of narrow wasps . . .Из Третьей тетрадиFrom the Third NotebookСтихи о неизвестном солдатеVerses on the Unknown SoldierСквозь эфир десятично-означенный . . .Through the ether of ten-digit zeroes . . .Для того ль должен череп развиться . . .Should the skull develop its brow . . .Для того ль заготовлена тара . . .Is the packaging of charm stored . . .Я молю, как жалости и милости . . .I beg like compassion and grace . . .Я скажу это начерно, шёпотом . . .I will say it in draft and in whisper . . .Может быть, это точка безумия . . .It might be the point of insanity . . .Не сравнивай: живущий несравним . . .A living man’s unique: do not compare . . .Чтоб, приятель и ветра и капель . . .To help a friend of rain and wind . . .Гончарами велик остров синий . . .A blue island, green Crete is extolled . . .Длинной жажды должник виноватый . . .A guilty debtor of a long-time thirst . . .О, как же я хочу . . .Oh, how I madly crave . . .Нереиды мои, нереиды! . .My nereids, oh, my nereids! . . .Флейты греческой тэта и йота . . .Greek flute’s theta and iota . . .На меня нацелилась груша да черемуха . . .I’m under fire of a bird cherry tree and a pear tree . . .[Стихи к H<аталии> Е. Штемпель]1 | 2[Poems for N Е. Shtempel]1 | 2AbbreviationsBibliographyPublications of Works by Osip E. MandelstamTranslations into EnglishTranslations of Osip Mandelstam’s Poems into Other LanguagesCriticism

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Book SynopsisIn this debut collection of poetry, the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy. A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can “pose” and “compose” in a “trans way, of course.” Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.Trade Review"'I want a stupendous smugness, and the self,' this debut poetry collection by S. Yarberry declares, 'to dispense its terrible truth.' Terrible, as in terrific and terrifying, is one body meeting another, knowledge bending toward doubt, and that which we fear being exactly what we want . . . Yarberry changes the world—streetlights are city-tulips, the soul is a slippery fish—to create a new world, to ask, 'How do you see me anyways?' In these poems, where gender, desire, love, and the struggle to say what can’t be said converge, this inquiry offers us a seductive new mind at work. 'I can become anything,' this collection proclaims. 'I did.' And Yarberry’s gift to us is that we can become anything, too." —Paul Tran, author of All the Flowers Kneeling"'Trans is Latin for across,' states the title of the final poem in S. Yarberry’s A Boy in the City, a book in which Yarberry builds poems from a heady mix of eros, violence, tenderness, and the Blakean ecstatic, poems that seek to bring connection between parts, to give wholeness to the fragmentation that, for Yarberry, can come to define trans life: 'It’s as if/only/when in pieces/I find/myself again.' A Boy in the City argues for a way across and through, past the 'festoonery' of gender and easy binaries, toward a hard-won understanding that 'it is nothing special'—should in fact be a given—'to not want to be hurt.' Yarberry’s is a defiant new voice." —Carl Phillips, author of Pale Colors in a Tall Field"A Boy in the City is a remarkable collection of poems—incisive, erotic, artfully antiromantic. The poems act as a transcript of a brilliant mind reasoning with itself. Remembered scenes get reenacted against changing backdrops inside a stage-lit braincase—street, bedroom, seashore (“I watched the ocean rise up on its miraculous haunches”). Over time, it becomes clear: the issue is not self-discovery, or so-called "becoming.” We are born knowing who we are—“The world flexed, and I was flown— / my body aching, / for the anatomy of boyhood.” After the flight, all that is left is the work of achieving the wishes we were given." —Mary Jo Bang, author of A Doll for Throwing

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Book SynopsisFreedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins’ formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms”. The speaker isn’t afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more — all while using humor and craft. What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions, and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live.Trade Review"Brookins’s debut full-length collection explores what it really means to be free in America, particularly as a Black, queer, trans writer living in Texas; their writing style is urgent and timely while still holding space for the possibility of a life lived on one’s own terms." —Emma Specter, Vogue "KB Brookins’s Freedom House is an unapologetic, forward-dreaming manifesto for a better, shared future." —Chaney Hill, Southern Review of Books

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Book SynopsisJohn Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In The Coming of the Little Green Man, his eighth Bloodaxe collection, we enter a world of play and parable – in which the little green man stands for all pesky outsiders – in provocative poems charged with contemporary resonance. Which box should the little green man tick on the question of identity? Will the little green man survive as a minority of one in a multiracial London? What if the little green man volunteers to give blood to 21st-century humankind? Winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, he brings to bear his trademark trickster wit that bridges the metaphysical and the political, the comic and the poignant, the oral and the literary. His Alternative Anthem: Selected Poems (2009) was followed by Travel Light Travel Dark (2013) and Playing the Ghost of Maimonides (2016).Trade ReviewIf Agard had not already been forged in the roller-coaster aftermath of empire, there would be an urgent need for society to invent someone like him.’ – William Wallis, Financial Times

