Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisThis collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan."Proposition" When we’re old lovers, sitting in separate chairs Silently, will you think our love has faded Though we smile richly and are still unaided By doctors, accountants and presumptuous heirs? Though talk has frozen in geologic layers Of long alignment of the loved and hated And even our sexuality is jaded And we have settled all our private cares Including death, listen to me, adored, Words cannot fail us ever, no matter how The fates brighten their implements to prove That even gods and geniuses get bored With marriage, fucking and poetic love, Because, beloved, we call each other thou.Table of Contents Foreword by Robert Phillips vii LOVE POEMS The Dinner Party 1 Waiting for Takeoff 2 Moving In 3 Homework 5 Interior 6 German 7 Sea Dance 8 Letter-Poem 9 A Kind of Gift 11 A Thank-You 13 Poems Like Flowers 14 The Meaning 15 "I'll Get Back to You" 16 Spate 17 An Exorcism 18 Archaeology 19 God 20 Proposition 21 Lost and Found 22 The Bestower 23 Total Immersion 24 Torso 25 Torso Fetish 26 The Legs 28 The Walk-Through 29 Talisman 30 No Doubt 31 The Spear 32 Rights 33 ROSE POEMS Late Bloomer 37 Hothouse Flower 38 Harvest 39 Prepositions 40 Vase of Dead Roses 41 VARIOUS POEMS The Day That Painting Died 45 The Camera 46 Ballpoint Pens 47 The Sacred Blue 48 Landscape 49 I Declare Peace 50 The Soldier 51 After the Surrender 52 Trajectory 53 Feminist Poem 54 Proverbs 55 The Tenses 56 Second Opinion 57 An Apology to a Bulldog 58 Karl Shapiro 59 Bar Mitzvah 60 The Jewish Problem 62 Again, for Sophie 64 About the Author 67

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Book SynopsisIn questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2000. ...From “No Trespassing”It’s me who worries about her mini-strokes and falls, the knot on her head from where she stumbled picking blackberries on the bank. She watches the bees come, stippling themselves with pollen, flowers bending in the breeze. This world is hers, for now—all she covets. Tonight it is a black bear and three cubs up against her window, spilling seeds from a bird feeder hung against the house. My mother stands in the dark by that window, her thin hand, the chill of ghostly glass.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside the woman a lake of funeralsThis layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds-particularly extinct species-become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze.Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems-their subjects and their logics-refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind.Trade Review"A Theory of Birds opens with phrases stitched with commas that are both light and startling: a grammar-flux that produces the effect of something falling out of or off the page. Zaina Alsous: ‘I entered through the empty cage, hips first.’ Zaina Alsous: ‘Can the map eat?’ The questions that follow invert their cardinal nouns, reverting to zero each time the next one is asked. I became curious about the nothing-everything of the book itself, the logic of voids and flight. A book that proposes a ‘collaboration with the dead’ but also a paradise of solar pathways and outcomes (intense joy). Alsous offers the reader a ‘previously’ as much as an ‘almost.’ A jar in France, a blonde hair in Fez: foreignness composes fragments in the shape of an ibis, a harp, a broken lantern, pinning them on a sky-red space: the page, which also shakes—shakes so hard that letters lose their place. And what would it be to write anyway? To love anyway? Zaina Alsous: ‘When I say home, I mean origin as a transitive verb. / When I say love, I mean these miracles are work.’"—Bhanu Kapil "Gabriel García Márquez wrote that Christopher Columbus’s Diario, ‘a book that speaks of fabulous plants and mythological lands,’ was the first example of magical literature in the Caribbean. This ‘magic’ is the colonizer’s ability to falsify a history, to rename what has already been discovered, to create taxonomies and eradicate the epistemologies of entire peoples. Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds makes another kind of magic. Alsous writes, ‘While invading the New World, Columbus writes of sirens in / his notebooks, evoking the half-women, half-birds of Jason’s / Argonauts. Every time I look for women, I become more bird.’ Here is the magic of decolonization, the way it reconnects us past the romanticized past of the noble savage, past the Orientalist hybrids of an unimaginative colonial fiction, all the way to a poetics born of solidarity, of struggle, and pushing through the fissures that will eventually break apart empire. ‘Listen, next time, the flowers are naming themselves.’" —Raquel Salas Rivera

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Book SynopsisDonetsk, the black gem of Ukraine—Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe’s east: Svetlana Lavochkina sends readers on a double odyssey with two adventurers, the fiery blacksmith Alexander and the elusive linguist Lisa, whose paths are destined to cross on the cusp of the war in the Donbas. Only one of them fathoms that their encounter goes far beyond its face-value purpose. A thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city.

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Book SynopsisWhat can it look like for poetry to bear witness? What might it feel like for a poem to keep company? A Different Species of Breathing: The Poetry of Sue Goyetteoffers an introduction to the work of a poet whose writing attends to these large and connected questions.Goyette’s poetry experiments with (and pushes at the edges of) lyric poetry to explore webs of connection. Whether considering the ways in which systems of care fail children, the devastating reach of Big Pharma, the reciprocal relationship between oceans and humans, or the possibilities that rest in rewriting one’s own story, Goyette’s poetry is rooted in the work of witnessing and being in company with others.A Different Species of Breathing opens with an introduction by scholar, editor, and poet Bart Vautour, which offers readers context for Goyette’s lyric innovations as well as her key poetic concerns. A selection chosen from across Goyette’s published work then presents readers with poems that appear in chronological order to ground readers in the poet’s trajectories of thinking. The volume closes with a new and previously unpublished interview between Goyette and scholar and writer Erin Wunker. For scholars, poetry aficionados, students, and those interested in questions of care, connection, and ecosystems.

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Book SynopsisWith compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date.Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. Throughout her six collections, she is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love.Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight.Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers.Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy, and is an enthusiastic retrospective of Bloom's work. In the Afterword, Ronna Bloom traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration.

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Book SynopsisWorking within a postmodern style, this rhythmic and melodious collection of poems originally written in Slovenian by Cvetka Lipuš and translated here by Tom Priestly, blends the real with the surreal, dull urban lives with dreams. Lipuš, known for the lexical beauty of her work, dwells on topics of time and space which she handles in an almost revolving, irreverent manner. Priestly captures the maze-like characteristic of her verse and carefully reconstructs the sonoric beauty of the work in its original language.

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Book SynopsisSophie grew up in Veslefjord, deep in the Norwegian North, where the ice stretches to the horizon and the long Arctic night is filled with stories about the animals of the sea, ice, and sky. Now the ice is melting and the animals are dying. Sophie's mother is also dead, leaving behind a daughter and a lover on the melting permafrost.An Orchid Astronomy is the story of Sophie, of her personal trauma and of climate catastrophe, told in striking experimental poetry. Crossing poetic styles and genres, words and sentences flow and break, twist into images, and cluster together like the Arctic stars. Coming together in a sustained narrative, these poems ask how we grapple with magnificent loss, searching for solutions in science, in mythology, in storytelling and ultimately, in our relived memories.Challenging, powerful, and beautiful, An Orchid Astronomy wrestles with the grief we feel for the loss of those we love and grief for the changing world. In the language of mass extinction and the unknowable sky, Tasnuva Hayden fearlessly explores the nuances of personal collapse, sublimated desire, unfulfilled longing, and the ways we must move forward in the face of the impossible in poetry that dazzles like the moon on a midwinter night.

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Book SynopsisRelic species extinct everywhere else on the planet thrive on a remote archipelago. Evolution requires isolation, and these islands offer the perfect environment for genetic variation to take place, fostering new and unique forms of flora and fauna. Evolutionary biologists Emily and Roland have come on an extended field expedition to this secluded world, eager to expose its unique biosphere.As they work to gather a large dataset of dead specimens for study and description, Emily and Roland experience growing shifts in their perception, in their bodies, and even in the flow of linear time. The environment they have come to quantify acts upon them, the species they collect observe and comment upon them, and the controlled lens of science cannot save them. Succumbing to the dynamic power of isolation, they find themselves irrevocably changed.A poetic novel told through field notes, letters, and scientific data, Refugia is a story of discovery and transformation that shows the hubris inherent in the idea that humans live both outside, and at the center of, the natural world. This is a book that reveals science in all its imperfect beauty, crossing the line between observer and observed, scientist and subject, between what is known and what is unknowable.

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Book SynopsisThe body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence.In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body. Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect. Bodies burble, rejoice, yearn, and suffer. Bodies grow old, they are injured, they hold strength and grow weak in unexpected ways.Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.

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Book SynopsisThe body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence.In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body. Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect. Bodies burble, rejoice, yearn, and suffer. Bodies grow old, they are injured, they hold strength and grow weak in unexpected ways.Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.

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Book SynopsisIn March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a “fancy academic” who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy’s trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.

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Book SynopsisIn March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a "fancy academic" who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy's trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.

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Book SynopsisWalking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett’s fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence – part found poem, part assemblage – draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights – a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the love between a parent and child – attempt to balance the darkness.Trade Review'Mature, intense, necessary – in turbulent times, the poems of A Perfect Mirror haunt and hold the reader, showcasing the gifts of a poet as accomplished in evoking the natural world as she is in communicating a powerful psychic landscape. Deploying imagery at once idiosyncratic, apposite and utterly memorable, with an remarkable feel for the line, and terrific sonic effects, Corbett never fails to move and excite, prompting me to return again and again to wonder, with not a little envy: how does she do it? Here is a talent who illumines darkness with a fierce emotional and intellectual rigour. There can be no doubt: Sarah Corbett is one of the finest, most essential poets now writing.'Kathryn Gray'A Perfect Mirror flickers more secrets about the Calder Valley into view than a mirror ever could. Marvelling at moss and the moon of ice, elsewhere plying the mystery of puddles, these miraculous poems nurse the glint of sun into gold. Even the sky begins to speak, graced by the ghosts of Wordsworth, Plath, Bronte and Austen, as scaling each hill entails a hike into the imagination, “where the mind goes gliding beyond the shores of its ocean... moving towards a horizon we will never touch”.'Jade Cuttle, Poetry Book Society'Often, cautious students of poetry worry that their poems oughtn’t be about one ‘controversial’ thing or another. What Corbett has shown is that they should take the opposite approach: fill their poems with all the savages and saints which make up the human condition. Only then will the mirror of poetry be perfect.'Jake Campbell, Poetry School'Corbett’s writing on nature is both jubilant and troubled, lit by the joys of exploring the countryside of West Yorkshire, but equally alert to environmental problems caused by humans...When Corbett lets her enthusiasm for the natural world loose her writing is energizing...'Suzannah V. Evans, Times Literary Supplement'Corbett proves herself throughout these poetic depictions of nature to be a timeless and sensual writer. She is subtly sonnet-like in her portrayal of opposing concepts, pitting safety and surety against risk, the rural against the urban, the here versus the elsewhere, and the then versus the now.'Biana Pellet, The London Magazine‘Corbett’s creative engagement with earlier literary figures, including Marvell, Blake, and especially Dorothy Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath, is only part of the pleasure of this book, in which the poet treads carefully from line to line while retaining much of the wildness of spirit and thought she so clearly values.’David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent Reviews ‘A Perfect Mirror reflects brilliantly on the craft off its maker, on the places of its making and on the literary heroines and heroes with whom, it proves, Corbett is amply deserving to be ranked.’Mike Farren, The High Window'Corbett’s creative engagement with earlier literary figures, including Marvell, Blake, and especially Dorothy Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath, is only part of the pleasure of this book, in which the poet treads carefully from line to line while retaining much of the wildness of spirit and thought she so clearly values.' David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021Linda Anderson's much anticipated first collection travels across time and space, employing a range of voices, including historical ones. At the heart of the collection, though, is always the moment of encounter, the moment when things appear strange, before they settle into a pattern or become known. This is as true of the explorer Charles Kingsley, awed by the Caribbean landscape, as it is of the poet herself, confronted with moments of vision or almost vision, either in her own travels, or in the ordinariness of a domestic life. Nothing is quite secure in this collection: memory destabilizes with its resurrections; seeing has many angles and cannot be taken for granted; borders fluctuate and crossings abound. And although not afraid to draw on ideas from many sources, these poems often explore how thinking masks a fragility, the knowledge of our mortal selves. What are the fragments that make a poem, the book asks? How are they held within a form? And how do we negotiate the multiple memories, ideas, sights, meetings, and losses which constitute us and our complex selves.Trade Review'This marvellous first book is a journey into the wisdom of years - it knows 'arrival is a myth', that we live in a constantly unfolding mystery, fluttering in our memories, hovering over the present, pollinating the page with our presence. And as the poems roam from post-war Scotland to tropical lushness the reader is drawn deeper and deeper into an astonishing attention to the 'uncontrollably multiple' world around us, and the parallel world within.' Mary Ruefle'Linda Anderson’s The Station Before is a wondrous lyric meditation on liminal space— temporal and sensory thresholds, fissures, glimpses of world flickering in consciousness, and most especially the moment of taking pen to paper. The poet untethers herself from all certainties to set the mind aloft, accompanied throughout by winged beings: among them fulmars, kittiwakes, ravens and lapwings in a virtual aviary of tutelary spirits. Great distances are crossed within and without, and if a secret is revealed it is this: Always write in the moment. There is a truth/ that cannot afterwards be transcribed. Anderson’s poems are luminous with this truth.' Carolyn Forché'Linda Anderson’s is a poetry of acute perception and close scrutiny, where ideas and feelings are fused in patient enquiry about what and who and how we know. A subtle music invites and receives the reader’s trust in the work of Anderson’s imagination.' Sean O'Brien'“Tilted between past and present”, a childhood in post-war Scotland and the death of a Father, Anderson surveys the tender remnants of life… In these lyrical and liminal poems “arrival is a myth” and we can only ever reach The Station Before.' Poetry Book Society'When a life-long academic distills a lifetime of images into a such a tight collection, the result is as strong as aged single-malt whiskey. This is the good stuff hidden on the top shelf, only uncorked at weddings and funerals... Anderson’s writing is precise, meticulous, and bursting with acuity.'DM O’Connor, RHINO Poetry'In The Station Before, Linda Anderson demonstrates a clear eye, a depth of thought, and a probing, restless intelligence. Whether watching a fulmar fly or giving voice to Virginia Woolf in her study, Anderson's attentiveness and her discreet, convincing music are entrancing and deeply impressive. After reading her some trace of the poems remains, some 'intimacy left over' like 'a dusting of pollen'.' Nick Laird, Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize Judge'Whether Linda Anderson’s collection, The Station Before is looking to her past, present, dreams or the lives of others, its preoccupation is the same: to privilege seeing; to rapturously observe our lives so that we might uncover new meaning. [...] Anderson’s voice, positioned at this frightening fault line of seeing/unseeing, memory/imagination, past/present arrives on the page quietly, with patience, sorrow and consideration. [...] These are not poems that manically dash about or shout for attention; their voice is poised and their shape largely contained in regular couplets, quatrains and sonnets. Anderson’s language likewise does not push for idiom or explicit playfulness but quietly asserts itself through precision – a rapturous contemplation so focused on its subject it clears the page of ego.'Genevieve Stevens, PN Review