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Book SynopsisLouis de Paor is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language poetry renaissance of the 1980s and 90s. His dual-language selection The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue was published in 2014, following his selected poems, Rogha Dánta (2012), voted one of the top ten collections in Irish since the turn of the millennium. This new dual-language selection is mainly drawn from two other collections, Cúpla Siamach an Ama/The Siamese Twins of Time and Grá fiar/Crooked Love, with translations made by Louis de Paor with Kevin Anderson and Biddy Jenkinson. It shows a paring back of language and a greater flexibility of form in his poetry, as well as a preoccupation with the passage of time and its implications for both familial and sexual love. His narrative skill and inventiveness come together in the sequence 'Lá dá raibh/One day', which follows a day in the life of an imaginary village in the west of Ireland where the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, collide. This was adapted for a dual-language radio feature with music by Dana Lyn broadcast on RTÉ Lyric FM and Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2021.Trade ReviewThere is a great deal of narrative play and wit. The imagery is taken from common life as observed at first hand mostly, but transformed by a delight in resemblance and transformation… there is a Chagallian inclusiveness and generosity in the poems that is more than its incidents. The poetry can turn to darkness and the public world as well as to the intimate village or street. -- George Szirtes * Poetry Ireland Review, on The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue *While poetry should always be romantic (there never is a practical reason for the stuff) he always avoided the romanticism of the mushy line and the soft tone and the fuzzy diction. There was always something wire-taut about his work. No floss here. -- Alan Titley * The Irish Times *De Paor has for long been a master of the short lyric in which the literal and the figurative combine in a tight nexus of images that distil the character of a particular individual, relationship or encounter. The highly sensuous poems from the early collections set the scene for a body of work where sight and touch and smell are often invoked and where intense moments or intimate states are exposed by flashes of light or by dramatic physical contrast. The collection Rogha Dánta is a rich representation of the work of a poet who is now in his prime and still producing fresh and challenging poems that speak to and across different generations. It is a mark of major achievement and a sign that there is much more to come. -- Máirín Nic EoinTable of ContentsClár |Contents I Don gcéad ghlúin a mhairfidh tréis 8 | For the first generation to survive bhás na Gaeilge the death of Irish Caora finiúna 12 | Grapes Fuarán 16 | Fountain Iascaire is ea m’athair le ceart 20 | My father is a fisherman by right Cloigíní 24 | Bells Luascáin 28 | Swings II Multi-tasking 34 | Multi-tasking Hataí 38 | Hats off Bóithre 42 | Chaos theory Matamaitic 46 | Mathematics Lánúintí 48 | Couples Bratacha 52 | Flags Iníon Deichtine 54 | Deichtine’s daughter III Lá dá raibh… 56 | One day… IV Luck 102 | Luck Ar Oileán Bruny 108 | On Bruny Island Garbhach, Inis Cara 112 | Garbhach, Inis Cara Aesthetics 118 | Aesthetics Mise agus an leabhar i gCafé na Beatha 126 | The Book and I in Café de la Vie V Macalla 134 | Echoes Pluaiseanna 136 | Caverns Ar cuairt 142 | Visiting Rósanna 146 | Roses Téada 150 | Strings Paidir Ameiriceánach 154 | American prayer Nótaí 157 | Notes

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Book SynopsisWhen Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ This ‘mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography,’ as he called it, was written ‘so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’ All that was known of this work before Fisher’s death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet’s literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher’s signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet’s archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction. By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher’s own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England’s industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.Trade ReviewCity's subject matter is urban, the technique a blend of the surreal, expressionist, realist and cubist, the whole thing almost cinematic in its abrupt transitions and dislocations… Most of the lineaments of Fisher's mature work are present in City…a remarkable achievement for a writer in his twenties. He sets out to write about an actual city but to "dissolve" its particulars and make them strange, until it becomes as much an inner perceptual field as a post-industrial Midlands wasteland… 'There is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more. -- August KleinzahlerFisher stands outside, or alongside, whatever else is happening, an English late modernist whose experiments tend to come off. He is a poet of the city – his native Birmingham, which he describes as "what I think with". He is a redeemer of the ordinary, often a great artist of the visible… His range is large: he suits both extreme brevity and book-length exploration; his seeming improvisations have a way of turning into architecture. The best place to start is The Long and the Short of It. It might look and sound like nothing on earth at first, but then it becomes indispensable. -- Sean O'Brien * The Guardian *Roy Fisher's The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2010 should be read by anyone with a serious interest in post-war English poetry. -- William Wootten * Times Literary Supplement *I was proud to be able to choose his Selected Poems, The Long and the Short of It... as my book on Desert Island Discs, and I know that I'll be returning to that book over and over again in the next few weeks and months, now that one of the most important inhabitants of the island has gone. -- Ian McMillan * paying tribute to Roy Fisher *Table of ContentsIntroduction Note on texts The Citizen (1959) From a Citizen notebook (1960) Five city poems: The Fog at Birmingham Midlanders Sea Monster in Hospital Shed Where We Are Lost, Now City (1961) ‘CITY by Roy Fisher’ City (1969) Notes Roy Fisher’s published comments on City Secondary bibliography

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Book SynopsisFairoz is a book-length poetry sequence in which Moniza Alvi explores an imagined teenage girl’s susceptibility to extremism. The book’s fragmented, collaging narrative draws together fairytale elements, glimpses of Fairoz’s thoughts, and pieces of dialogue. A folkloric representation of God and the devil acts as a wry counterpoint, touching on questions of morality. Fairoz is a powerful portrayal of human vulnerability.Trade ReviewShe is a skilled storyteller, recounting the extraordinary in the voice of the everyday, so that we accept the miraculous as something we need… the overriding impression is of a deft, restrained language carrying ideas with a metaphysical wit and seriousness. -- Leonie Rushforth * London Magazine *One of the few British Poets whose work could currently be described as essential reading, not least as we try to grasp what fractures of cultural difference might have contributed to the July 7 bombings. -- Tim Robertson * Magma *Europa made the most difference to me as a writer. It showed me one way of writing about trauma and violence, how to circle around a central concern and explore it from different angles […] when I came to write my own poetry about violence I returned to this collection many times to study how it had been done before. -- Kim Moore * The North *Table of Contents11 Driving the devil away 12 In the present tense 14 Indoors 16 Hair 17 What do you do with a heap of stones? 18 ‘It was a house of female habitation’ 20 Questions in the wood 21 The Devil and the gleams 22 The Devil’s soup 23 The white cat 24 Not enchantment 25 In the morning 26 Home 27 Fairoz and Annat 29 As summer 30 School lunchtimes 31 Listening to Fairoz and Tahir 33 Pilgrims 35 Does the Devil know what he is? 36 The notice 37 When they meet 39 A story of God and the Devil 40 Ripe 41 Wolves-of-the-woods 42 What runs under her skin 43 She pictures Jannah 44 Absent and present 47 Her absences 49 ‘where the swarm is thickest’ 51 The dark patch 52 The plants 53 It was long ago 54 A conversation 56 A punch 58 Ice age 59 He’s ‘v v sorry’ 60 The short long story 61 The loping wolf 62 A tale reduced to a sliver 64 God’s eyelids 65 This woman will speak to you, he says 67 The bride 68 Gone 69 A task 71 The viewing 71 He was 72 The contest 73 A change 75 Classroom scorpions 77 Cherry stones 78 Who’s there? 79 DANGER 81 The eye 82 She’s heard nothing from Tahir 83 Call him three times 84 What’s real? 85 The Devil’s news 87 Witnesses 89 In the snow 90 Her whole life 91 Urgent question 92 Like a mark on her kameez 93 What she’d like to say 94 The room in her mind’s eye 95 The woods 96 Cold song 97 Her future 98 ‘Over every soul there is a watcher’ 99 My imagined Fairoz 102 Notes and acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisWilliam Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson’s poetry: `He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.’ Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw `the world as event... He is fascinated – with his eyes open: a lucid fascination – by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things.’ Tomlinson’s take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of `sensuous cerebration’ as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.Trade Review`Tomlinson is one of the most astute, disciplined, and lucent poets of his generation. His quiet, meditative voice will reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time to come.’ - Edward Hirsch

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Book SynopsisHomunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies 'one of the strangest documents of the human mind', and W.H. Auden singled him out as a 'really remarkable poet'. Womack's versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.Trade Review'On Trust is a witty, eloquent, troubling collection.' - Sean O'Brien