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2021Shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2022PBS Special Commendation Summer 2021Alice Hiller’s debut performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected – and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.Trade Review'Alice Hiller’s bird of winter is a vital work of poetic witness. It is necessary, alive, resilient. Unflinching in its account of childhood abuse and trauma, it depicts a world ‘harsh as ash over sunshine’ and in its process of recovery, makes of it something beautiful and new.' Karen McCarthy Woolf'bird of winter reminds us that the root of courage, etymological and otherwise, is heart. Prepare, Dear Reader, to feel.'Nuar Alsadir'Alice Hiller’s project is the excavation of a city of grief from beneath the ashes of memory. It does what poetry does best: it makes a new, hard-won truth and a beauty of its absences and denials. Its partial shapes and unstable formal qualities consequently come to live in the reader.It doesn’t redeem, it scorches.'Sasha Dugdale‘This collection bears witness to the resilience of human nature, with poetry giving voice to the silences within that are so hard to talk about. Yet they must be voiced, and Alice Hiller has turned her devastating childhood experiences into a narrative of transformation that everyone should read.’ Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon‘Between the obscurity and bewilderment of her erasure poems, and her other visually arresting, formally playful work, Hiller never loses sight of the vivid world in which an escape from oppressive interiority is made possible.’ Juliano Zaffino'Alice Hiller’s potent debut collection, Bird of Winter, commands respect and reverence. Composure is required to absorb this essential and courageously intimate exploration of sexual abuse. [...] Hiller’s fearless writing is neither crude nor violent despite indicating unbearable violations. The specifics and long-standing impact of abuse are rarely written with such tender flair. [Her] words are cathartic, proud, persistent and we are compelled to read to further our understanding of a violation perturbingly common. [...] Through dynamic form and the powerful imagery of excavated histories, that offers a deeper awareness of the reality of sexual abuse and the consequent devastation, Hiller reclaims a voice that we are compelled to hear. This is a poet so brave, resolved to gather the ruins of an appalling early childhood and redefine herself as more than a catastrophic moment in time.'Victoria Lothian, Dundee University Review of the Arts'Hiller’s writing is precise, delicate and starkly austere. [...] These accessible poems often reflect the vulnerability of the speaker as a child and make use of white space and fragments of text. The disturbing subject matter is depicted with care and distance through searing image-making. An exceptional début, courageous and devastating in equal measure. This is a profoundly moving and important book, which oscillates between life and death, loss and regeneration, light and dark. The final poem ‘o goddess isis’ epitomises the speaker’s movement towards freedom, to ‘dissolve night’, ‘reveal the sunrise’.' Jennifer Lee Tsai, Mslexia'Through great erudition and a razor-sharp focus on image, this collection raises faultless victimhood from the ash like a phoenix. [...] With exacting erudition, a strong connection to the natural world, and the power of a witness statement, Alice Hiller’s bird of winter is beautiful to hold, a pleasure to open, and a testament of vindication. Hiller exorcises shame through beauty and assembles redemption with acute detail.'David Morgan O’Connor, RHINO'The book is an impressive example of the power of poetic control, in its choice of what information to share with the reader and its simplicity of diction and line. [...] The poems throw off the tethers ofsocially sanctioned silences around abuse till the unpunctuated and carefully punctured lines soar. [...] With their gaze resolutely on the grievous hurt arising from abuse, these poems are a deep reproach to the act of looking away. bird of winter will turn your gaze towards damaging behaviours that we know happen but can’t bear to focus on. Read it.'Claire Crowther, Magma Poetry'Alice Hiller’s debut poetry collection bird of winter is an act of witness, exceptional in its exploration of form, sources and landscape, and deeply humane in purpose. [...] Some poets wait patiently for poems to reach them like gifts from the elements, from air and water. Others build work from their own flesh, blood and bones, in defiance of censorship and silencing. Alice Hiller is a rare poet who uses both approaches to write an extraordinary testimony of trauma that offers fierce resistance, as well as hope to survivors of sexual abuse.'Pauline Rowe, Poets' Directory ‘Hiller offers extraordinary resilience and moments of immense, liberatory tenderness… This is a harrowing book, yes, but ultimately, with its invitation to “billow forth the wrecks we hold”, with its emphasis on resistance and joy, it is a staggeringly beautiful piece of life-affirming work.’ Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. Shortlisted for the Ledbury Hellens Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2023. ‘Have you looked / have you looked deeply?’ ask these poems, rooted in the human body and its movement through an interconnected living world. Bloom, Sarah Westcott’s second collection, approaches the cultural and physical spaces where human and non-human lives co-exist. These poems are attuned to a tender, bleeding world in which ‘all flesh is grass’ and language is matter. These are poems of resistance: attentive to non-human life, ‘eternal and plaintive … counter-balanced, strange.’ Here are field flowers, walled gardens and lost species, the particularities of ‘undistinguished things … seeds, waterbuts, palpable concerns’. Exploring sacrifice and loss, these poems push at the boundaries where girlhood and flower might bleed. These poems are a hymn to being alive in the twenty-first century - the frailties and vigour of life in all its dazzling form, its ‘looped breath, perpetual singing’.Trade ReviewReviews'Like a deep Summer meadow, "thrumming in wet light", Bloom teems with wild, restless energy: bird song, flowers, birth and death, the body in its ecstasy and decay. Sarah Westcott's beautiful poems pivot upon a strange dazzling curiosity. They urge us to kneel in the long grass and pay tender attention to the spaces within nature and within ourselves where life blooms.' Liz Berry'Sarah Westcott’s poems are an enquiry into perception, in which looking is refracted, and the line between subject and object becomes permeable. They look back to a time when “form and perception were … the same”, and trace the contours and textures of loss, the way longing sets birds “circling”, and green is “inconsolable”. And yet elegy is not the only key: there are celebrations, too, exhilarations of surface, colour, voices on and in the body. Bloom brings the human and its various others – the weathers, weeds, flowers and creatures - into delicate focus, attending to their forms and relationships with tender precision and care.' Mina Gorji‘Sarah Westcott in her second poetry collection Bloom, picks up where she left off with Slant Light; at once fully immersed in the natural world, and yet devastatingly unable to escape the body, its attendant implications of mortality, humanity, in a world that renders us tiny.’ Juliano Zaffino'Westcott blends dynamic, sensual language with the scientific [...] the poet-narrator of Bloom seems to almost bodily flow, meld and join with the natural world. [...] This second of the Westcott’s ‘sister’ collections shows us a powerful nature poet unafraid of a bolder reach in expression, where we are ‘one layer of carbon’ (The Turn) among so many others in nature, but one grounded in the particularity and exactitude of that world.'Ken Evans, The Manchester Review'Wescott create[s] a palimpsest of hymns to the natural world [...] Bloom is a subtle meditation on the underlying connection between humans and Nature with ecological overtones, rooted in passionate, precise observation.'Theresa Sowerby, Orbis Magazine'[Wescott] invokes moments of sanctity which have meaning for her without invoking theology. In this wide context, she reads as both eco-poet and love poet. What makes her an eco-poet (not strident but urgent) is her respect for life. [...] Because she often strikes a note of fine spontaneity, it would be easy to overlook that Westcott is a clever technician and witty with it. Several love-poems here are down-to-earth, high-flown and tender all in one. [...] Awareness of touch, of one texture against another, is an insidious (in a good sense) presence through poems which are invariably sensual at one level or another; she is also, however, making a point about the need to feel, the ‘civilisation’ that comes from a trembling awareness. 'Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry'Sarah Westcott's keen-eyed second collection, Bloom, deals in surfaces that shift, cut and resist. [...] It is a particular gift of Westcott's poems to connect directly with an animal nature that can slip past intellectual overlay. [...] These are poems that capture a sense of the things that are 'bewildering', 'tender' [...] Wescott reveals the multiplicity of our experience, its many truths. This is a mesmerising volume that invites us to rove, and in so doing, to leave a different track behind.'Lesley Sharpe, The Alchemy Spoon'The poems in this luminous book are tight, fragmented things, varying in shape and typesetting, in a style both abstract and committed: the world placed firmly underfoot even as the work revels in strangeness and uncertainty. [...] There’s something original about Westcott’s nature writing, something unsettling, where clarity of observation is never far from an obsessive sense of derangement. Maybe that’s because hallucination and actually seeing are closer to one another than we might think: our interiors influence our perception of the exterior. [...] The world is always rolling in this collection, brought to life by Westcott’s quick but careful observations: in flux and subjected to harmonious processes, always in bloom.'Daniel Bennett, Wild Court'With humility, reflectiveness, and careful attunement to her surroundings, Westcott calls for her readers to stop and contemplate the wonders of the natural world. Her language is tender and vivid. [...] These poems describe ordinary moments made noteworthy by the poet’s good eye and deft imagery. “All beginnings are naïve,” she writes, and, in this collection, her curiosity proves contagious.'Maggie Wang, Harvard Review'Eerie and sensuous ... Westcott’s poems seek to collapse the differences between human and non-human entities in order to show how human beings can contain multitudes' Dzifa Benson, Magma Poetry‘When we read Westcott we know ourselves, instantly, to be in another world, flowering… She is a deeply instinctive poet, at ease in her own poetical character… Westcott has a way of dissolving boundaries between self and other, self and world, self and time, so that any reader of hers must end up feeling: I want to be this way all the time. The word I want here is an over-used and badly understood one: natural. Reading Bloom makes one ache for that naturalness, but also, and this is rare, gives us a portal, a way of finding it.’ Nichola Deane‘Skilful patterning, sharp observation, sensuous evocativeness and startling leaps of metaphorical imagination give her poems a vivid, immediate impact, absorbing the reader in the experiences they present.’ Edmund Prestwich, London Grip

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Book SynopsisMention Robert Frost and people instantly think of snowy woods and less-traveled paths and rural neighbors meeting to fix their stone fence. But what does Robert Frost have to do with science? You might be surprised. Born in 1874, Frost lived through a remarkable period of scientific progress, including the development of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, the Big Bang theory, the discovery of the structure of DNA and the beginnings of space travel. Possessing a powerful intellect driven by keen curiosity, Frost was highly knowledgeable about the science of his time and infuses his poetry with imagery and language borrowed from science. Frost not only uses the language of science to enrich his poetry in the same way he uses classical, historical, biblical and literary allusions, but he also uses ordinary language to create sophisticated metaphors based on scientific concepts such as evolution and entropy. A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost represents the first systematic attempt to catalogue and explain all of the references to science and natural history in Frost’s poetry. The book, which is organized chronologically, uses language that is accessible to laymen and is supplemented by numerous illustrations, and appendices that should make it a valuable resource for teachers and scholars. Trade Review'What a wonderful idea Virginia Smith, with her strong scientific background, had in providing us with A Scientific Companion to my grandfather’s verses! Always impressed by Rorbert Frost’s deep understanding of his natural surroundings – in botany, archaeology, astronomy, among others – we learn here just how his scientific knowledge enriches the metaphorical language of many of his verses. As a teacher of his poems, I frequently note the need for such a Companion: the heal-all in “Design,” the iris in “Iris by Night” that is not a flower, or the complex interaction of fruit, trees, ancestral primates, and a young girl, in “Wild Grapes,” one of my favorites. Richly illustrated, the volume will help you move ever more deeply into the poet’s layers of meaning while, at the same time, awaken you to the endless mysteries of the universe.'Lesley Lee Francis, author of You Come Too: My Journey With Robert Frost and Robert Frost: An Adventure in Poetry, 1900–1918'More than half a century ago, C. P. Snow lamented that science and the humanities had become so specialized that their practitioners could no longer speak to one another. With the publication of A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost, Virginia Smith proves the exception to the “two cultures” divide. A professor of biochemistry at the United States Naval Academy, Ms. Smith is also an astute reader of Frost’s poetry. In combining her “avocation and vocation,” as Frost advises in “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” Ms. Smith demonstrates the breadth of Frost’s engagement with science and carefully discloses how Frost used the lessons of science—in astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, and natural history—to inform his poetry. In doing so, she provides devotees and scholars with an invaluable primary resource that will surely stimulate new thinking about our most thoughtful and complex American poet.' Robert Bernard Hass, author of Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science and co-editor of the Letters of Robert Frost'Any lover of Frost’s poetry will be delighted by Virginia Smith’s A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost. It brings an exciting new perspective to many of the poems we have all long admired. Now with her book as our guide through all the allusions to matters of science that Frost continually turned to in writing his poetry, we can experience and appreciate these poems more fully. Smith has not missed a single one of these allusions, providing us with clarifying details of the significance and history of specific words and phrases in the poems related to the fields of botany, ornithology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, physics, and the technology of his day. But her book is not merely a catalog of Frost’s use of scientific language and imagery; Smith puts her commentaries in the context of where he was living, the books he was reading, the people he knew, and the discussions of the times. Each entry is meticulously documented, drawing on an impressive body of research, often primary sources, including what he had read, courses he had taken, and letters he had written and received. The ninety one illustrations throughout the book further illuminate and enrich our understanding of Frost’s fascination with science. While scholars will surely make use of this book for academic study, I urge the multitude of readers who have made Frost their favorite poet not to pass up this opportunity to get to know his poetry more deeply and enjoy it even more.' Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, author of Robert Frost: The People, Places, and Stories Behind His New England Poetry'Robert Frost was one of the few poets who knew as much about science as he did the humanities. Here at last in one volume Virginia Smith allows readers to see just how deeply informed and rich with scientific knowledge Frost’s poetry could be.' Jonathan N. Barron, director of The Robert Frost Society and author of How Robert Frost Made Realism Matter'The careful research Smith has conducted into Frost’s reading is a great strength of this volume... A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost will help scholars and students alike see new dimensions in Frost’s poetry.’ Steve Knepper, The New England Quarterly 'A professor of chemistry and an active Frost scholar, Virginia F. Smith is uniquely positioned to contribute to these interdisciplinary conversations. In A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost, she draws on her authoritative knowledge of both scientific concepts and of Frost’s life and work to give us an invaluable guide to scientific references in Frost’s poetry. The book not only illuminates these references, it also makes clear the significance of scientific ideas to Frost as both man and poet. Any engaged reader of Frost will benefit from having this Companion at his or her elbow while leafing through the poems.'Marissa Grunes, The Robert Frost ReviewTable of ContentsIntroductionA Boy’s Will North of Boston Mountain Interval New Hampshire West-Running Brook A Further Range A Witness Tree Steeple Bush An Afterword A Masque of Reason In the Clearing Uncollected Poems Works Cited Annotated Bibliography Concordance of Plants Concordance of Animals