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Book Synopsis**WINNER OF THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2019**'Alice Oswald is at the height of her powers in...this electrifying new work' Observer This is a book-length poem - a collage of water-stories, taken mostly from the Odyssey - about a minor character, abandoned on a stony island. It is not a translation, though, but a close inspection of the sea that surrounds him. There are several voices in the poem but no proper names, although its presiding spirit is Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god. We recognise other mythical characters - Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes - who drift in and out of the poem, surfacing briefly before disappearing.Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean: a destabilising experience that becomes mesmeric, almost hallucinatory, as we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water - fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves. As with all of Alice Oswald's work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but this poem takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular and liquid.one person has the character of dustanother has an arrow for a soulbut their sto ries all endsomewherein the sea 'An invigorating book-length poem' Sara WheelerTrade ReviewAlice Oswald is at the height of her powers in…this electrifying new work… It is out of this world – and in it. It is mythical and realistic, ancient and modern. * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *Sometimes the rush of unexpected language is thrilling… It is a wonderfully skilful tarantella of syllables and images… Nobody is Oswald’s most formally freehand work, a fragmentary gathering of murmurings searching for the excitement of new meaning. -- Jeremy Noel-Todd * Sunday Times *[Oswald is] a revolutionary, an eco-poet whose ideas are alive with sensory experience. Her new book, Nobody, is a kind of verse novel which refuses even the conventions of storytelling. * Guardian *[Nobody] is a paean to water, to the fluidity of language and the porousness between beings and stories… Both form and language echo the ceaseless drift, flitting movement and translucence of their uncontainable body…and, as with any memorable trip, the effects of reading Nobody linger in and around the mind long after the experience has passed. * Financial Times *The text (and characters) ebb and flow as mesmerically as the sea, a fluid abstraction that speaks to the power of the ocean. * i *

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Book SynopsisThe University of Leeds has a long tradition of engagement with poets. Many of them were members of staff (for instance, Geoffrey Hill), some were students (Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, Tony Harrison, Jeffrey Wainwright, Ian Duhig), others creative writing fellows (James Kirkup, John Heath-Stubbs, Thomas Blackburn, Jon Silkin, Peter Redgrove, David Wright, Pearse Hutchinson and Wole Soyinka among them). The poetry archives in the Brotherton Library are extensive and valuable. The Academy of Cultural Fellows has included Helen Mort, Malika Booker, Vahni Capildeo, Zaffar Kunial and Matt Howard. Its long association with the magazine Stand continues. The Brotherton Poetry Prize is the University's latest expression of commitment to poetry as a living art.

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Book SynopsisIn Tristram Fane Saunders' first collection, readers encounter a poet whose ingenious forms dazzle, even while exploring darker themes. Drawing on delicious, unconventional rhymes and rhythms, Before We Go Any Further conjures a contemporary London as it maps the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances. Sphinxes and sea-creatures, sleepwalkers and surrealists visit poems about art and friendship, poems that are 'trying to tilt toward love', but 'can't help tugging/at the invisibly thin/line between true and honest’. They discover wry humour in that struggle.Trade Review'Tristram Fane Saunders is a joyfully idiosyncratic new voice in contemporary poetry; cultured, wry, formally adept, and adroitly musical. But what I love most is the deep compassion beneath the play. Many of these poems seek remedy for their suffering beloveds, only to be openly frustrated by their own limitations. These moments of radical kindness and vulnerability completely floored me, and make this a collection to cherish.' - Fiona Benson; 'Before We Go Any Further would be a striking debut on the strength of its formal confidence and original phrasemaking alone; but what separates it from the competition is its shamelessly bold return to a poetry of the imagination, to poetry's old tradition of making it new. These poems see it as their business to make connections, shed light and extend their empathies into the world; that they do so with such originality and flair makes for one of the most purely enjoyable and invigorating first collections I've read in a long time.' - Don Paterson

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Book SynopsisThe Poetry of Mr Minevar is a collection of light reading poems laced with humour, all based on a wide range of subjects from Art, Literature to Science. An ideal birthday or Christmas gift!