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Book SynopsisThe ‘country house poem’ was born in the seventeenth century as a fruitful way of flattering potential patrons. But the genre’s popularity faded – ironically, just as ‘country house society’ was emerging. It was only when the power and influence of the landed classes had all but ebbed away that poets returned to the theme, attracted perhaps by the buildings’ irresistible dereliction, but equally by their often very personal histories. This is the first complete anthology of modern country house poems, and it shows just how far (as Simon Jenkins points out in his Foreword) poems can ‘penetrate the souls of buildings’. Over 160 distinguished poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer fascinating perspectives on stately exteriors and interiors, gardens both wild and cultivated, crumbling ruins and the extraordinary secrets they hide. There are voices of all kinds, whether it’s Edith Sitwell recreating her childhood, W. B. Yeats and Wendy Cope pondering Lissadell, or Simon Armitage’s labourer confronting the Lady who’s ‘got the lot’. We hear from noble landowners and loyal (or rebellious) servants, and from many an inquisitive day-tripper. The book’s dominant note is elegiac, yet comedy, satire, even strains of Gothic can be heard among these potent reflections. Hollow Palaces reminds us how poets can often be the most perceptive of guides to radical changes in society. The book is illustrated by Rosie Greening.

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Book SynopsisEbook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. The years following the Second World War saw an exponential increase in the translation of contemporary foreign poetry in Italy. The practice was at its most prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, when publishing houses across the board almost doubled the number of foreign poetry titles in their catalogues. This remarkable phenomenon, however, has received scant critical attention, which has been limited to an aesthetic perspective. Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field, 1939–1977 is one of the first studies to examine the sociological significance of publishing poetry translations. Drawing on untapped archival materials, it investigates from an interdisciplinary perspective the processes and products of poetry translation, and how they impacted on publishing, cultural, literary, and political dynamics in Italy. It explores the internal reconfiguration of Italian culture, and how Italy sought to position itself in the world, without neglecting the contradictions of national and transnational cultural networks and movements. The book argues that translation was a means to modify power relationships in the field of poetry publishing and the contemporary literary arena; this ultimately changed the map of Italian cultural production and its transnational networks, thus anticipating the further developments provoked by globalisation in the 1980s.Trade Review"An insightful analysis of the way that the translation of foreign poetry helped shape the Italian publishing industry and its power dynamics – enormously well-researched and highly readable."Liz Wren-Owens, Cardiff UniversityTable of ContentsINTRODUCTIONPublishing and Poetry Translation: A Methodological IntroductionCHAPTER 1Publishing, culture, and poetry: a field investigationCHAPTER 2Editors, Habitus and Translation: publishing strategies in poetry translationCHAPTER 3Contemporary foreign poetry anthologies for new cultural and publishing horizonsCHAPTER 4Towards Globalisation, by a way of conclusionAppendix 1Appendix 2Works Cited

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Book SynopsisSergio Raimondi’s work engages in the most complex issues of his time, including globalisation, colonialism, industrialisation and environmental degradation. Yet all his concerns are rigorously analysed through the medium of the poet’s art, steeped in literary tradition and craft. He is widely considered Argentina’s most important and influential contemporary poet, with an international reputation. Many of Raimondi’s poems address what might seem unlikely subjects for poetry: industrial practices, global trade, or labour legislation. Yet among the allusions, the immense research, the unsparing gaze, and the expert skill of the language there’s also room for desert-dry humour, touches of self-deprecation and immense empathy for individuals caught up in seemingly implacable historical processes. This volume includes a generous selection of his poems from Poesía civil (Civil Poetry) and Lexikón (Lexikon) in bilingual Spanish-English facing-pages format. A substantial introduction by the translators places Raimondi’s work in its literary and wider cultural context, and reflects on the challenges faced when bringing his unique poetry into English.Table of ContentsIntroductionSelected PoemsGlossary

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Book SynopsisThis collection is named for a “swale,” a shallow channel used to direct the flow of rainwater. Similarly, Swale looks outward to the natural world and directs its focus inward to the landscape of the mind. The past presses in like a thick mist: plundering colonial ships and the cracking edges of empire coincide with contemporary scenes and personal erosions and failures. Alongside humans are animals both living and extinct: manatees, sea turtles, and whales; roaming bears, horses, and lambs; and the flightless dodo and Steller’s sea cow, gone for centuries. What happens when the mind eclipses what the body sees, and neither can be trusted—when demarcations between land and water blur, and one’s sense of self begins to recede?Swale interrogates the violence of colonialism and its reverberations over time, as well as the extinction and the rapid decline of animal species. By turns tidal and cloistered, Swale speaks of science, reliquaries, and lapis lazuli, traversing forests, seascapes, and meadows. Here, the ocean becomes a field, a medieval tapestry transforms into a space that can be entered, and the body is fleshless, struck through with light. The speaker of these poems is ultimately unfixed—and with that comes both imaginative possibility and a personal unmooring. In poems that cast and recast the interior self in different guises—from the perpetually off-kilter Alice to the divergent voices of the shorn lamb and predatory foxhound—an unsettling anxiety grows starker, along with the wish for repair.Trade Review“I feel both shaken and repaired by the alertness of Allison Hutchcraft’s poems. The announcement ‘When I swale, I cannot/tell border from border’ describes her art and where it carries us. Swale takes on the desire of the mind to land and activates new imaginative pathways to disorient the mind from its disorders. Her poems—beautiful and riveting—are excavations, topographies, and tectonic shifts all at once.” -- Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine“This is a splendid book. But when this poet says ‘I look/at the ocean and see only the ocean,’ do not believe her. Know instead how unnerving and strange and revealing her poems are about human time and love and loss through brilliant observations about the natural world (think: whales, otters, seabirds of oil slick or not, woodpeckers, crows, nuthatches, even extinct creatures like the heart-stopping long lost dodo.) Enormous empathy lives in this book, plus time-travel’s feel for past centuries where sailors in tall ships suffered (or were gifted) with ‘calenture,’ an affliction bringing on visions of the sea as a welcoming, irresistible ‘meadow silent/but for the ticking of insects.’ Where we can walk too—and fall into deep imagining as startlingly real as ‘submerged/grasses swaying like the drowned/hair of a doll.’ Did I say these poems are strange? Yes. As genuine beauty is.” -- Marianne Boruch“Swales direct and slow the flow of rainwater, and this collection directs the reader’s attention to the ways that the natural world has indelibly shaped our human consciousness and, in turn, the ways we have attempted to trap and tame the natural. In these poems, manatees turn to mermaids through sailors’ lore, priests weather Orinoco rainforests in the hopes of colonizing its inhabitants, and foals’ legs are taped to facilitate their breaking. ‘The animals we love most / we put in cages,’ Hutchcraft writes, and yet everywhere the natural finally evades our capture. Hutchcraft examines the delicate balance between rapture and ravishment, in poems as ambitious as they are beautiful.” -- Paisley RekdalTable of ContentsICalenture Sometimes My Body Lifts as a WaveSo I Try to Picture the PriestsOn the New Continent, Our Eyes Shining“I Have Written Myself into a Tropical Glow” ScurvySteller and the Sea CowThe Mermaids at Weeki WacheeIIThe Trouble Is IAs Lamb in FieldAlice in the CloistersReliquaryAs Knock-KneedAlice in Millefleurs Flock or Herd, They Came to MeThe Lapis Lazuli in Which She DreamedAs Twin HorsesAlice Goes for a Run, Considers the Year, How She Barely ShookOn this One Acre of the WorldForest Rising from Its Name When Living in Bear CountryAlice above TimberlineAs FoxhoundWhen Living in Bear CountryIIISwaleGhost ForestFrom an Age of SailPolarisOn Effort You Like to Think the Whales Are ListeningGhost LobsterDream from the ShadeA Color of SunsetSometimes I Am Permitted to Return to the SeaWhale FallAlice among the GravesIVSo Legged and Footed[Oh, Dodo. You can’t][Dodo, duodo, sluggard.][Swampland. Bog. Mare aux Songes. “Sea of dreams”] [Out the birds, out][Seeds, or the collapsed bodies][I dreamt my stomach was full of stones] [The lead scattered through your cranial bone][They called you melancholy, too.][You, again,][So legged, so footed, and who’s left to care?]Notes