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Book Synopsis'High-concept, formally daring, and sonically rich [...] What a tremendous gift to readers to witness a poetics balanced so deftly between intellect and instinct.' - Kayo Chingonyi In myth, the Pillars of Hercules near the Straits of Gibraltar mark the edge of what was then the known world, with the warning Ne plus ultra - No more beyond. Beyond power, beyond the sublime, beyond love, PLUS ULTRA begins where other poetry gives up. Sarah Fletcher's dazzling debut collection pushes at the world, reaching towards the 'beyond' of its title poem to explore questions of power, romance, pain and the sublime. These poems challenge, play and press, but also carry an anxiety around borders: what is 'beyond'? What happens when you reach the boundary and keep going? With a sharp, Plathian interrogative voice Fletcher's poems prowl the bars and night-haunts of Madrid and London, and in rich, mythic language plumb the below-places where discoveries are made, drowned, and left behind.Trade ReviewSarah Fletcher's poems are highly mobile, troubled, troubling, rich and fraught -- Chris Kraus, author * I Love Dick *'PLUS ULTRA is an alarming, accomplished and brilliant first collection. Fletcher's ambition, formal invention, erudition and technical precision offer a compelling scaffold for poems that fizz and flit between vulnerability, wit and a brutal willingness to confront the world, and others, with a dark honesty that is frequently refreshing and, occasionally, genuinely menacing. These are poems that demand the reader's full attention, but that also deliver.' * Ahren Warner *PLUS ULTRA is a wild, exciting, lyrical book, free-associative and narrative at the same time ... Fletcher is a poet of the future, and lucky for us, she's arrived just in time. * Matthew Dickman *Cool, sexy, dangerous and brilliant [...] PLUS ULTRA is essential reading. * Victoria Kennefick *The high-concept, formally daring, and sonically rich poems collected in PLUS ULTRA confirm my long-held suspicion that Sarah Fletcher is engaged in the life-long enterprise of mastering the various things a poetic line can do. What a tremendous gift to readers to witness a poetics balanced so deftly between intellect and instinct. * Kayo Chingonyi *

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Book SynopsisA visceral, surrealist tale of becoming, from the shamanic cult hero of contemporary queer poetryBeguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that 'however we seek another's weakness is our tyranny', as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel. Called 'a contemporary masterpiece' by Thurston Moore, a 'desert island book' by Anne Boyer and 'this generation's Dream Songs' by Maggie Nelson, The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Frank poems' appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.Trade ReviewI've heard it said that The Book of Frank is this generation's Dream Songs, but I think The Book of Frank surges ahead in experiment and lasting power -- Maggie Nelson, author of THE ARGONAUTSThis is not merely a desert island book, but a book for a desert world. The Book of Frank lilts through the strangeness, brutality, and beauty of our often terrible age. These are unsparing poems, and it has been a gift to be sweetly wrecked by them again and again, never quite knowing whether to meet the mythic Frank with laughter or with tears -- Anne Boyer, author of THE UNDYINGCAConrad's The Book of Frank enters like a Dixie tornado of nightmare surreality, the trash of USA demon seed consciousness assaulting the senses. CA's magic is his poetics, the transference of rotten hearts into crystal intellect, angel dreams, rhythms seeking love, and locating it in the essence of ritual and language. The Book of Frank is a contemporary masterpiece of radical prose in which the writer's soul sings across the page, rising above the indignities of Earthbound chaos, where humor and horror dance to the beat of the living dead -- Thurston MooreI can never have enough CAConrad, like paprika or wisdom in disguise. Is he the Frank of the book? -- Bernadette Mayer, author of MEMORY

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Book SynopsisAn experiment with the sonnet form by one of the foremost French poets of his generation. Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, The Anchor’s Long Chain is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. Enriching Bonnefoy’s earlier work, the volume, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, also innovates, including an unprecedented sequence of nineteen sonnets. These sonnets combine the strictness of the form with the freedom to vary line length and create evocative fragments. Compressed, emotionally powerful, and allusive, the poems are also autobiographical—but only in glimpses. Throughout, Bonnefoy conjures up life’s eternal questions with each new poem. Longer, discursive pieces, including the title poem’s meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels. Long-time fans will find much to praise here, while newer readers will quickly find themselves under the spell of Bonnefoy’s powerful, discursive poetry. Trade Review“There is a folkloric feel to this writing. As if life is a fairytale. The tone is theistic, and there’s always a narrative within the surreal. Yes, all this is Bonnefoy. His prose pieces are sharp and clear while there are transgressions folding dreams within reality.” * Washington Independent Review of Books *Table of ContentsTranslator's Acknowledgements The Disorder The Anchor's Long Chain (Ales Stenar) America Child's Play Child's Play The Long Name The Trees Mouth Agape The Painter Whose Name is the Snow The Divine Names Passerby, Do You Want To Know? Almost Nineteen Sonnets Tomb of L.-B. Alberti Tomb of Charles Baudelaire 'Facesti come quei che va di notte...' The Mocking of Ceres The Tree on Rue Descartes The Invention of the Flute with Seven Pipes Tomb of Giacomo Leopardi Mahler, the Song of the Earth Tomb of Stéphane Mallarmé To the Author of 'The Night' San Giorgio Maggiore On Three Paintings by Poussin Ulysses Sails Past Ithaca San Biagio, at Montepulciano A God A Poet A Stone Tomb of Paul Verlaine One of Wordsworth's Childhood Memories Remarks on the Horizon On Leaving the Garden: A Variation Another Variation

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