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Book SynopsisA collection of poems that delve into the experience of living with bipolar disorder. This collection of poetry explores the disruptive state of psychosis, with all its insights and follies, and the challenges of living life after a departure from the self. These poems reach for an understanding of the ecstasy and tragedy of madness through both lyric and prose forms that mimic the sublime state of mania through their engagement with language. Ordinary life becomes strange in these poems, which are playful and humorous at times and dark at others, as they seek resolution to the question of what happens when the mind overthrows the body.Trade Review“‘You are not alone,’ writes the poet on her dedication page. That beautiful assurance is addressed in particular to ‘those who are struggling with mental illness,’ but it is something, these poems convince us, that each and every one of us may take to heart. So perfectly does Metsker render a mind under pressure—from a punishing surfeit of stimuli, obsessive thoughts, proliferating options in a world of impediment—that, paradoxically, we are deeply comforted. Logic—and its torqued economies—do the work we normally assign to images: ‘I scour the obituaries, but they have no specific plans for me.’ The images themselves are crystalline: ‘The sugar in the sugar bowl hardens into a rock to represent one idea of patience.’ I am profoundly grateful for this marvelous book. On page after page, it demonstrates how intelligence, compassion, and poetry can triumph over chaos.” -- Linda Gregerson“In her exploration of mental illness, Metsker reminds me that poets are natural chroniclers of the line between a mind’s inventiveness and its unmooring. For a poem to function, the figurative has to feel real. Poems that draw us into their irrationalities can allow us to reach more rational states and understandings. While in poetry there is often this leaving sense and coming back to it, with mental illness, there is a similar, more severe leaving but not always a return. ‘Tomorrow will be another story, another pause by the window that could turn into a lifetime wearing cinched jackets.’ Just the opposite of a straight jacket, this book reads as a liberation from the fear that a familiar self, once lost, cannot be regained. While it’s ‘hard to stick a landing in sand,’ to find a way to sense when sense has been taken away, Metsker has done just that.” -- Bob Hicok

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Book SynopsisThe third full-length collection from physician and poet Jenna Le blends traditional form and the current moment. In Manatee Lagoon, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a “failed georgic” weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence. A recurring motif throughout the collection, manatees become a symbol with meanings as wide-ranging as the book itself. Le aligns the genial but vulnerable sea cow with mermaids, neurologists, the month of November, harmful political speech, and even a family photo at the titular lagoon. In these poems, Le also reflects on the experience of being the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in today’s sometimes tense and hostile America. The morning after the 2016 election, as three women of color wait for the bus, one says, “In this new world, we must protect each other.”Manatee Lagoon is a treasury of voices, bringing together the personal and the persona, with poems dedicated to Kate Spade, John Ashbery, and Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. With this book, Le establishes herself as a talented transcriber of the human condition—and as one of the finest writers of formal verse today.

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Book SynopsisWritten over the course of a year in response to the National Gallery Singapore’s exhibitions, Madeleine Lee’s volume of ekphrastic poetry enacts the ways in which language may relate to art. Each poem is a vignette of a show; words compose, question and revision the visual in novel forms of their own making. The sum of this interplay between word and image is more expansive than its parts, and speaks to the generative force of intersecting mediums.

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Book Synopsis Bringing together the collected works of bestselling poet Charly Cox for the very first time with new and exclusive material. Trade Review‘Honest, relatable, and thought provoking.’ Stylist magazine ‘Funny and heartfelt and brilliant.’ Sunday Times STYLE ‘Relatable and funny.’ ELLE ‘Encapsulates what it is to be a young woman.’ Pandora Sykes ‘Divine.’ Cecelia Ahern

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Book SynopsisA timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowski’s best unpublished and uncollected poems Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who produced countless short stories, novels, and poems that have reached beyond their time and place to speak to generations of readers all over the world.

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Book SynopsisChristian Wiman braids poetry, memoir, and criticism to create an inspired, career-defining work.

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Book SynopsisInception and implosion, Chicago's grit and grandiosity all come together in the finite poetic power of the original Slam igniter, renowned poet Marc Kelly Smith and his retrospect denotation, Ground Zero.Trade Review“Listen up: Marc Smith’s poems are performances, fast paced and quick talking, beep beepin' and zoom zoomin,’ urban and hard-charging, jazzy and impudent, utterly authentic, full Chicago. They are filled with life.” —Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel“What Marc Smith invented when he created the poetry slam was so deeply, intuitively perfect . . .” —Ira Glass, host of This American Life"Harriet Monroe birthed the Chicago poetry scene at the start of the 20th century. Then Marc Smith came along at the end and gave it new life: straddling its fading body, pressing the heels of both hands down, hard, on its chest and hissing, 'BREATHE, damn you!' His words squeal and crackle, squish and gasp, always reflecting the city of his birth, a city forever in decline, yet forever struggling to rise again. Read them with joy and sorrow." —Neil Steinberg, co-author Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to RecoveryTable of Contents Uptown Monologue No Exit Sunday Nobody’s Here Ground Zero Man on his Cell Phone Shouting Winter Café Face on the Floor The Sign Rattled Pyromaniac Ball Park Poem Conga Beat Bradley Cockren My Father’s Coat Corners Chips Breakfast Rush Street Shuffle Stuttering Light Rosie Moon Moan Impudence Arnold the Jazz Prophet Turning Ten Small Talk Ameritech Deep Dish Chicago IT the Problem IT the Solution Something

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Book SynopsisOffers a tender, tangled account of the heady days in South Africa following Nelson Mandela's release from prison. This award-winning poetry collection portrays the innovative forms of music, kinship, and even self in ""the new, intricate country / we understood was impossible.Trade ReviewBaderoon’s poetry . . . uses a gentle eye to consider all that is intimate between us, and in doing so, renders these quiet and still moments as sacred. In The History of Intimacy, she has rendered our most painful histories through an unobtrusive lens. She has written them with care, and left space and silence around them, so they (and we) may have room to breathe. In the act of listening, we render them sacred, and might begin to heal." —Toni Giselle Stuart, The Johannesburg Review of Books". . . Baderoon’s poetry does not shy away from attempting to forge an understanding, on a broader political scale and in the intimacy of our souls." —Karina Magdalena Szczurek, LitNet"South African poet Gabeba Baderoon’s fourth collection of verse impresses with its concision of language and clarity of ideas. With subjects ranging from the hidden tableaus of her personal history to the meaning and value of poetry, Baderoon’s verses invite the reader to join her on an exploration of history, culture, and the universal qualities of the subjective experience." —World Literature TodayTable of Contents Poetry for Beginners Tell Me What You See A Prospect of Beauty Closer Surface Focal Length Axis and Revolution Rain fall on the abstract world Port Jackson, Cape Town The Port Cities The River Cities Everything We've Said Diving Concentration Promised land Koggelbaai The Blue of the Night before We Left Ghost Technologies Song of the Husband 2 The Flats Black Butterflies Green pincushion proteas Effective Immediately The Edges of Things Hangklip* The Word No Name Not You I saw you walk toward something The History of Intimacy Answering The Law of the Mother Cardinal Points Glossary

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Book SynopsisThis sprawling collection comprises a series of interviews with denizens of the shifting city, each mediated through the lonely lens of the Detective, a character whose refractive investigation atomizes the scene.Trade Review“You’ll likely find Thea Brown’s collection Loner Forensics shelved under poetry, but this book is something all its own: lyric noir, speculative elegy, private procedural. A story told through story’s negation ('The city is not a story'), here we feel we might glimpse SchrÖdinger’s cat gone stray, living out one of its lives off alley scraps in the intimate estrangement of the metropolis. While the chorus of voices builds a litany of delightfully dubious testimony out of postmodern materials—fragments of the attention economy, consumer culture, and so on—place (as in any good Gothic) is a crucial character as well: dangerous, endangered, and indelible. Alongside Brown and her Detective, we search for truth in the trappings, asking the big questions, like, well, 'What was the question?'” —Dora Malech, author of FlourishTable of ContentsHEAD SOUTH, CATAFALQUE 6 THE ANNOTATOR 14 THE FORENSICS TEAM 15 THE MAYOR 16 THE PALM READER 18 THE AMATEURS 19 THE CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST, PART 1 20 THE CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST, PART 2 21 THE CURATOR 22 THE WEATHER 24 THE REGISTER 25 THE LUXURY CONSULTANT 26 THE FORENSICS TEAM 28 THE MUNICIPAL LANDSCAPER 29 THE FRAMER 31 THE INTERNIST 32 THE RIDER 33 THE CONCIERGE 34 THE CORRESPONDENT 35 THE RADIO PRODUCER 36 THE FLORIST 37 THE DIPLOMAT 38 THE JOURNALIST 39 THE FORENSICS TEAM 41 THE TWINS 42 THE STENOGRAPHER 44 THE INGENUE 45 THE CENTAUR 47 THE COLLECTOR 48 THE COPY EDITOR 49 THE RUNNER 50 THE ACTUARY 51 THE DANCER 52 THE MAKEUP COUNTER 53 THE BLOGGER 54 THE TALKING HEADS 55 THE HOUSEKEEPER 56 THE ADJUNCT 57 THE FORENSICS TEAM 59 THE PROVOST 60 THE DREAMBOAT 61 THE TELLER 63 THE SHOPPER 65 THE TEMP 66 THE TOUR GUIDE 67 THE NEOTRANSCENDENTALIST 68 THE FORENSICS TEAM 69 THE DESIGNER 70 THE NOSTALGIST 71 THE COPS 73 THE IMPALEMENT ARTIST 74 THE TRANSPLANT 75 THE POLLSTER 76 THE FORENSICS TEAM 78 THE INDUSTRIAL ARCHITECT 79 THE NARC 80 THE THIRD SHIFT 81 THE CARTOGRAPHER 83 THE BACKPACKER 84 THE FORENSICS TEAM 85 THE GROUNDSKEEPER 86 THE OPENING ACT 87 THE VISITOR IN THE HILLS 88 THE CRONE 89 THE MISANTHROPE 92 THE RINGMASTER 94 THE GARDENER 96 THE FORENSICS TEAM 97 THE DETECTIVE 98 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 101

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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 SynopsisLaden with their belongings and informed by their experiences, these immigrants became citizens of a new diaspora searching for space to exist in their adopted home.In Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, author Katerina Stoykova follows that which "calls / the roaming mind / looking for land" with the shell of her homeland at her back.Table 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 SynopsisThis poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Book SynopsisPoetry collection exploring female gender roles.

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Book SynopsisThe translated poems in Now at the Threshold: The Late Poems of Tuvia Ruebner are from Ruebner's final three collections, all written from 2014 onward, after the poet's 90th birthday. Translated into English by award-winning translator Rachel Tzvia Back.

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Book SynopsisEntering its fifteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs.Trade Review"A reminder that contemporary poetry is not only alive and well but continuing to evolve." "This collection stands out among the crowd claiming to represent emergent poets. Much of the editing and preliminary reading was done by emerging poets themselves, which results in an anthology that’s fresh and eclectic, and may actually represent a significant portion of the best new poetry being written by the next generation."

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn Paisajes con burro, the donkey is here converted into the incarnation of wisdom a corporeality in which the purity of childhood and the honorability of accumulated experience come together. -- Antonio Puente, La Provincia

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Book SynopsisA moving and incandescent volume from a poet celebrated for her “unfailing mastery of her medium” (New York Times Book Review).

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Book SynopsisOne of NPR's "Books We Love" in 2023 Acclaimed poet Nick Laird reflects on the strange and chaotic times we live in with singular precision, clarity, and daring.Trade Review"Ruminative and daring…Laird [is] a wild poet-soul attentive to everything in poetic omniscience, challenging readers to see what he sees in the double witnessing of art’s power…This is mastery over formal limitation—a kaleidoscope of perfectly calibrated chains of attention, constraints that break, release and re-form." -- Carol Muske-Dukes - Washington Post"Up Late is an incredible book. It finds a music for our moment—its fragilities and terrors, it sets restlessness to a rhythm. It finds a new kind of irony, one that confronts our endless gallop into a mechanical, artificial, made-up idea of future, and asks instead why are we here in the first place, asks so without patronizing, almost without irony itself. There is an honesty in the tone of this book that stays in mind days after the last page is turned." -- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"With Up Late, Nick Laird has stepped into his own future and produced a daring new poetic idiom that is all his own. His fortunate readers will be delighted and amazed." -- Billy Collins, author of Musical Tables

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Book SynopsisIn a time of malevolent righteousness, often described as Cancel Culture, J’Accuse is an essay-in-poetry by Canada’s Parliamentarian Poet Laureate emeritus that responds to the impacts of being “cancelled.” Shame is not a word that gets much play these days among the caustically righteous, but Clarke had been wronged, and the people who did the wronging should be ashamed of themselves.J’Accus is a poignant statement that calls upon individuals, scholars, artists, and journalists to never submit to impulses that intentionally, or even unintentionally, forbid debate and questioning.J’Accus ponders what is truly unspeakable: injustice.Clarke boldly confronts the reality that in our turbulent time there must be an interest in real voices and stories, otherwise any individual can fall victim to silencing – blacklisting – gag-orders – cancelling… And ultimately, this cri-de-coeur reveals the personal cost.

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